| The
Australian Outback is barren, inhospitable and largely deserted. What better
place for an alien landing?
Fellow writer and former
denizen of Coober Pedy Eddie
Crismani provided creative input for some of the core materials (no
pun intended) such as the possible locations and commercial driving force
(iron ore) that would place people in such isolation.
A New
Scientist article by Douglas Fox describing a paper on the possible
origins of the "min-min" and the "Fata Morgana" (John Pettigrew, Clinical
and Experimental Optometry, Vol 86, p109 (2003)) added further fuel to
the backstory.
The AirScooter,
an intriguing invention (one of many) of Woody
Norris, is real and can be seen taking to the air online (you can even
buy a working model if you have the
necessary folding stuff), as is the UAV based on the same technology.
The rest is down to pure
imagination...
|
In
the desolate Outback of South-Western Australia where the sun beats down
mercilessly onto a barren, other-worldly landscape, a small iron ore mining
community struggles to survive. An American geologist and his family, hired
by the parent company to try and locate new sources of ore to attempt to
keep operations going, do their best to integrate into the community but
find that isolation, as so often happens, breeds suspicion and distrust
of strangers.
One of the few young
people in the township extends the hand of friendship to the family, however,
and she discovers a soul mate in the form of the geologist's son. She also
discovers his passion for alien abduction and conspiracy theories, and
in the process of attempting to debunk his wild and impossible beliefs
slowly comes to the realization that he might in fact be right after all.
The turning point arises
when the two see a min-min, a night time light phenomenon sometimes observed
in the Australian outback, and attempt to locate it using the geologist's
AirScooter. Running out of fuel and making an emergency landing miles from
anywhere, the two youngsters set off a search and rescue episode that leads
to their eventual recovery, at the same time that an apparent Fata Morgana
is observed by the entire rescue crew.
Except that this particular
mirage doesn't show a range of hills from beyond the horizon. It shows
a huge craft settled in an ancient caldera inside a nearby mountain range.
And that's where the adventure really begins...
Possible candidates:
Russell Crowe as the
geologist (who flies an AirScooter (www.airscooter.com) to help him in
his field work, and uses a similar UAV to extend his reach - carrying a
p-wave radar system to scan up to thirty inches below the surface of the
earth, looking for evidence of ancient geological structures).
Possible locations:
Flinders Range; Coober
Pedy; other sites in Western and South Western Australia, especially around
the Flinders Range.
The pitch/premise is
on WriteSafe
and here. |