Editor’s Note: In 1992, while working as a staff writer and reporter for a chain of newspapers on the Gulf Coast, I stumbled onto a dangerous story involving electromagnetic fields and pulses being developed by Naval Intelligence in Pensacola, Florida. The stories I wrote about it were so controversial that a rogue agent working for the CIA managed to get himself hired as my editor. I’m not making this up. His name was K. Lee Lerner and he later conned his way into Harvard and went to work for the CIA in France.

There is a chapter about this in my book Jump on the Bus: Make Democracy Work Again.

I moved from Gulf Shores back to Birmingham, Alabama, briefly and wrote most of a novel about it, but never finished it or tried to have it published. I moved on and went back to grad school in 1993. But a couple of years ago a story surfaced under the slug name the Havana Syndrome. This caught my attention, since it sounded exactly like the technology that was being developed at the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola in the early 1990s.

I wrote a story about this in February, 2022: Havana Syndrome Clearly Caused by Directed Energy Weapon

Obviously this technology has come out of the closet, so to speak, so I pulled up the text of my novel and began reworking it a bit. Upon reflection, I decided the novel did not need an ending. If produced as a film series, that could be handled with a few overhead shots of New York City and the Pulitzer Prize Awards to roll during the closing credits. So I began working on the story as a film treatment.

I am now actively looking for the right company and director to bring this important story to light. I believe I am the writer and producer to do it, since I broke the early stories on the technology and thought about it a lot for a dramatic, fictional treatment. I had in mind a thriller format, modeled on the style of Southern lawyer-writer John Grisham.

I was hanging around in the campground recently near D.C. and was approached by a film crew. They are going to do a shoot in the park in a couple of weeks. So I’m joining some film groups on Facebook and getting ready to pitch this idea, and three other ideas I have for films. So for today, I decided to post the opening film treatment for Operation Zap, and the first chapter for people to get an idea of how the story begins. Hope you like it. I’m using a pseudonym for this project.

Operation Zap

By Aaron Murphy

Film Treatment

FADE IN — Drizzling rain, winding mountain road, 1979 midnight blue sparkle Fiat Spider convertible driven by star reporter-writer, high on weed and whiskey, contemplating suicide. Opening scene ends unresolved with car sitting on the edge of a cliff with a raging river below.

FLASHBACKS — From a suburban childhood at Christmas.

Foreshadowing – A flash of headlights on a black SUV off in the distance back down the mountain driven by an agent with the CIA or Naval Intelligence.

It became harder and harder to see where one lane started and another stopped as the broken, faded white line disappeared in the drizzle and mist. Yet my foot grew heavier and bore down harder on the accelerator. The Italian convertible, made for the beach, with only one headlight burning, created a crooked silhouette against the night sky as it droned on into the storm. Up and up I drove like a madman into the foothills of the lower Appalachian mountains, into the blinding drizzle of precipitation toward the precipice, where the pain might end.

It seemed unbearable that the world no longer valued words, accurate, factual information. Truth and justice had been lost in the propagandistic shallows of modern life, where something as simple and seemingly inescapable to the human species as self preservation meant about as much anymore as the act of Christmas giving. Taking and getting while the getting was good, that’s all anyone thought about anymore. Basic human kindness and courtesy went out when disco came in the late 1970s. And by the time 1991 rolled around, it was clear the human species was headed for the same sort of collective suicide the whales sometimes submit themselves to, hurling themselves en masse against the beaches of the world.

No one seemed to notice or care on that Christmas Eve night as I, Curtis Upchurch, journalist at large, sped toward the top of Mount Chilhowee and the hang-gliders launch. There were no state troopers on the roads after midnight to stop me for speeding, for a busted headlight, an expired tag, a suspended drivers license or to arrest me on the outstanding warrant for unpaid traffic tickets and put me in jail and save me from myself. The statute of limitations had run on most of my other crimes, all minor in comparison to the one I was about to commit. No sympathetic talk radio host interrupted the rock-country babble to tell me someone, somewhere cared. No nun or pastor came to comfort me. No wife. No mother. No father, sister, brother, lover . . . not even one friend called on the car phone to invite me over for cheer. And I knew better than to go to a psychiatrist, for even in these modern times, it would haunt me for life. Better to die than be followed for life with a record of admitting mental weakness.

There was only the drizzling rain and the steady hum of the four cylinders pumping up and down in the oil and the whir of the tires on the wet, black as midnight asphalt and the excruciating squeaking of the worn out windshield wiper blades, cutting a trench in the glass one micro millimeter at a time, mile after mile. On I drove, past the barren cotton and soybean fields and country houses all decorated up with lights and trees and tinsel and plastic snow.

A few dogs barked. A white-tailed deer leaped across the road in front of me, yet not close enough to provide providence a way to stop the onward advance of this coffin on wheels.

Inside one-hundred million houses, two-hundred-fifty million men, women and children, black, white and original red Americans, tuned into five-hundred million television sets and flipped through ninety nine different cable channels, passing over one obscure, colorized movie starring a long-dead and almost forgotten actor who stood in the snow on the edge of the bridge and prayed.

