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phenomenon to the media may not seem an integral part of the UFO problem, per se, but its effects loom large. The signal-to-noise aspect of the UFO problem is aggravated to a high degree because the signal is a totally unexpected signal, and represents an entirely new set of empirical observations which do not fit into any existing framework in any of the accepted scientific disciplines. One may even contemplate that the signal itself signals the birth of a new scientific discipline. I return to the out-of-hand dismissal of the UFO phenomenon by persons like Isaac Asimov, in part, because of the poor presentation of the data to such persons. This is an important facet of the UFO problem itself and must be taken into account if we are to make any progress with the study of the 1 signal. An analogy may be useful here: In the isolation of radium, Mme. Curie was obliged to work through tons of pitchblende to obtain a minuscule amount of radium. Yet there was no question of the signal in the “pitchblende noise”. The radioactivity of the pitchblende was unquestioned. Let us suppose that instead there had been a rumor - an old wive’s tale, or an alchemist’s story - that there existed a miraculous unknown element which could be used in the transmutation of elements, and which had miraculous healing powers and other exotic properties. Would any scientist, on the basis of such an alchemist’s tale, have done what Mme. Curie did to lift the signal out of the noise of tons of pitchblende? Hardly. Mme. Curie knew that there was a signal - it wasn’t a rumor. And although the labor was immense, there was a definite, scientifically accepted methodology for separating the signal from the noise. Now, in the UFO problem we did not know at the start that there was a signal - there were merely tales, unacceptable to scientists as a body. Only those of us, through a long exposure to the subject, or motivated by a haunting curiosity to work in the field and to get our hands dirty with the raw data, came to know there was a signal. We know that we cannot find a trivial solution to the problem, i.e., a common sense solution that the phenomenon is either entirely a matter of misidentification, hallucinations, and hoaxes, or a known phenomenon of nature, e.g., of a meteorological nature. We know that there exists a subset of UFO reports of high strangeness and high witness credibility for which no one - and I emphasize - no one, has been able to ascribe a viable explanation. But the Isaac Asimovs and the trained scientists, as well as large segments of the public, do not know this. And we cannot expect them to know this unless we present data to them properly and thus provide motivation to study the subject. We who have worked in the UFO field are somewhat in the position of Einstein who wrote to Arnold Sommerfeld i in response to Sommerfeld’s 1ooat es are tm. ena Author’s Letter to the Reader skepticism of the General Theory of Relativity: