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And at one point, in a hauntingly beautiful moment, one of the men took Schirmer to the large window of the ship, pointed to the deserted landscape around them, and said gravely: "Watchman, someday you will see the Universe!" If the occupants are so advanced, and do not want Schirmer to speak wisely of that night, why could he remember so much of it under hypnosis? Have they not anticipated this method of disclosure? Or could it be that some parts of the human mind are inaccessible to them? Could it be that their power is more limited than their actions imply? Could it be that someone, or something, is playing a fantastic trick on us? Perhaps you have had the opportunity to attend a magic show performed by an excellent master of that remarkable profession. He produces before you, under impossible conditions, a phenomenon that is clearly unexplainable. But then he appears to realize how disappointed the audience is. Indeed, everyone feels almost insulted by the preposterousness of his performance. There must be a simple explanation, an obvious trick! You do not find it.... Then the magician explains everything: the table tops was hollow, the cane was made of small sliding sections that collapse into a different shape. Now you have understood everything, you kick yourself for not immediately percieving such a simple solution. You leave the room with a warm feeling of gratefulness and a certain amount of pride: "I am not so stupid after all. This performer hasn's had me fooled for long!" As you get home, new doubts begin to creep into your rational mind. You obtain all the objects necessary for accomplishing the same trick by the simple method so nicely laid bare before you just an hour earlier; and then you realize that the exp/anation itself is impossible, that the magician never told you the real technique! The UFO phenomenon enjoys the same recursive unsolvability. It leaves indices behind, but they seem to be even more maddeningly misleading than the witnesses' accounts. The phenomenon negates itself. It issues statements and demonstrates principles where some of the information conveyed is true and some is false. Determining which is the true half is as an exercise left to the investigator. In another relevant case the main witness was fooled by sociologists; the believers were fooled by alleged spacemen calling themselves the "Guardians"; the public was fooled by the believers; and the sociologists may have been fooled by the phenomenon itself! Contact with the group called the Guardians started when a midwesterner referred to as Mrs. Keech woke up one winter morning with a tingling or numbness in her arm: My whole arm felt warm right up to the shoulder.... I had the feeling that someone was trying to get my attention. Without knowing why, I picked up a pencil and a pad that were lying on the table near my bed. My hand began to write in another handwriting. Through the messages she got, this woman was gradually introduced into something she regarded as the realms of the life beyond, until one day she recieved a message of comfort from an "Elder Brother." As described in Leon Festinger's book When Prophecy Fails: I am always with you. The cares of the day cannot touch you. We will teach them that seek and are ready to follow in the light. I will take care of the details. Trust in us. Be patient and learn, for we are there preparing the work for you as a connoiter. That is an earthly liaison duty before I come. That will be soon. Mrs. Keech came to think of this as genuine "channeling" with higher entities and began telling people that amazing new knowledge was coming through. Soon a small sect formed in the midwestern city where she lived. One of the leaders of the sect was a "Dr. Armstrong," whose real name was Laughead, a man who later became involved in the Uri Geller affair. The Guardians gave The Phenomenon Negates Itself