American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,141

so, yes. The most interesting thing we’ve found from the lens is that it suggests our own experience of reality is myopic. It is a bit like… I don’t know, like an ant crawling along a string stretched across a large room. The ant’s experience is largely two-dimensional. It only cares about what’s happening along the surface directly in front of it or behind it in a straight line. That’s us. We’re the ant. But the lens allows our perspective to expand outward. Our perspective gains more dimensions: there are things below us, above us, to our sides. There is an enormous, unexplored gulf of existence, of realities, all around us; we simply can’t experience it because our perspective is a bit nailed down. You see?

MICHAEL DERN: Hm. Well…

RICHARD COBURN: What’s wrong?

MICHAEL DERN: I… don’t think this metaphor is a good one.

RICHARD COBURN: Why not?

MICHAEL DERN: Because he’s gonna ask—what’s in the corners?

RICHARD COBURN: The corners of what?

MICHAEL DERN: Of the room. There’s this big huge room. Maybe there’s something in the corners.

RICHARD COBURN: Well, we just don’t know. That’s the curious thing about it.

MICHAEL DERN: Ehh. I’d leave it out. These types of guys, they tend to fixate on stuff like this. It’s the war mentality, I guess.

RICHARD COBURN: I can almost guarantee that there are no Soviets in the corners of this metaphorical room.

MICHAEL DERN: You know what I mean.

RICHARD COBURN: Well… well then, if it comes to that, I will just say to him that, that… that we just don’t know. And… and that’s why we need money, Mr. Senator. We need lots of it, all of it. In big bags. We need it to figure out what the fuck is going on.

MICHAEL DERN [LAUGHS]

RICHARD COBURN: Did you like that? It was rather good, wasn’t it.

MICHAEL DERN: You say that and Laura will kill you.

RICHARD COBURN: I’ve no doubt.

[STATIC]

TRANSCRIPT OF PROGRESS INTERVIEW

c10.37a-jc

CONDUCTED BY MICHAEL DERN, CHIEF OF STAFF

JANUARY 3RD, 1974

: So it’s one hundred percent necessary that this is taped.

MICHAEL DERN: One hundred percent.

: Why? Who’s going to listen to this?

MICHAEL DERN: Um. Not many people.

: How many is not many?

MICHAEL DERN: One?

: One? One person?

MICHAEL DERN: They get played, once. Then they get stored. Safely.

: Come on, Michael.

MICHAEL DERN: You’re awful curious about this.

: Yes, I am awful curious about what happens to tapes made of me, of me talking. How would you like it? Wouldn’t you be worried?

MICHAEL DERN: I have been taped so many times, I don’t even notice anymore.

: But you do know what happens to the tapes.

MICHAEL DERN: Yes. The tapes get transcribed.

: Okay. Then what?

MICHAEL DERN: Mm. Probably shouldn’t. But. Then the transcriptions get circulated to a committee—a really important committee—with your name removed.

: What? Why the hell would they do that?

MICHAEL DERN: Because there’s always a chance that someone—I don’t know who, but some asshole—could leak the interview.

: Ah. Because we do such [singing] topsecret work.

MICHAEL DERN: Yeah. You do. You do, you know.

: Yeah. I know all about that.

MICHAEL DERN: Still, they want to hear, you know, thoughts, opinions, et cetera. They want to hear it out of your mouth. But not, you know, your mouth.

: Is your name redacted?

MICHAEL DERN: Nope.

: Well aren’t you special.

MICHAEL DERN: My name is a matter of public record. So yeah. Yeah, I am special. Not as special as you, though, but

: You sure know how to sweet-talk

MICHAEL DERN: I do. So how’s it going?

: That’s it? Just how’s it going?

MICHAEL DERN: We’ll start there, sure.

: Seriously?

MICHAEL DERN: Seriously.

: Not good.

MICHAEL DERN: No?

: Yeah. Not good. And I’m saying that knowing full well that I could lose my job, and the job of everyone else here. It’s not good.

MICHAEL DERN: What’s so not good about it?

: The results we’re getting. is excited about them, sure. His but you’ve got to understand that… like, think of looking at a dark room. You see a flash on one side. Then you see it again on another. What’s the guarantee that it’s the same light? Isn’t a much more practical explanation that it’s just two different lights that appear similar?

MICHAEL DERN: You know I’m a physicist too, right?

: Yeah, but you went to Stanford, so.

MICHAEL DERN: Very cute. So you’re saying you disbelieve

: hypothesis about the photon tracking.

What I will say is that I think we’ve made more progress exploring photon signatures than we ever have on cosmic bruising. If there’s one great contribution we’ve made to science, it’s that.

MICHAEL DERN: What do you feel is