Shadows of Reality

About the Book

Christmas Day, 3:00 a.m., December 25, 2015

The final chapter in man’s search for truth began with a single event that took place in the wee hours of Christmas morning, 2015.

A crippling blizzard of epic proportion had blanketed the entire northeastern corridor with an opaque shroud of ice and wind-driven snow. All ground and air transportation was at a complete standstill as residents throughout the Atlantic coastal area hunkered down in their homes awaiting a reprieve from nature’s fury.
This explains why Ray Hodges was fast asleep at his desk in the air traffic control tower of Dulles International Airport. After doing absolutely nothing for the past six hours, he was bored stiff and had planned to rest his eyes for only a moment.
Forty-five minutes later, Hodges was awakened by a high-pitched alarm warning him of an incoming bogey. The aircraft’s radar signature was that of a TWA Constellation, a prop-driven plane that he had not seen since the early 1960s. The anonymous intruder was flying dangerously close to the high value targets in Washington DC, and Hodges was required to establish immediate radio contact with the inbound aircraft. Using multiple radio frequencies, he tried to hail the pilot, with no response. This perilous situation prompted an urgent call to the Strategic Air Command at Andrews Air Base, and within minutes of notification, a squadron of F18 jets had surrounded the aircraft. The team leader contacted Hodges and reported that he too was unable to communicate with the pilot. Then the pilot said something that made Hodges’s skin crawl.
“Dulles, there seems to be multiple objects protruding through the fuselage of the plane. Understand the visibility up here is marginal, but those objects look a lot like body parts.”
Hodges instantly felt a gnawing pain centered in the pit of his stomach.

Thus began one young man’s journey into the crypts of the unknown. It was a place where all reality was an illusion.

About the Author

Dr. Stephen Berberich is a retired interventional cardiologist with extensive training in the sciences. He is a graduate of Georgetown College and Georgetown Medical School. Dr. Berberich began an internship at the University of Pittsburgh and then moved on to a medical residency at Georgetown University Hospital. He finished his medical training with a cardiology fellowship at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Berberich is the lead author on the first published review of Post Exercise Echocardiography. This test subsequently became one of the gold standards for the early detection of coronary artery disease. In 1974, Dr. Berberich moved from the Boston area, where he was chief of Cardiology at the Boston Naval Hospital, and came to southern California where he continued in the private practice of Cardiology until his retirement in 2004. Dr. Berberich is married and has three grown children. Just like Michael Crichton and Robin Cook, after 40 years in the fields of science and medicine, Dr. Berberich acquired the background that enabled him to explore the mind-bending possibilities suggested by Rebecca Cann’s seminal work on mitochondrial DNA and its relationship to the evolution of man. The novel comes as close to reality as Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” and Cook’s “Coma”.