This week, a metal from a strange book I read five years ago showed up in Nebraska. The book led me through every sky story I know to the one that ends with the Father.
October 16, 2026, ekolovesyou.com
https://tinyurl.com/yeyv9xx2
There’s a novel that says human beings are livestock, bred to mine a metal called niobium.
We were engineered to dig it up. Our breakthroughs were fed to us to speed up the work. And once the planet is stripped, the book gives Earth 73 years.
Tore Says told us to read it back in 2022. It’s called Niobium Node: Earth’s Oldest Secret. I jotted down passages that shook me and shelved the notes.
This week, the Secretary of Energy stood at a niobium mine site in Johnson County, Nebraska, and said, “We are going to restore America’s control over our national security.” At the same time, an Australian company moved on a niobium deposit in western Greenland.
So I pulled the notes out of my drawer.
Tore has touted the metal for years. In March 2021, a year before the book’s release, the Nebraska mine came up on her stream, and in the same breath, Greenland. Coincidence?
The book
Gada is an Abenaki girl from Vermont who grows up to become an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She’s handed two cases. Scientists working on human chromosome 2 keep dying in ways the coroners can’t explain. Countries with no research base are designing parts of the same advanced missile without talking to each other.
She follows both cases to the same place, something far older and stronger than us, mining the planet for niobium. Along the way there’s niobium plasma that steers gravity and pure ingots in a cave on Mars.
Her fear, by the end, is that we were made to be useful.
Some of it is real. Human chromosome 2 is two ancestral chromosomes fused end to end. The great apes have twenty-four pairs and we have twenty-three.
When Gada asks where an outside power would store a planet’s worth of niobium, her husband, Mike, describes an old room-and-pillar mine in the Midwest, near a river and rail lines. Gada names one near Kansas City. It actually exists. It’s called SubTropolis, a limestone mine in the bluffs over the Missouri River, leased out as underground storage.
Elk Creek sits a few hours north.
Gada’s great-grandfather built the family house as a refuge for Native people “hunted by those who supported the eugenics programs.” Vermont ran a eugenics survey from 1925 to 1936. At least 250 Vermonters were sterilized, and the Abenaki took the worst of it. The state just apologized a few years ago.
On Gada’s first day at Langley, her guide tells her to look up file 001 in the archive, “The Kingston Doctrine, dated May 9th, 1941, and issued to President Roosevelt.” But she points out that the Office of Strategic Services wasn’t founded until 1942. He just chuckles, and the book never mentions it again.
While I can’t find any record of a Kingston Doctrine, what I can find is a story of a craft recovered near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in late April 1941, with everyone at the scene told to keep quiet. The book’s file is dated 2 weeks later.
The typewriter
Three years after she quits, Gada types the whole thing on a manual typewriter, because anything digital can be read. On the way to the publisher she tells her old professor, “It’s a work of fiction, or at least that’s what I’m going to call it, to keep my former employers from suing the pants off of me.”
Her husband Mike goes in as the ‘author’. The editor says she sometimes believed it, “we might all really be bio-bots.” Mike tells her, “We want it to be as realistic as possible because it IS real.” She laughs until she has to wipe her eyes. He turns down any payment. When the editor insists on a $5,000 advance to prove she owns the rights, he asks for it in cash. No paper trail.
Out on the sidewalk Mike says what he’s really hoping for. “Hopefully, there will be a few people who manage to extrapolate the truth from your book.”
Her husband’s full name is Mike Corey. When I closed the book this week I looked at the cover. Written by Mike Khouri. Pronounced the same way.
In 2023 a former intelligence officer told Congress under oath that our government holds recovered craft and “non-human biologics.” People started saying soft disclosure. A truth too big to announce gets released first as a story, so when someone finally says it plainly, we’ve already met it, and whoever says it can still be laughed off.
Bill Cooper told us standard procedure is to first disclose, then deflect.
Thirteen hours
One afternoon at Langley, Gada looks out a window and sees night, with stars hanging so low they brush the treetops. Somehow she instantly lost 13 hours.
After that, the people protecting her are taken away one at a time.
Her boss is suddenly transferred to Maryland. Her best friend, Tyrone, dies, and his wife and children die in a car crash an hour or two after his funeral. Her software is wiped. And every backup, too.
In the lobby of her building stands a marble statue of the archangel Michael with a sword. The first time she sees it, she calls it creepy. On the night she loses 13 hours and comes home shaking, the statue is gone.
All that’s left is the deep impression it pressed into the carpet.