“God, I ain’t much of a prayin’ man. But if you’re out there, somewhere, help me. Please, Lord. Please show me the way.”

I didn’t see that movie this year. And I didn’t pray. I broke my last hundred dollar bill on a tank of gas and a bottle of Irish whiskey. And I drank and drove into the night, up the last mountain toward my last moment on this brown, round, dying planet, a planet people used to call God’s green earth.

Not only did I find myself unemployed, penniless, alone and unloved on this Christmas Eve. My personal situation was bad enough. But the so-called greatest country in the world was on the verge of collapse because its people had grown at the same time greedy and lazy, techno-smart and spiritually unattached to the basis of life on earth. The richest capitalist economy ever built was about to grow poor once again because the masses allowed the politicians to allow the corporate greed-heads to amass and conglomerate almost everything, including the money and the words. As the rich got richer, the poor did not even have the intelligence or the will to rise up. Thus the greatest experiment in self-government, democracy, the last utopia, was on the verge of becoming the most centralized and corrupt state capitalist oligopoly in the history of human development.

In my hopeless, cynical view, every politician was a liar. Every captain of industry a snake. Every a preacher a charlatan. Every women a big-haired, makeup wearin’, fingernail paintin’, camero drivin’, twinkie eatin’, bubblegum chewin’, shitty diaper changin’, soap opera watchin’, cosmoplitan, gimme-gimme slut, who would just as soon marry you one day and run off with your checkbook, credit cards and first born the next, than to cook you a lousy dinner and give you head, much less missionary style sex. Every lawyer was a pig who should be hog-tied and horsewhipped. And every journalist was a shill or a hack or so mediocre and afraid of pissin’ somebody off they might as well shut down the entire industry and give the people what they wanted: Good news or no news and stop wasting the trees. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, so important to the revolutionaries who started this great experiment, seemed to mean little to modern Americans. Freedom to a majority of them no longer meant the freedom to worship, to assemble, or to speak the truth, but merely “free markets.” The right to make money at will and over any dead body; the right not just to own property, but to destroy whole ecosystems.

To top it all off, the polar ice caps were melting due to the buildup of greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation. And most of the scientists were now fat, happy and silent because they finally gave in to the money of the big oil companies, the chemical companies and the paper mills and said it was finally proven that massive amounts of carbon dioxide, DDT and dioxin in the environment was actually GOOD for the planet, ESPECIALLY endangered plants and animals.

“GODDAMN them!,” I yelled, pounding the plastic dashboard. The slick tires on the FIAT lost the pavement for an instant. It swerved from the soft shoulder back into the road, then rubber grabbed asphalt again. “Here I am trying to get to the top of this goddamn mountain to run myself off and wouldn’t you know it. With my luck I’d run off the road into a ditch and get a flat and get stuck in the mud and nearly freeze to death before some damn farmer would find me with hypothermia and save me, only to send me forever to suffer for the rest of my life with no feeling in my hands or feet.”

It wouldn’t be long now.

Curtis Upchurch came into the world a bit premature. Sometimes I think maybe I missed the cosmic timing and got the wrong soul, or came into the world ahead of my time. Sometimes, when the ladies whispered of Michelangelo and said I looked like an uncle who died in a plane crash during World War II, I thought maybe I was that uncle reincarnate, destined to die a violent death, or to live and advance to a higher plain. I missed the wars of my time. I was six months too young to be nabbed by the Vietnam draft, and six months too old for the Carter reinstatement in case of war in the Persian Gulf. I led a perfectly average life growing up in the suburbs. I almost always got the right bicycle for Christmas and pretended to believe in Santa Claus, long after I knew it to be a sick lie, just as the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny were the creations of money hungry capitalists of German descent. Just as the resurrection of Jesus was a myth; the Golden Rule a dead cliche. I walked out of church at the age of seventeen in the throws of a super enlightening acid trip and never returned.

I will never forgot the look on the preacher’s face when I called him a liar. Down into the underground economy I went, pounding drums for lodging, sex, food and drink. Until it got old. Then I went to college and found a thirst for learning. I asked for knowledge, and received more than my share. I asked to love, and she fell in my lap. I found journalism, a vocation, a higher calling, meaning in my life. After a few years of watching the politics and mediocrity engulf the trade, however, my cynicism grew to an almost unbearable level. H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann and Edward R. Murrow were dead. Ben Bradley and Walter Cronkite retired. And it became apparent that there were no Humphrey Bogarts come to life to replace them. The gig was surely up when Hunter S. Thompson could not even muster up a rebellious sentence fragment without being arrested for firearms violations, then he finally pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger.

