Addendum · not a cable
What this desk is about
This is a game. The office is invented. The feeling is not: a government desk, a boring letterhead, and a signature that does something the next morning.
The years you played
About 1944 to the early 1950s. A war is ending. A new American intelligence office is being built. The story the neighbors get is weather and wire.
About 1950 to 1953. Korea. The Air Force studies reports of flying discs under names you can look up: Sign, then Grudge. In the game, a crate leaves the mine labeled as electronics.
About 1953 to 1961. The paper leaves the city. In the real record, secret research into behavior is funded, and other governments are treated as weather. The game keeps that as furniture invoices and a ledger. It does not play those events.
Where it stopped
Glass is about 1961 to 1969. Missiles. A real salt company starts cutting the rock under the lake from Whiskey Island. Blue Book, the Air Force’s public study of unidentified flying objects, closes at the end of 1969. Turn the window down and the story ends early. Choose it and you play that season. The hearings after it are not written.
What was borrowed
The public studies named above. The habit of filing the strange under a dull word. A salt mine, because the rock under the lakeshore is real and an office in it is not. “Long Lines” is an old telephone-company phrase, used here as a front, not as a claim about any real firm.
The parish, the chemist, the messenger, and the crate are composites. No real person’s record is a character. The disc in the margin is a drawing. It is not a photograph of anything.