Page Content (OCR)
only saw a bus: Near Bananeiras, Paulo had begun to show signs of nervousness, Elvio reported. He told him that there was a flying saucer accompanying them, when in fact what was following them was a bus which was keeping at a reasonable distance behind the car. Elvio added that the car had slowed down and stopped, and that he had come to the assistance of Paulo after he had fallen to the ground, behind the car, with the door on the driver's side remaining open. Elvio managed to get Paulo on his feet and started with him by bus toward Itaperuna, where Paulo was examined by the first-aid station. The police sent a patrol to the site and found Paulo's car on the highway. Elvio was unable to explain what had happened to Paulo and why the door was open. He did not remember when Paulo had gotten out. And he could not explain why they had taken the bus. The police found no trace on the car that could explain the wound on Paulo's arm. Some experiments with microwaves suggest that it is becoming technically feasible for sensory impressions to be projected into people's minds at a distance. Is this part of the technology that is involved in the UFO phenomenon? Here again we must ask: are we dealing with a technology that systematically confuses the witnesses? If so, it must be possible to duplicate it. If certain areas of the human brain can be remotedly stimulated, then it is not impossible to think of broadcasts literally saturating large territories with a flood of symbols. Such a technology could be an important factor in the confrontation with advanced psychotronic devices. Many descriptions of UFO phenomena force us to deal simultaneously with two categories we always attempt to separate: the physical (or technical) and the spiritual (or divine). Numerous witnesses, in their statements after a close encounter, claim bluntly that the experience of the phenomenon has a religious meaning to them. Perhaps it does. Perhaps we need not only a scientific breakthrough here but a consciousness breakthrough as well, a global, historical grasp of the beliefs — materialistic as well as idealistic — among which we have been groping for ten thousand years. Steven Spielberg capitalized on this idea at the end of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So did Whitley Strieber in his book Communion. But it has been captured in the most complete and most artistic form in John Fowle's extraordinary masterpiece, A Maggot, published in 1986. The famous apparitions at Fatima offer a historical example of the religious dimension of UFO encounters. The case is a celebrated one, yet I am prepared to wager that few Americans know the full story of what happened in 1917 near that small Portuguese town. I suspect that even fewer realize that the entire sequence of observations of an entity thought to be the Virgin Mary had begun two years previously with a fairly classical sequence of UFO sightings. If we accept the interpretation given of Fatima by the Catholic Church, we are dealing with a phenomenon that cannot be explained either as a physical effect or as an illusion. In its decision of 1930, arrived at after thirteen years of painstaking investigations by many scholars, the church states that: The solar phenomenon of the 13" of October 1917, described in the press of the time, was most marvelous and caused the greatest impression on those who had the happiness of witnessing it... mm: 7. The Spiritual Component: A Morphology of Miracles What Happened at Fatima This phenomenon, which no astronomical observatory registered and which therefore was