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142 Von Daniken was not alone; other authors have suggested that alien visitors influenced our past by granting knowledge that accelerated our development. Some find it difficult to believe that we could have arisen ae ned Levee ae MA nent bn nent tanh natn Alas ete eee from ape-like ancestors to create technologies and civilizations without outside help. Such theories reflect a low opinion of human abilities. Some people believe that extraterrestrials are resident on the Earth today, detectable only through physical and psychological profiling. Accord- ing to physicist Robert Ehrlich’s book Eight Preposterous Propositions, 45% of the U.S. population are in no doubt that extraterrestrial beings have been stalking our planet.’ Nearly all scientists reject this idea, asserting that there is no confirmed evidence of past or present extraterrestrial visitations to the Earth. None- theless, one physicist argued that there is a nonvanishing chance that very advanced civilizations are able to visit Earth, and that they might already be here.'"! This brings us to the most popular and most controversial image of contact. In many minds, speculations about interstellar exploration and colonization by another species are linked with the belief that some Unidentified Flying Objects are vehicles from other worlds. Direct Contact