By the end Gada decides we’re the perfect slaves, “stupid enough to think that our religious and political institutions are more than just another way to control us.” When Tyrone offers to pray for her, she tells him crossing your fingers is just as effective. Near the last page, Mike promises an army.
“We will take back our planet.”
I sat on my notes for five years because I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t have the whole story, and I wasn’t sure it was mine to tell.
The writing surprised me most. It’s bad. Really bad. Clunky dialogue, typos, a plot held together with duct tape. But I could see past all that to what was really being said between the lines, and once I saw it, I realized this happens a lot. So I started looking for it. Pulp novels. B-movies. Trash TV. Stories thin enough that something true shows through. Pattern matching. Noticing.
When I returned to the book this week and finished it a second time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d read this story before.
Other clothes
Niobium Node isn’t the only story that calls itself fiction and then winks.
There was a show in the 90s on NBC called Dark Skies.
Its first episode opens on an old man’s voice over black.
“My name is John Loengard. This program is being presented as fiction to protect those people fighting in the Resistance. But I will tell you the truth now if you will listen.” Then the line the whole show hangs on. “The truth is we are not alone.” A long pause. “I wish we were.”
Someone I trust told me that show was made to share what happened. It ran alongside The X-Files (which got all the attention). It was never promoted, and was cancelled after one season. Didn’t matter. The message got seeded.
I came to Majestic later, after reading James Forrestal’s diaries and feeling like something was big missing from them. Then I heard Bill Cooper say on an archived episode of his radio show that its author Whitley Strieber was a tool of the Agency, handed Forrestal’s ‘lost’ material to publish as fiction. Majestic came out in 1989, seven years before Dark Skies, and it tells the same story.
Its narrator says the book is labeled fiction to keep him out of prison, and signs off, “Will is fiction and so am I.” The novel opens with a line from a former head of the CIA, quoted in the New York Times in 1960.
“Through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe that unidentified flying objects are nonsense.” Same thing Cooper said. And the internal series bible that producers had made for Dark Skies resembles a top-secret briefing, which quotes the same CIA head saying the same sentence.
Stories can say almost anything once everyone agrees it’s only a story.
Most people sort all of this into two rooms.
In one room it’s disclosure, truth leaking out in costume. In the other room it’s entertainment. Folks argue in those rooms for years, but neither asks the question every one of these stories answers (whether we notice or not).
What’s above us?
The sky
I knew Stargate SG-1 as a kid. When I came back to it as an adult, I was surprised how sophisticated some of the storytelling is, and how many details line up with declassified documents and whistleblower claims. It ran ten seasons on the premise that the old gods of the ancient world were real, but that they were really just parasites. Worms in human bodies, wearing a pharaoh’s crown, demanding worship.
In the second season an old warrior faces one of them, living inside a young man it took as its host. “You are not God,” he says. “You are a parasite within a child.” In the third season the team asks how these creatures get power on Earth. Teal’c answers in two words.
“False religion.”
Above the parasites exists an older race that watches us. “We have studied your race closely,” one of them says. “Your race has much to prove.” They grade us like a teacher grading a slow, underachieving class with potential.
Dark Skies added a hive up there. A parasite that crawls into the brain and joins each host to one networked mind. Its people have a prayer. “Praise the Eternal We.” In the pilot, one of them holds out a globe of light to a frightened woman. “Touch it! All your questions will be answered!” (sound familiar?)
Majestic puts something gentler up there. Its visitors are ‘soul-workers’, and its dying spymaster says, “In the sight of God they are almost angels.” The novel even gives them the words of Jesus. Its last line asks us to take the little yellow flower they hold out.
Jupiter Ascending puts a royal family up there. In that movie Earth is a farm. We were seeded here to be harvested, and the harvest becomes a serum that keeps a few very rich people young for thousands of years. Tore pointed people to that one too. The studio famously never released the screenplay.
And Niobium Node puts ranchers up there, with us as the herd.
A parasite wearing a crown. A hive with a prayer. Watchers grading us. False angels holding out flowers. A family that drinks us to stay young. Ranchers.
Every one of them wants something from us.
Worship. Surrender. Labor. Sacrifice. Our bodies. Our trust.
Not one of them is the message of the Father.
That’s the dark room these stories leave us in. Whatever is up there owns us, or eats us, or is waiting for us to pass a test. The protecting angel in Gada’s lobby is gone, and all that’s left is the dent in the carpet.
Of everything I’ve read or watched in this vein, my favorite is the one that actually walks us out of that room.
♥ Eko