Hal Hunt, Fixer

About the game

It is 1947. Something is coming, and the people who know about it have decided the rest of the world is not ready. You are Hal Hunt, and your job is to keep the peace between the public, the Committee you work for and the Guests, who are not from here. Each card is a decision, and some of your choices come back to find you years later.

About ten minutes.

How to play

1. Pick how hard the game is, then take the desk. Each card is a decision with two sides.
2. Swipe the card, tap a choice, or press the ← or → key. While you point at a choice, dots show which meters it will move.
3. Keep four meters above zero: Secrecy, the Committee’s trust, the Guests’ patience and Hal’s own Stamina. If one runs out, the game ends. The ? beside each meter says what moves it.
4. The first time a meter turns red, the next card is a warning: one way out, at a price.
5. Hard choices wear Hal down. A piece of Get It Done Gum adds 20 Stamina and costs one of his five hearts. Hearts heal slowly without gum, and a glass of water or a swim helps.
6. After a choice, the card says what came of it and, where the history is real, what really happened. There are nine endings, and the game counts the ones you have found.

What really happened

• June 1947 Kenneth Arnold and the flying saucers

  On June 24, 1947, the pilot Kenneth Arnold reported nine fast, shiny objects near Mount Rainier. He said they moved like a saucer skipped across water, and newspapers turned that into a shape: the flying saucer. Within weeks, sightings were being reported across the country.

  Kenneth Arnold and the first flying saucers

• July 1947 Roswell and Project Mogul

  The press office at Roswell Army Air Field announced that it had recovered a “flying disc”. Hours later, General Roger Ramey showed reporters what he said was a weather balloon. In 1994 the Air Force said the debris came from Project Mogul, a secret program that flew balloons carrying microphones to listen for Soviet nuclear tests.

  The Roswell incident

• January 1948 Captain Mantell and the Skyhook balloon

  Captain Thomas Mantell of the Kentucky Air National Guard died when his fighter crashed while he chased a bright object. He had climbed too high without oxygen. The Air Force first suggested he had been chasing Venus. Later investigators concluded it was most likely a Skyhook balloon, at the time a classified Navy project.

  The Mantell incident

• July 1952 Radar targets over Washington

  Radar around Washington, D.C., picked up unexplained targets on two weekends in a row, and fighter jets were sent up. On July 29 the Air Force held its biggest press conference since the Second World War, where General John Samford said the radar returns were most likely caused by temperature inversions in the air.

  The 1952 Washington sightings

• January 1953 The Robertson Panel

  A panel of scientists sponsored by the CIA and chaired by the physicist H. P. Robertson met to review saucer reports. It found no threat from the objects themselves, but warned that a flood of reports could clog military channels during a real attack. It recommended a public “education” program to take the mystery out of saucers, and that civilian saucer groups be watched.

  Declassified UFO documents

• 1955 The U-2 and the CIA’s 1997 study

  The U-2 spy plane first flew in 1955, far higher than any airliner. A 1997 CIA study found that over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by U-2 and later spy-plane flights, and that the Air Force made misleading statements to the public to calm fears and protect the planes.

  Area 51, where the U-2 was tested

• October 1957 Sputnik

  Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, went up on October 4, 1957, and the space race began. From then on, almost anything new in the sky could be treated as a question of national security.

  The Levelland sightings, a month after Sputnik