1. Ash Point, Maine: October 25, 2025 ASH POINT, MAINE OCTOBER 25, 2025 "People like to talk about UFOs when they talk about Ash Point," the sunburned man with the wild white hair said, facing the camera squarely but keeping his eyes downcast. "That''s nonsense. But the danger isn''t." His eyes came up, found the camera, and held it. "Instead of looking for trouble from another world," Abe Zimmer said, "folks would be well advised to look closer to home." "Love it," Charlie Goodwin said from behind the camera. "Perfect, Abe.
That''s gold." The old man''s stern face fractured into a smile that made his previous intensity seem imagined. "You sure? I never like seeing myself on camera." "That''s why you have me," Charlie said, and she paused the video and stepped away from the tripod on which her iPhone rested, facing the old pilot and the rusty, eight-foot-high chain-link fence behind him, which was adorned with weather-beaten signs warning away trespassers, promising criminal charges, and asserting the authority of the federal government. Beyond the fence was a long ribbon of runway, the only part of the facility that looked fresh, with unmarred asphalt, repaved every two years on the taxpayer''s dime. The handful of low-slung concrete buildings that flanked the runway were abandoned, their steel doors draped with chains and padlocks, the windows boarded up. Welcome to Ash Point, Maine, property of the Office of Naval Research. Charlie Goodwin, seventeen-year-old cinematographer in the making, hated everything about the place except for the stories.
Well, the stories and the view. If she turned away from the runway and the rusted fence, she''d be facing the breathtaking vista of the North Atlantic, waves breaking on granite ledges beneath a cobalt sky. Abe Zimmer''s tall tales were better than the view, though, and filming them helped keep Charlie, a Brooklyn kid from birth who''d been forced to move to rural Maine by her father less than six months ago, from losing her mind and hitchhiking home. She''d picked up 10,000 followers since posting her first conspiracy video. The public loved a paranoid old man, and Abe Zimmer looked straight out of central casting. "Ignore the camera," she instructed him. "Be natural: Let your eyes go where they want." It was more effective when Abe didn''t look into the camera.
He had the keen squint of the former pilot he''d once been. Watching that gaze flash around the desolate old base was by turns compelling and hilarious, as was the way he''d lower his voice to a dramatic whisper before asking a rhetorical question. "Should I start with the construction of the base?" he asked. "No, I want the story of the wreck. The anniversary is coming up. That''s when we''ll have the most views." Abe scowled. "You told me you were going to do a real documentary, like Ken Burns, not that TikTok shit that the communists want our eyes on.
" Damn it, why wasn''t she recording? That was a perfect line: she could see viewers jamming index fingers as they hit "Subscribe." "The social channels are samples for crowdfunding, Abe. You know this." He grunted, spat into the weeds. He was dressed in faded jeans and an olive T-shirt that said BUFF Brewing and had the silhouette of a B-52 soaring over a pint glass. Between the shirt and the windblown white hair, he couldn''t have been styled better, and she hadn''t even had to ask. Natural content--that was Abe Zimmer. "Yeah, yeah, funding," he said.
"Okay, so I just talk you through the wreck like you''ve never friggin'' heard about it?" "Exactly like that." He sighed, and she thought she was about to lose him, so she pressed: "We''ll finish in the taproom. Dad told me there''s fresh Tail Gunner on tap." "Well, let''s quit bullshitting and get on with it, then," Abe said. Tail Gunner IPA was what held Charlie captive to this place, although nobody had paid a dime for one yet. Her parents had been determined to turn their love of craft beer into a career. There were a few hitches to the plan. Foremost: Charlie''s mother was the brewer, and she was dead.
Her dad grasped the chemistry and had the formulas that her mother had left behind from years of study, but there was a difference between having your grandmother''s recipe card and her pie, or between holding blueprints and drawing them. Talent was not a chain-of-title possession. How did you explain this to your own grieving father? Not that Charlie hadn''t tried. Oh, how Charlie had tried. The whole idea was madness. No matter how wonderful the beer was--Charlie''s limited sampling suggested it was adequate but not exceptional, and her palate was already more refined than her dad would dare to consider--his chosen location was a clinical example of stupidity. Even in peak summer season, Ash Point was remote for tourist travel, more than an hour north of Bar Harbor and Acadia, a desolate peninsula in what was known as "Downeast" Maine, a reference that had something to do with the way wind currents carried sailors downwind and to the east even as they traveled north, into colder and emptier waters. It was there, on tall cliffs above those cold, empty waters, that BUFF Brewing was to be born.
