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190 metals than any other planet in our own solar system, and possibly in the local neighborhood. The aliens may be staking out claims the way gold miners did in California and Alaska. They may even be staking out claims for materials we don't realize are important, just as prior to World War II we paid little attention to uranium, zirconium, and rare earths such as euro- pium and neodymium. Now they are considered valuable met- als, metals of commerce. Earth could also be a laboratory for alien psychologists studying human behavior, much as we study rats in a maze, or monkeys under special conditions, using one-way mirrors and tape recorders. In view of our own difficulty in understanding ourselves, imagine how much more fascinating we may appear to aliens. Some of the most peculiar behavior of UFOs (a disc flying with its broad side forward, for example, or flipping end- over-end) could be analogous to a professor shocking his psy- chology class with some seemingly irrational act just to see how they will react. It may be ego-satisfying to think that aliens visiting Earth must have some superspecial purpose, since their journey had to have been exceptionally difficult, dangerous, and long. But that would be as foolish as judging modern transatlantic flights by Charles Lindbergh's historic solo trip in 1927. From one brave man flying for thirty-four hours in a poorly equipped and hard-to-fly single-seater, we now have ten million people flying every year across the Atlantic in just six or seven hours. Many go for reasons which once would have been considered trivial but are perfectly acceptable because the trip is now so easy. If it took six months to get there, you wouldn't go to London for a weekend. If aliens have been flying between stars for scores of genera- tions or for millions of years, they could have as many reasons for coming to Earth as we have for going to New York City: good ones, bad ones, indifferent ones; personal ones, very pub- lic ones; immediate ones and long-term ones; happy ones and sad ones. Instead of trying to figure out what single purpose motivates aliens to visit here, perhaps we should be consider- ing a wide range of concurrent possibilities. CRASH AT CORONA