It is not possible for there to be a more provocative or intimate intrusion. If, as seems clear, we cannot control the visitors in any way, then we human beings must create among ourselves a community of support. The only lasting damage I can find has not to do with any direct side effects of the visitors' activities, but with people being isolated with their experiences because of the indifference or incomprehension of competent scientific professionals.
The fact that respected public institutions such as the government and the scientific and medical establishments do not. consider this a real problem hurts people, and hurts them badly. The lack of social support irrevocably isolates them when they need help the most.
When they read false debunking stories or see others like themselves made the butts of jokes in the press, they are in effect assaulted a second time by their own society.
Cornell University professor Dr. Carl Sagan has stated many times that there is no evidence that unidentified aerial objects-and presumably visitors exist. To be precise, there is no publicly acknowledged physical artifact. The large body of encounter memories. some heavily freighted with imagination, others more sparse, amount to an artifact of something.
And there is a substantial body of carefully authenticated photographic evidence of the devices themselves that is very hard to refute in any way except on an emotional level. Of course, there are also liars who claim contact, and faked photographs — some of them skillfully faked.
It appears that there is more than a shred of evidence that there are visitors here, and that they are doing something that involves its. It is also obvious from their secrecy that they want very much to hide. Can it be that the government is inadvertently helping them do this, or even that they have somehow compelled it to act as it does? Certainly the combination of visitor and government secrecy has led to profound public confusion. We do not know what is going on There is no publicly available reason to conclude that our earth is the object of visitation, or to support any of the other hypotheses that have been advanced. Indeed, any such assertions would be premature.
Maybe the visitor experience is what happens when the human mind looks into the mirror. . . and discovers that its own reflection is not only real but fearful to see.
Something is here. But what? And from where?
We come at last to the essence of the mystery.
Ancient Future
The first instance of an official attempt to explain flying disks, oddly enough, is not American. In Japan, General Yoritsune observed while on maneuvers that there were mysterious lights swinging and circling in the southern sky. The visitation continued through the night. In the morning the general ordered a group of scientific investigators to determine what had caused the strange disturbance. After consultation they announced that "it was only the wind making the stars sway." They are to be forgiven the profundity of their confusion, for the date of this occurrence was September 24, 1235, 751 years ago.
More recently, the distinguished Harvard astronomer Dr. Donald Menzel, in his 1953 book Flying Saucers, explained that a major sighting, carried out by professional observers with good equipment, was "an atmospheric lensing effect." According to navy physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, critical errors were made by Dr. Menzel in comparing his own tensing theory with the data reported observers. Specifically, the angle at which the observation took place was too great to allow Tensing, even under Dr. Menzel's hypothesis. However, in his discussion of the sighting, Dr. Menzel did not mention the angle actually reported but assumed it was one at which it might have been possible to observe lensing.
The observation I refer to occurred at 10:30 A.M. on April 24, 1949, and was made by Mr. Charles B. Moore and a group of U.S. Navy trainees observing a weather balloon with a theodolite. Mr. Moore observed both an unidentified object and the balloon at the same time.
He noted the azimuths and elevations of the object as it moved, and it was noted that the azimuths changed by about 190 degrees during the sixty-second sighting, and that the central angle between the initial and final sightings was 120 degrees. This information was filed with the Navy Special Devices Center.
I found that Dr. Menzel's description of the sighting in Flying Saucers is not the same as in the report. He claimed that what the observers saw was a mirage of the balloon, appearing at first above the balloon and moving straight downward until it was below and to one side of the balloon. But the report clearly states that the object appeared at first so near the balloon that Mr. Moore initially thought it was the balloon. The balloon remained in place while the object moved off to the north.
Dr. Menzel was well aware that a mirage cannot appear at a large angle away from the object that is the source of the mirage. In the appendix to Flying Saucers, Dr. Menzel calculated that the largest angle between the balloon and its mirage would be no greater than one fourth of a degree. But Moore's measurements were far different from that: To make the mirage theory stick, Moore's measurements would have had to have been off by about a hundred degrees. Nowhere in his book did Dr. Menzel mention the actual sighting angles reported by Mr. Moore.
Seven hundred fifty years, and it's still "the wind making the stars sway." That is much of the explanation that has been offered for flying disks and related phenomena by those who are emotionally or intellectually unable to admit the reality of the mystery. It is not because they are bad scientists, not at all. To a degree some of them may be shaking hands with elements of the intelligence community that have hidden information about the phenomena, but this is mere conjecture at this point. A far more compelling reason for this irrational behavior is suggested by a paper presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969 by Dr. Robert L. Hall, professor of sociology at the University of Illinois:
"We might describe the body of scientific knowledge accepted at any given time and the people who bear that knowledge as constituting an unusually strong belief system which resists inconsistent items of knowledge even more powerfully than a layman defending his political beliefs .... The very strength of our resistance to the evidence on UFOs suggests to me that there is clearly a phenomenon of surpassing importance here."
Since that paper was delivered there has been added a new element, which is that of scientifically educated people with Fundamentalist Christian religious beliefs. These "scientists" have joined forces with the debunkers, even founding official-sounding 'skeptics' groups" that have Creationist motives.
The Institute for Creation Research has stated, "To date there is not one iota of real evidence in either science or the Bible that intelligent beings were either evolved or created anywhere in the universe except on earth. In any case, it is the planet earth which is the focal point of God's interest m the universe. There is no need to look, because there couldn't be anyone out there." The banality of this position makes it more pitiful than frightening, but there are competent scientists, such as Drs. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, who recently published a brilliant book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which elegantly states a similarly unsound case, albeit from a much more intellectually substantial viewpoint than that of Creationism. The weakness of even the most sound "man-centered" case is our striking lack of samples from which to extrapolate predictions. We have one sample, and one only: this planet. If we could observe conditions on, say, a few million planets, we might be able to make more viable predictions, as we would then have a sample base comprising at least a small proportion of the probable planetary matter in the universe.