Man, but I miss the print edition of the Weekly World News.
Alien grave in Mississippi – Google Docs
Alien grave in Mississippi!
There is a corpse waiting to be dug up in Mississippi. It’s currently somewhere among the up to seven thousand corpses currently buried on University of Mississippi Medical Center property (said bodies dating back to the 19th Century, when the land was part of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum), and nobody at the moment is particularly looking for the corpse. Not that there’s much reason to, given that almost the only records involving the corpse were part of the batch of papers quietly burned by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton after Lincoln’s assassination. Including a 1863 handwritten memorandum by General Sherman reporting success in removing all details of the corpse from the asylum’s own records (a copy of this memorandum can still be found in Sherman’s papers at the Library of Congress, albeit physically misfiled among some papers from a 1866 diplomatic mission to Mexico that General Sherman had participated in).
As for the corpse: it’s quite interesting, really. Superficially, it appears human enough; conditions in the ground were such that it’s more or less a jumble of bones at this point. But the teeth are all wrong; and the larger bones are more subtly so, with an odd coloration about them that would make anybody familiar with exhuming long-dead corpses scratch his head. There’s enough hair and dried out bits left to get a DNA test (there is a tentative plan, or hope, to take DNA samples from as many corpses as possible, in order to aid linking the bodies to potential descendants), which will reveal that whoever this was had nonhuman genetics. And, judging from an analysis of the bones themselves reveals that the corpse, when alive, had a diet that incorporated trace elements not found in terrestrial biochemistry. And was also apparently seven feet tall, with yellow-green hair.
Naturally, finding records on all of this will be problematical, one hundred and fifty years later. Still, research into various physical archives will eventually track down anecdotal reports of a strange, seven-foot babbling madman that had been locked away in various madhouses throughout the 1840s and 1850s, eventually ending up at the Mississippi asylum (where he died in 1859). Some more research into the history of the asylum will lead to a general consensus that its records were ‘abominably violated’ by General Sherman in 1863 (unfair, but Southerners have perhaps been not always entirely objective on anything touching upon Sherman); and it is not impossible for the right people to get a good look at Sherman’s physical papers at the Library of Congress (the 1863 report will fairly glaringly stand out among the Mexico papers). And once the party has that, why, the report will lead them right to whatever secret, centuries-old government facility the GM might desire.
Whether or not it’s still occupied at that point is left for further development — as are the exact details of who the original alien was, why it ended up screaming its life away in a Mississippi asylum, why nobody came looking for it later, and what the US government still even remembers about the case. GMs know their own campaigns best, after all. One man’s proto-Green Lantern recruitment gone horribly, horrifically wrong is another woman’s secret history of interstellar espionage during the Millard Fillmore administration. I don’t believe in stifling creativity in others.