"Every breath you exhale, it's all the tension of the day just gone," Sims whispered. "Let it go. That's right, just give it up. And as it happens, I want you to notice that your foot, the one we're going to work on, I want you to go ahead and put it in a little bucket of ice. There you go ...."
Leir marked the spot with a stud finder. He and his nameless assistant put a tourniquet around the toe and cut it open. Then there was blood, and they pulled the tourniquet tighter and forced the cut open and began probing with their scalpels.
"That's it right there, isn't it?" said the second surgeon.
"Yeah, I think so," said Leir.
"We're hitting the object now," the second announced. "It has a very hard metallic feel."
Leir pulled something out and wiped it in the gauze.
"Is that it?"
"No," said Leir. "That's soft tissue."
They poked and pushed and cut and squeezed. The woman was drifting farther and farther away, Derrel Sims kept saying, but after a while, he broke the reverie and asked: "Where's my implant, Doctor?"
Dr. Leir answered: "We're fishing, Derrel. It's like going fishing."
More than an hour had passed when Leir said, "I got it!" and this time he really had. It was a tiny black triangle, and the reason it had been so hard to find, Leir instantly concluded, was that "a layer of abnormal fibrous tissue" had grown around it. They were all very excited. Leir was anxious to get it to a lab. Many implants have evaporated or turned to powder in the light of day, but Leir thought he knew how to preserve this one. The chief investigator took the implant home, packed in the patient's own blood. He soon announced that it glowed green under a black light, but eight months later, "at press time," UFO Magazine reported, "pieces lingered at the unnamed lab pending official analysis."
HUFON's outcasts call themselves SPUFON now, which stands for nothing, except their refusal to take anyone seriously. They gather for breakfast occasionally. Over pancakes and coffee, they discuss UFOs and alien abduction. There's something to it, they say, but no one knows what it is, and no one will ever know, if the likes of Derrel Sims keep scaring the serious people away.
"Derrel's implants have never been fully analyzed and they never will be," Schatte concludes, "because once they're proven to be dirt off the floor, he can't make any money on it."
But whether or not they've examined the implants, experts are growing interested in the work of Dr. Leir and Derrel Sims. A California ethics board is investigating the necessity of implant surgery. In Texas, an expert on ethics thinks it's possible that Sims is practicing psychology without a license.
The chief investigator knew nothing about his new fans in April. With 70 members of the Houston UFO Network, he was sitting in the dark, gazing at pictures of rotting cows. "I'm not going to dwell too much longer on unusual animal death," the speaker said, but he did it anyway, to the point that even the chief investigator got up and took a break.
He was in the lobby when I found him. Chief, I said, it's not looking good. Are you sure you don't want to talk to me?
Not a chance. If you write an unflattering story, he said, "all it's going to do is make you look like an ass."
And that was that. He turned his back then and began talking to whomever would listen. He told about the five surgeries scheduled for May, the report he's writing for MIT, the July conference where he'll sit beside Bud Hopkins and the charity he just founded to finance his research.
He was interrupted at last when a middle-aged man with immaculate hair stepped forward, rubbing his thumb. The fellow only knew that he had been watching the surgery video, and the next morning, he had wakened with a pain he didn't understand.
"Watch it come up right here," he said, rubbing harder. "I push on it, and it gets redder and redder and then becomes a triangle."
The chief investigator leaned over and investigated the man's thumb. Yeah, could be something was in there all right, but he would a need a thumb X-ray to know for sure. He gave the name of a chiropractor who does that sort of thing.
"You just say, 'Derrel sent me,' and he'll smile at you and say, 'Come on in.'
