        The night before his departure, he sat back in his recliner and nursed a beer.  He was completely emotionally and mentally drained.  The car was loaded, and everything had been double-checked.  He’d left a brief letter on the kitchen table just in case, along with a key to a newly-rented safety-deposit box: as hackneyed as that gambit was, he couldn’t think of a safer way to tell his story if he did disappear on this expedition.  Dale chuckled; given the History Channel’s relaxed standards as to what was history, he could just imagine Giorgio Tsoukalos holding out his hands—as if he held an imaginary globe in them—and whispering “aliens.”  Of course, these aliens weren’t ancient, and they hadn’t engineered the pyramids.