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| {{Infobox personnel|class=TOP SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-GREEN DOVE//NOFORN|name=John Arledge|rank=Major|service=CIA Directorate of Plans, later [[SPS]]|nation=United States|active=1959–1983|status=Missing, [[Operation LAST LIGHT]]|clearance=Class-A}} | | {{Withheld|marking=TOP SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-GREEN DOVE//NOFORN|clearance=Class-A|record=DETR-PER-1959-042|sar=SAR-GREEN DOVE|custodian=Directorate Command}} |
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| '''Major John Arledge''' assumed command of the Mount Qasioun site in May 1959 under Directive 10-5, and led the Antarctic breach two months later.
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| He survived the central chamber with total loss of vision through retinal cauterisation, where every other American present died of cerebral haemorrhage.
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| The 1960 assessment of him reads: ''Arledge failed because he looked into the glass and saw Hell.''
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| == The descents ==
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| Blindness made him the most valuable man the programme had.
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| [[Ark Chasm]] attacks through vision. Non-Euclidean geometry to induce vertigo, inverted iconography to invert the observer's foundational symbols, black glass which shows a man the worst thing he is carrying. A mirror does nothing to a man with no eyes.
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| From 1960 to 1983 Arledge went back down, repeatedly, under three successive programme designations, for twenty-three years. He learned the interior by touch and by count of paces, walked the corridor of calcified remains without a light because a light was of no use to him, and came back up and dictated what he had heard.
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| He is the only person who entered that place more than twice and remained employable.
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| == The reports == | |
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| The early dictations are auditory and tactile: surface texture, air movement, echo delay, the temperature gradient in the side tunnels.
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| From the mid-1970s the reports begin to contain '''colour'''.
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| He describes the ochre of the inverted trees. He describes the manner in which the burning haloes are inlaid rather than painted. He describes the quality of light coming off a surface which returns no light, and names its colour, and the colour he names does not exist.
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| Three medical reviews concluded confabulation consistent with long-term sensory deprivation. All three noted, in the margins rather than in the findings, that the descriptions matched a photographic survey he had never been able to see.
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| == End of service == | |
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| Arledge is one of the four personnel listed missing after [[Operation LAST LIGHT]], none of whom were inside the gallery at detonation.
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| He was sixty-one years old, medically retired for two years, and not on the manifest. He entered the complex on foot by a service route he had memorised in 1961. Nobody saw him go, because nobody was watching a corridor a blind man had been using for twenty-three years.
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| [[Category:Personnel]] [[Category:Class-A]] | | [[Category:Personnel]] [[Category:Class-A]] |
TOP SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-GREEN DOVE//NOFORN
RECORD WITHHELD
A record exists under this title. Its contents are not available at your clearance.
REQUIRED CLEARANCE: Class-A
RECORD ID: DETR-PER-1959-042
COMPARTMENT: SAR-GREEN DOVE
CUSTODIAN: Directorate Command
Access attempts against this record are logged against the requesting account.
TOP SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-GREEN DOVE//NOFORN
