I coiled my rope and stowed it in my backpack as I watched Ming head slowly toward the fog bank. Then I climbed to the base of the mountain and headed west.

Mountain. Not alien spaceship.

As intriguing and believable as Captain Benjamin Hintzmann’s close encounter stories had been, once one removed the storyteller’s embellishments I knew there was a reasonable explanation for everything.

The same could be said about Lake Vostok’s extreme variations in pressure. Magnetic anomalies in Antarctica were far from unusual, and an asteroid impact in a volcanically active region would yield a powerful magnetic resonance. As far as I was concerned, establishing a sensory array around an impact zone was standard operating procedure.

No, what concerned me wasn’t the Colonel, it was Ben. The captain’s behavior was anything but S.O.P. for a former member of the U.S. Armed Forces. Pilots simply didn’t abandon their wingmen to turn the mission into a race. They stuck together against the elements, even if it meant walking a few extra miles in extreme weather conditions.

Yet Ben had not only preferred to separate, he’d seemed eager to go off on his own.

He thinks there’s a spaceship down here, and he means to prove it to the world. Maybe he’ll find an entrance inside. He’ll snap a few hundred photos with his iPhone and send them off to Steven Greer and the rest of the E.T. screwballs in hopes of reclaiming his career.

The sudden realization of Ben’s circumstances gave me pause.

He’s a lot like I was. After the Sargasso Sea incident, my career was in serious jeopardy. When Angus tricked me into testifying at his trial, and the Inverness judge practically stripped me in court to reveal scars from a childhood attack on Loch Ness, my name was reduced to a punchline on late-night television. All my hard work and field research as a marine biologist—down the drain. My reputation was destroyed, my career in ruins. In the end, I had done exactly what Ben was attempting to do now: prove to the world he was right.

Feeling like the world’s biggest hypocrite, I picked up my pace.

Twenty minutes passed. I had managed to forge a path as close to the base of the mountain as possible, taking advantage of the patches of exposed rock, but as I neared the area targeted on my GPS I was forced to move farther out, exposing myself to snow drifts and unseen crevasses. I was shivering badly, and my resolve was weakening.

The designated site was another thirty feet or so down a steep embankment. I stared at the spot.

Ten more paces across virgin snow. Three minutes max to set up the sensory device.