At the Capitol building a stage had been set up facing the mall. Jim Clancy grabbed one arm and Susan the other as our security team surrounded me and pushed their way through the parting masses toward the podium. It was as loud as a college football bowl game, and I heard Jim shouting instructions about a bulletproof shield.

The shield was an eight-foot-high, three-sided Lexan enclosure that surrounded the podium. Jim opened the back panel and I ducked inside. There were no air vents other than a few slits atop the slanted ceiling, and the effect created a stifling silence.

“Good afternoon.” My greeting repeated across dozens of speakers in a staggered delay throughout the mall.

Muffled by the bulletproof plastic, the crowd’s response returned to me in waves, concluding with the distant din from the masses gathered around the Washington Monument almost a mile away.

“Imagine your home powered by an infinite supply of free, clean electricity. Imagine never having to fuel your car again. Imagine free public transportation, reduced manufacturing costs, urban areas with clean air, and oceans with reduced levels of carbon dioxide. The threat of global warming addressed, the threat of a war in the Middle East defused. Energy is the life-blood of civilization, the key to our survival as a species. For most of the last century, our fossil-fuel masters have used energy to maintain control of the masses. I say, enough is enough.”

Staggered cheers moved across the multitudes, the sound reverberating off the surrounding buildings.

“The powers that be refuse to go quietly in the night. When we demonstrated the Vostok prototype, they offered me five billion dollars to buy the company. When I refused to sell out the people of this planet for a few trinkets of silver, they stole it. When we received funding to begin manufacturing our line of generators, they burned our factory to the ground. They play by their own set of rules, and—”

I paused. In the distance, the crowds gathered around the Reflecting Pool and Washington Monument were gesturing to something in the eastern sky. Like a stadium crowd doing the wave, section by section looked up and pointed.

I turned to see for myself, only my view was obscured by the Capitol building.

And then I saw it.

The vessel was imposing, as dark and wide as a B-2 Bomber, only saucer-shaped. It descended majestically and then hovered, motionless over the mall, as if it were going to perch on the tip of the Washington Monument. The teardrop belly was flashing lights and emitting a magnetic field that I knew all too well, and those people caught in its gravitational vortex found themselves levitating fifteen to twenty feet in the air.

The crowd went wild as hundreds pushed and climbed over one another to experience zero gravity within the UFO’s shadow.