Its success formula: cold beer and old planes. The "BUFF" in question was the B-52 Stratofortress, and Charlie Goodwin had been young when she learned that the nickname "BUFF" did not, in fact, stand for "Big Ugly Fat Fellow " but "Big Ugly Fat Fucker." Her mother taught her this. Dana Goodwin, maiden name Hightower, had been a military brat, growing up on Air Force bases, and her grandfather had achieved a moment''s notoriety for the inauspicious achievement of flying a B-52 right into the side of a Maine mountain. Oops! That had been the title of the first of Charlie''s TikTok and YouTube videos featuring the wreck site. The story of the B-52 had faded from the public consciousness in a blink, but it lingered in Hightower family lore. This generations-old tragedy was what led Charlie''s father, fresh off his own tragedy, to pack up his daughter and move to Maine. He was addicted to grief, not alcohol.
The potential brewery had been his wife''s dream, and why should a little thing like her death get in the way of that? Then kismet happened: Greg Goodwin encountered Abe Zimmer. In the type of plan that could only be formed while consuming alcohol, Greg and Abe agreed to a brewery and museum hybrid. The people would come for the beer, but they would learn of the forgotten heroes. It would have remained talk, as the geographic cure usually should, until Dana died and Greg began to blame the city itself for her death. He and Charlie left Brooklyn in June, arriving in Maine to impossibly cold weather for the first month of summer, and although Charlie was outraged, she strived for patience. She knew the move was born of heartbreak. She had tried to go along. She really had.
The videos were a lifeline, and her father didn''t appreciate them, because he thought they were making light of sacred history. But good news today: Greg was gone. Her dad was off for a brewing festival in Wisconsin, and that meant Charlie had the whole weekend to shoot. She wasn''t about to waste it. "Roll on three," she told Abe, counted three beats, then gave him a closed fist to indicate she was filming. None of this technique was real, but it sounded real, and that was all she needed to sell Abe on her legitimacy. He began to stroll beside the rusty fence and the freshly paved runway, moving quickly, his wiry frame seeming built for speed. He was shorter than Charlie, but he always swelled up and announced that he was perfect pilot height.
Those poor tall bastards can''t handle the g-forces like me , he would say. He was infinitely proud of his posture, and the ramrod bearing made him seem almost as tall as Charlie, who was five nine. "Date was October 28, 1962," he said. "Everyone was worrying about the shit going down in Cuba, but locals who were paying attention were also keeping an eye on Ash Point. Because, for a supposedly closed facility, it was awfully friggin'' busy. They''d added an electrified fence. You can still see the conductors." He pointed, and Charlie pivoted to capture the end of the lane that led off down the peninsula, the blues and grays of the coast tapering to dark layers of pines pressing close to the road.
"Now you tell me, why does the Navy add an electric fence and guard tower to a closed facility?" Abe asked. "Doesn''t take a detective to answer that question. During the Cuban missile crisis, this airfield was as busy as a New Orleans whorehouse on Mardi Gras." Thank you, internet gods , Charlie thought. You have smiled upon me. I can already see the merch. "Now, it had been Indian summer, about like you see today," Abe continued, striding ahead. "Clear blue skies, warm temperatures, the whole bit.
Then came the twenty-eighth, and the clouds started to come in. After the clouds?" He sneaked a glance at the camera, unable to help himself. "After the clouds came the plane," he said, voice dropping. "Tail number was 60-3730, but the name was the Loring Loonatic , spelled like the bird. They had the paint job on the cockpit, you know, to personalize the plane. The bomber was based at Loring Air Force Base in Aroostook County, near Limestone, up in border country, nothing around but hundreds of miles of forest, some owned by the timber comp.