Acceptable fact pattern¶
The acceptable fact pattern is the phrase Rudy Giuliani uses when he orders the task force to produce a presentable official account of the first Radford case, after President Perot rejected the original reports.
| Type | Lore / directive |
| Aliases | cover story directive |
| Issued by | FBI Director Rudy Giuliani |
| Status | Standing order; the team is never shown delivering such an account |
| First appearance | Radford Horrors 01 |
Overview¶
At FBI headquarters, Giuliani tells the team that a number of people are missing near the site of one of their old cases and that the original FBI task force sent to investigate has gone AWOL. Perot found the classified reports from that investigation of unacceptable quality; former Director Sessions stood by them and was fired. The team become consultants under Special Agent Daniel Webster's operational authority, "strictly there for informational purposes", with two goals: first, establish what happened to the previous FBI team; second, "establish an acceptable fact pattern for the previous investigation" (Radford Horrors 01).
Andre restates the order in Radford Horrors 02 as the second of two priorities: find and recover the previous task force, and "determine an acceptable fact pattern for the previous case". In the same recap, Perot reads the intelligence from the team's last deployment ("What the fuck is this? This says it was like a giant bug."), Sessions answers "Yeah, it's a giant bug", and Perot fires him and appoints Giuliani (Radford Horrors 02). See Alternate history for the Perot administration.
Reception at the table¶
The players read the order as a cover-up. Dante guesses that Perot does not like reading "that it's fucking aliens and shit", while Ezra suggests that the original report may itself have been a cover story (Radford Horrors 01). Andre explains that Webster believes the team is "dirty as hell" and covered something up in Radford (Radford Horrors 01). In Radford Horrors 02 Dante sums up the first leads as a "secondhand, kind of hand-wavy cover-up" (Radford Horrors 02).
The order sits alongside the other official explanations met in Radford, such as the LA treatment cover story for the disappearances and the bleach-cleaned woods at the SEF fence site, which Kurt calls a professional cleanup (Radford Horrors 02).
Trivia¶
The phrase is used only in these two episodes. The team is never shown delivering a finished account, and it is never established whether Perot objected to the supernatural content itself.