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against me as I stood bracing myself against the wind. Before he could recover his poise to speak to me, I glanced elaborately at my watch and courteously, as if he had inquired the time of day, I stated, "It's exactly ten minutes of two," though it was actually closer to 4 P.M., and walked on. About half a block away, I turned and saw him still looking at me, undoubtedly still puzzled and bewildered by my remark. This is how Erickson described the incident that led him to the development of an unusual method of hypnotic induction which he later called the Confusion Technique. What had taken place? The incident of bumping into each other had created a context in which the obvious conventional response would have been mutual apologies. Dr. Erickson's response suddenly and unexpectedly redefined that same context as a very different one, namely, one that would have been socially appropriate if the other man had asked him the time of day, but even that would have been bewildering because of the patent incorrectness of the information, in contrast to the courteous, solicitous manner in which it was given. The result was confusion, unalleviated by any further information that would have reorganized the pieces of the puzzle into an understandable new frame of reference. As Erickson points out, the need to get out of the confusion by finding this new frame makes the subject particularly ready and eager to hold on firmly to the next piece of concrete information that he is given. The confusion, setting the stage for reframing, thus becomes an important step in the process of effecting second-order change and of "showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." Was the alleged UFO pilot trying to show the witness the way out of a similar maze? Is this confusion technique deliberately used to effect change on a major scale? Answering such questions could also help us to understand the strong resemblance that anyone who has examined the beliefs of esoteric groups could not fail to note between certain UFO encounters and the initiation rituals of secret societies. This "opening of the mind" to a new set of symbols that is reported by many witnesses is precisely what the various occult traditions also try to achieve. A case in point is the story of Jose Antonio, an enlisted Brazilian soldier in the military police of Minas Gerais and orderly to Major Celio Ferreira, who commanded at that time a Guard's Battalion. An investigation conducted by Mr. Brant Aleixo and published in The Flying Saucer Review (November/December 1973) disclosed that one Sunday afternoon in May 1969, Jose Antonio was fishing on a lagoon north of Belo Horizonte when he suddenly became aware of figures moving behind him. He saw a "burst of light" hit his legs and felt a numbness that caused him to drop his fishing rod and fall to his knees. He was seized by two masked individuals about four feet tall, wearing dull aluminum suits, who took him to a machine that looked like an upright cylinder. Inside this craft the beings gave him a helmet similar to their own, tied him up, and took off: The higher the machine seemed to rise, the more difficult did breathing seem for the soldier, and at one stage, in addition to his state of low morale, he felt as though his whole body was physically tired out, almost paralyzed. He felt more and more uncomfortable in this position, owing to the hardness and the shape of the seat, the numbness in his legs, and the weight of the helmet, the corners of which were bruising his shoulders and neck. After a period of travel that seemed "interminable," the machine landed with a jarring sensation, and the little men unfastened Jose Antonio. They put a bandage over the eyeholes in his helmet and After quoting this story, psychologist Paul Watzlawick comments in his book Change: The Case of Jose Antonio