NEW SCENARIO COMING SOON: THE HOLLOW MAN

One of the two new scenarios for the upcoming book THOSE WHO COME AFTER will premiere here on Patreon, for patrons only! 

INTRODUCTION

The Breckenridge broadcast of 1986 is famous among those on the fringes of conspiracy lore. For six minutes on 19 NOV 1986, a pirate TV transmission blanketed four towns near Breckenridge New Jersey with a strange, backlit figure reading out a list of events in a unique (and some say familiar) cadence that — at the apparent time of their announcement — had yet to occur. 

Or so some say. 

An FCC investigation into the event in 1986-1987 revealed little definitive, but did much to cement the legend by listing the supposed date of the transmission, as well as the strange occurrences announced there that at least appeared to happen after that date. An underage suspect was implicated and then cleared, and two decades later, when his name was leaked to the fringe press, the man, Arnold DeVries, long suffering from a mental handicap all but became a hermit. In 2014, after some public interest due to the Phenomen-X web program Penumbra, a public statement by the FCC concluded that poor documentation was most likely responsible for the “supernatural” appearance and timing of the events. Few that researched the incident believed the official explanation.  

Copies of the broadcast were long ago committed to YouTube, and have been obsessed over there by a strange sub-group of theorists in the decades since. The back-lit figure announced two significant things in 1986 that many claim occurred after the transmission: an accident on the U.S.S. Starkwell, a missile frigate in the Gulf of Oman that cost seven sailors their lives, and that the winning lottery numbers in the New Jersey State lottery drawing the week after the broadcast were 08, 31, 39, 40, 43, 04.

It seemed that the Breckenridge broadcast might forever hover on the edges of fringe lore, never solved, never fully believed, a mystery, until 19 NOV 2019, when an identical transmission hijacked every screen (televisions, tablets and smart phones) in a forty mile radius of Breckenridge New Jersey again.

In it, a backlit figure — seemingly identical to the one from 1986 — predicted nine new events, eight of which were seemingly small, odd events like car accidents, house fires, and one aneurism of a named citizen in New York City. Only the ninth announcement was significant, and only then to a tiny, secret group within the Federal Government:

Subject will meet Delta Green 10 DEC, 22:22:11 EST, The figure said, just before the transmission cut out.  

The Truth

While in transit through unknown dimensions beyond our own, an operative of the Great Race of Yith was set upon by something on the threshold of timespace. This creature, which might be best termed a temporal predator, “pursued” and “injured” the mind of the Great Race operative, causing it to miss its target entirely, and instead to take refuge in the mind of Arnold DeVries, in the year 2019. There, trapped, the Great Race operative found portions of its knowledge — specifically those used to construct a machine which permitted its return to Pnakotus — had been utterly destroyed in the attack. It was stranded.

Arnold DeVries, born in 1969 with a congenital brain defect giving him an effective IQ of 80, was considered developmentally disabled, but high-functioning enough to attend school normally and was well-liked by his classmates and teachers due to his sunny disposition. 

Arnold had been born to Yelena and Thomas DeVries, and grew up in their home in Breckenridge New Jersey, leading an unexceptional life, until 1986 in his third year of high school, when he came under scrutiny by the FCC for a strange pirate television broadcast. DeVries was wholly innocent and knew nothing about the transmission, though his high-pitched voice on the broadcast, along with its odd and distinctive habit of enunciating the last word in a sentence twice, was unmistakably his. Multiple shocked people identified DeVries as the possible culprit, though Arnold had trouble even getting through a whole day without assistance.

Police searched the DeVries home, as well as Arnold’s “boathouse” on his parent’s property near Lake Delat, and looked into his library activity, but could find nothing amiss. The electronics and technical know-how to pull off such an impressive feat were simply not there. DeVries was cleared of suspicion and the investigation ended. 

In 2014, after a web program outlining the pirate transmission went viral on YouTube and drew scrutiny from various fronts, including a Freedom of Information Act request for the FCC case paperwork, attention fell on the town again. The release of this paperwork also brought Arnold DeVries to public attention to the first time. The man, now 45, had inherited his family home and lived there caring for his elderly mother who suffered from dementia. Arthur, terrified and confused by the attention, set up barbed wire, cameras and other inconveniences, and eventually, the flood of reporters and gawkers died down to a trickle. 

 Yelena DeVries died in 2016, and Arnold continued his lonely vigil at his family home, terrified of the world at large and people’s obsession with a crime he had nothing to do with.

Then, in 2019, the wounded operative of the Great Race took over his body. By Great Race standards, its plan was simple: it would transmit a series of message to humans causing new outcomes in a very limited fashion on a great many small things, this would signal its allies at the Library of Pnakotus that it was trapped in 2019. To the operative, this was the temporal equivalent of stacking wood on a deserted island to signal SOS to passing aircraft.  

The operative set about building a giant machine at the DeVries family boathouse at Lake Delat. From this machine, it would transmit two video messages: one would appear in November 19, 1986 (the famous Breckenridge broadcast) and the other in 19 NOV 2019. The final comment of the 2019 broadcast mentioning Delta Green (which the operative is quite familiar with, along with nearly every other fact of the modern human era) was meant to draw the agency here to “cap” its clumsy intrusion; to clean up whatever mess it might leave behind, when it exited, rescued from DeVries. 

What the Great Race operative didn’t predict is that the temporal predator followed it through into spacetime and is hunting Breckenridge even now, searching for sustenance.