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After some thirty years of research into this phenomenon, I have reached new conclusions. Tentative as they are, they shed light on the experiences of "abductees" and on the reluctance of professional scientists to analyze the facts. I believe that a UFO is both a physical entity with mass, inertia, volume, and physical parameters that we can measure, and a window into another reality. Is this why witnesses can give us at the same time a consistent factual narrative and a description of contact with forms of life that fit no acceptable framework? These forms of life, such as the small gray men seen by Kathy, may be real, yet a product of our dreams. Like our dreams, we can look into their hidden meaning, or we can ignore them. But like our dreams, they may also shape our lives in many ways. The phenomenon has made a significant impact in my own experience. On two occasions I have tracked some unknown objects, using small telescopes. A few of my astronomer colleagues made similar observations, and, after making inquiries, we became aware of sightings kept confidential by professional astronomers the world over. The objects we were tracking were not spectacular, but the reaction they elicited among French scientists fascinated me. Instead of asking if these seemingly maneuverable and "impossible" objects could be a manifestation of some advanced technology (and in some cases they may well have been terrestrial), they thought only of suppressing the records. They did this by denying every observation, by blaming it on airplanes or planets when the documentation was unassailable, and by destroying the data when it was demonstrated that no airplane could have behaved as the objects did. The insight I derived from this early experience with dogmatic scientific skepticism brought me into contact with professionals who, like myself, wanted to understand the nature of the phenomenon, and especially to determine whether or not it had an intelligent origin. This group has grown larger over the years. Whimsically, it calls itself the "Invisible College." Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the American astronomer who served for over twenty years as the Air Force's scientific consultant on UFOs, explained that name in an article called "The UFO Mystery," published in the F'B/ Bulletin (February 1975): Way back in the "dark ages" of science, when scientists themselves were suspected of being in league with the Devil, they had to work privately. They often met clandesinely to exchange views and the results of their various experiments. For this reason, they called themselves the Invisible College. And it remained invisible until the scientists of that day gained respectability when the Royal Society was chartered by Charles II in the early 1660's. My interest in UFOs has gone through several phases, but my curiosity has never been satisfied about the behavior of scientists who destroy, distort, or simply ignore the very facts they should investigate. Scientists are not the only ones to blame for the unfortunate stigma still attached to this subject, but such a gap has appeared between the academic position and the beliefs of millions of people that a reexamination of the entire problem is now imperative. We have, on one hand, the facts — thousands of unexplained observations by reliable witnesses. They stand as a monument to the limitations of our understanding. My book Passport to Magonia, published in 1970, contained a catalogue of 923 unexplained close encounters, and the size of this evidence is increasing daily. On the other hand, we have a paucity of theories to account for this richness of data. Either these encounters must be invention, delusion, hoax, and mirages, the experts tell us, or else we are being visited by an extraterrestrial race. I cannot subscribe to either explanation. I have argued for many years that the phenomenon could not be explained by hoax and illusion alone, that it contains an opportunity to obtain genuine new knowledge. In this section I hope to go a step further and show why these unexplained observations need not represent a visitation from space visitors, but something even more interesting: a window toward undiscovered dimensions of our own environment. The Invisible College