The Strange Encounter — Jean Van Hamme

The two gentlemen-spies travel to America and take on a 177-year-old evil. Blake and Mortimer head to the United States to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding the discovery of a 177-year-old body, which appears to have died very recently. The body is that of a Scottish major, Mortimer's ancestor, who was leading a British military expedition to the US in 1777 when he was swallowed up by a strange, multicolored light-beam shining down from the sky. Blake and Mortimer fight men in black armed with green-laser guns and soldiers emerging from the past in order to save the Earth from complete obliteration.