Life had become too unbearable. The only thing left to do was drive the ragtop off the side of a mountain into a deep ravine, where giant boulders or a fast running river would take me into whatever promised land or lake of fire waited at the end for all living spirits — or more likely the great black nothingness. Rigormortis. Worms would eat my flesh and my guts and my brain until nothing was left but a few specks of dust, buried under the mud beside the still waters. Soon I would know for sure, and what difference would it make anyway. The way I had it figured there was nothing out there. A little fear for the first hundred feet. A scream. A crash. Maybe an explosion. Perhaps a fire. Chances were I wouldn’t see it or hear it or feel it or even smell it. I would be gone, out, silent, dead, erased from human history except for a few bylines on faded newsprint, which would disappear from the acid in a hundred years or so. In truth, for all the major stories I had broken wide open — exposing the oil companies plans to dump toxic effluent into the Gulf of Mexico, the Navy’s plans to test a nuclear weapon simulation device in the Atlantic, exposing the governor of a small Southern state of gross financial corruption and conspiracy to commit murder — the truth was that I amounted to only a speck in a fraction of millennial time. What I was able to accomplish made about as much of a difference as the minor ripples caused by a pebble on the surface of a pond. I longed to be more of a warship in the ocean, and at times I had come close. Yet I was not yet even a footnote in history, much less a paragraph or a page.

As I grew closer to the top of the dark, wet mountain, I thought of my father, who died when I was only a boy. A short but strong, smart but silent man with receding, Elvis-black hair graying at the temples. A crooked smile revealing false teeth. A Winston dangling from the corner of his dry mouth. I pictured him sitting in the stern of an aluminum bass fishing boat tossing a green, plastic worm into treetop after treetop, reeling it in over and over again on his fiberglass rod and spinning reel, rarely coming home with anything from the depleted lakes except a sunburn and an anger that finally stopped up the valves to his heart. He died in one final snore sitting in a Marks Fitzgerald recliner in front of an RCA television set in the middle of the suburbs, never knowing what it was like to make the final payment on the house, to get the gold watch on retirement day, to catch a twelve pound bass and have it mounted on the wall in a newly decorated basement den.

My mom did pay off the house. She got a gold clock that chimed a different popular tune every hour. She raked the leaves and cut the grass by herself, when she could get the lawn mower started. The plastic Christmas tree went up every year right after Thanksgiving and a fair share of mall purchased packages lay neatly underneath, while ceramic wisemen looked down on the babe in swaddling clothes in a manger. This Germanic ritual seemed absurd. I had come to deplore both the false spirituality of Christmas and the gaudy commercialism it increasingly came to represent American style.

I drove on and thought of my former fiancé, who was now married to a lawyer with a fine house and two kids, two cars and a mortgage, and I remembered the last time we made love. It was fantastic and went on for hours. What had happened? It all came down to flowers and Christmas presents I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, provide; to money, “The root of all evil.” Why in the hell did all good things in life have to depend on the most evil thing of all?

The only thing left to do was drive off the cliff…

But wait.

Was that headlights off behind and off in the distance? It must have been a reflection. Surely there’s no one else out here on this god forsaken mountain road on Christmas Eve. In my delirium I must be imagining things.

“Too bad no one’s here to film this for the David Letterman show,” I said out loud to no one, a wry laugh coming out muffled and a bit choked. “Nothing left to do now but mash the peddle for the last time.”

I sat there in the dark and the rain and drank, and smoked, and imagined what it would be like. Easing it into first gear, I would slowly let out the clutch. It would catch and begin to inch forward as the gas rushed faster into the carburetor. The little Italian sports car would leap over the side of the cliff, with me in the driver’s seat. The nose would turn down and I would sail toward the bottom of the ravine, time and motion seemingly suspended.

I lit another joint and fast forwarded the cassette tape. I stared out into the darkness. Jim Morrison sang: “This is the end, my friend . . . ”

I imagined it some more. I would clutch tightly to the steering wheel and my eyes would grow wide as the river came rushing toward me at thirty feet a second. Ten more seconds and I would hit the rocks or the water and be gone in a thud, a crash a splash or an explosion only the deer and the barred owls would hear, maybe a fox or raccoon, out hunting at night.

What would happen to the world now? Some Prometheus I had turned out to be. I recalled my conversation with a charismatic college English professor on the subject of Shelly. “What a responsibility he tried to take on his shoulders. No wonder he died so young,” I said. Marshall Smythe, doctor of English Literature, just nodded, looked thoughtfully at the ceiling in his cluttered office, and said: “Yes, yes indeed.”

“Here goes,” I whispered, clenching my teeth and lips together for the final time. Did I have the courage to do it now that the time was at hand? Did I have a choice?

The rain never let up. The wind whistled through the trees. Somewhere a doe and her fawn looked up from where they huddled in the dark valley, but only for an instant. The owls stopped hooting at each other. Off in the distance, a church bell rang. One by one Christmas lights everywhere blinked off for the night, while children, with dreams of dolls and new boots dancing in their heads, strained to stay awake and to hear reindeer hooves on the roof.

Great Mother Earth turned another mile in her seemingly endless, yet finite, revolution around her axis and the sun. And from somewhere atop Mount Chilhowee, headlights flashed on a black Ford Bronco. Slowly, it began the descent back down the mountain. A rogue federal agent sat behind the wheel, placing a call on his secure cellular phone.

The End of Chapter One

Of course much of this text doesn’t have to be repeated in the film. Hopefully this gives you an idea of the opening scene anyway. There are 14 chapters in the book, and a film treatment for the new ending. If anyone wants to see more, get in touch.