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Understandably, this fanfare has made life in space a hotter topic than ever. The euphoria is likely to be soon enhanced by the two current Mars missions, which will predictably supply more "evidence" to fan the interest. The Mars Global Surveyor should reach orbital insertion in March 1998 and will begin mapping for one Mars year (687 Earth days) until January 31, 2000. This is intended to be the first of a decade-long program of the robotic exploration of Mars, called the Mars Surveyor Program. An aggressive series of orbiters and landers are planned to be launched every 26 months, as Mars moves into alignment with Earth. A second U.S. mission, the Pathfinder, is also on its way and is scheduled to land July 4, 1997. It is intended to land a small, 25 pound, six-wheeled robotic Rover ("Sojourner") for imaging and soil mechanics experiments. In the meantime, while the U.S. press slept and the scientific community focused on the possibility of ancient microbes from Mars, a number of well-documented mass sightings of unidentified flying objects have continued around the globe which have convinced multitudes of the reality of UFOs. On January 1, 1993, at 2:00 P.M., Mexico City became host to the most astonishing and best documented UFO event in recorded history According to numerous broadcasts' and published reports,’ tens of thousands of people (including police, military personnel, and ordinary citizens) sighted a silvery craft performing aerial acrobatics over the central portion of Mexico City in broad daylight. Radio stations were inundated by phone calls while television stations preempted their regular schedules to broadcast the event. Videotapes of the event showed traffic backed up on Mexico City's main thoroughfare, Avenida Reforma, as drivers and passengers emerged from their automobiles to get a look at the strange metallic disks.'° Later that day, at 3:51 and 5:21 P.m., two additional metallic, disk-shaped craft appeared and were also documented by local residents with camcorders. On January 2, 1993, every major newspaper and news pro-gram covered the event which reportedly lasted five hours. One of Mexico City's major newspapers, La Prensa, carried the head-line, "Astonishment! UFOs over the Capital." The event was also recorded by radar at the Mexico City International Airport." Incredibly, there was no reporting of this event in the U.S. press. This was not the first UFO event in the skies of Mexico in recent years. The Mexico UFO flap (a flap is a large number of sightings in a short time span) began on July 11, 1991, during the total eclipse of the sun that swept across the central part of Mexico. On that day, shortly after 1:00 PM., 17 unrelated individuals, in four different cities, armed with cam-eras and camcorders, documented a metallic disk-shaped object hanging motionless below the eclipsed sun. This event became the first "mass-photographed" daylight disk in history. Interestingly, many of the witnesses didn't realize they had photographed the disk until subsequent viewing of their tapes. Examination of the videotapes revealed a solid, metallic, "hockey puck-shaped" object with counterclockwise rotation. Since that time, researchers have collected more than 700 video tapes of metallic, disk-shaped UFOs observed in the skies over Mexico.'? More than 100 of the videotapes are day-light shots. In addition, many of these have been 10 THE DAY MEXICO CITY STOOD STILL