Page 4 - The Perpetrations of Captain Kaga

Foreword

industrialized areas of Earth, but the resources allocated to it were
few compared to those dedicated to the development of weaponry.
Further, international tension kept scientists isolated from their
counterparts abroad; thus progress was also hampered by redundancy
and lack of communication.
Waderski, unquestionably aware of the hopelessness of his
situation, seems to have formulated his plans early in the last decade
of the twentieth century. At that point a high level of interest in life
in outer space was held by the general public, stimulated by ballistic
probes of the solar system and fantastic representations of
otherworldly creatures in the entertainment media. A hoax, similar to
Waderski’s, involving an invasion from Mars, a neighboring planet,
had caused near-panic two generations earlier; possibly Waderski
knew about it and recognized the latent fear of aliens residing in
human minds.
Those minds were considerably more sophisticated in Waderski’s
era, however. This raises the question of his own technical
competence in the multitude of scientific and commercial fields
requisite to projecting the reality of an extra-terrestrial armada. In
this as in other areas of his biography, he covered his tracks well; it
may be said, though, that Armando Waderski had a genius for
organization and management equal to that of the greatest generals,
statesmen, and industrialists of his civilization.
First, a vast network of military and civilian communications
systems had to be tapped into and fed false information,
completely undetected. Then, a series of unimpeachable authorities
in a broad range of specializations had to provide interpretations of
that data supporting the image of a gigantic fleet of invaders. Many
of the individuals involved could not have known they were being
manipulated; others may have been under such tight control by
Waderski’s apparatus that they dared not reveal the truth.
At any rate, within a few days of the infra-red “sightings” of ten
thousand nuclear-tipped missiles coming from behind the sun toward
their planet, the Earth’s population and its leaders were well-primed
for the second phase of Waderski’s plan. Respected political figures
in the heavily-armed nations began to urge the same course of action
upon their respective constituencies: combine and unify their
militaries and launch a coordinated last-ditch defense.
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