The Visitors

It looked like a big black box-perhaps fifty feet high, two hundred long. And it had settled squarely on forestry student Jerry Conklin's car, parked next to a fishing stream outside Lone Pine, Minnesota. The townspeople of Lone Pine were the first to see it—and one of them was the first and only human to shoot at it. He paid for his rashness with instant death. Within hours the press, the government and the public knew something strange had happened in Lone Pine and were beginning to face the incredible possibility that Earth now harbored something from outer space. A machine? An intelligent…