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184 aliens' plans. Why worry about threats from other countries when a much more ominous threat cruises right above us? With the drop in the value of defense stocks would come similar drops in the value of stocks of hundreds of firms doing defense-related work, especially in research and development. A stock market crash of epic proportions is easy to envision, and would be followed by the layoff of hundreds of thousands of blue-collar and white-collar employees and the rapid failure of all sorts of service and support businesses. A deep depression could well follow in a very short time. This alone could be keeping the U.S. government (in concert with others) from releasing the news of the existence and na- ture of UFOs. What president would want to go down in his- tory as the space-age Herbert Hoover, with the blame for a financial catastrophe on his record? Of course, if the news could be let out slowly, so that the economy could adjust to the new demands a little at a time, then a deep crisis might be averted. But, as we have suggested, the chances of pacing the release of information may not be very good. Even if the financial situation could be controlled, there are other elements in our culture that might not react as well. Religion, for example. How would the major organized reli- gions react to the presence of aliens in our midst? No doubt many of them would immediately claim the aliens as their own, convinced that living, intelligent beings from anywhere must have come to the same conclusions on matters of philoso- phy and dogma as they had. But what if the aliens practice a religion closely resembling one familiar religion and thus reject all the others? Or if they practice a religion bearing absolutely no similarity to any of Earth's major or minor religions, and thus reject all of ours? Or if their lives include nothing that bears the slightest resem- blance to religion at all, and thus reject the very idea of religion and of a supreme being? For that matter, what if they had gone through a period of Earthlike religious behavior and then past it to a nonreligious life that clearly suited them better? Would religious leaders accept this maturely, or would they CRASH AT CORONA