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of reports about "the robots" and "the Martians." The consensus among UFO researchers in the 1960s, including myself, was that we were probably dealing with space visitors. The idea, at the time, was revolutionary. Scientists like Carl Sagan pointed out that space visitations, if they occurred at all, would be very rare. Other scientists, like Donald Menzel, rejected the whole idea, because even the nearest stars are too far away for interstellar travel to be feasible, even at high speed. Sagan's and Menzel's arguments are valid only if one assumes that their science has not superseded in any fundamental way the limitations of our own science, that they have found no means of propagating information faster than the speed of light, and that they are using the same concept of space-time as we are. In fact, we can make no such assumption about a space civilization. It could have had many centuries of development beyond our own science. Also, they ----VA LL 2 tea 2 ae The real question is, does the "spacecraft" hypothesis explain to our satisfaction the facts of the UFO phenomenon as we know them today? The answer is a definite and resounding no. The contactees and their friends will challenge this answer in many ways: "What about the messages we are receiving through 'channels' and through automatic writing, assuring us that the vehicles come from other worlds? What about our own observations of landings 1 in deserts and remote areas? What 1 oat Fi ta aoa on tau 1 1 wow 1 about the strange scars left on the bodies of the abductees who remember being medically examined aboard the craft?" And what about the evidence of the "star map" seen by contactee Betty Hill aboard the UFO that abducted her? What about the thousands of reports of landings that have been made around the entire world? Let us examine closely this so-called evidence. The first argument against the idea of flying saucers as spacecraft lies, oddly enough, in the large number of verified, unexplained sightings. In my own files I have selected approximately two thousand documented cases of close encounters from every country on earth, many of them involving occupants of various sizes and shapes. It may seem that two thousand cases in some twenty years is not a very large number, but we are talking only about the cases that were actually reported. It is possible to calculate how many landings this represents if, as the contactees claim, UFOs are spacecraft whose occupants happened to be surprised by witnesses who wandered onto the scene as the craft was being repaired or as the crew was conducting some exploration of our planet. To make this estimation we must take into account three factors: the time of the sighting, the ot a a te tad 21 tat 1 on probability that it will be reported, and the place of the event. Most landings are reported to take place after 6:00 P.M. The frequency distributions my computer studies have disclosed for every continent show this activity peaking at about 10:30 P.M., decreasing sharply after that time, and increasing again just before dawn. There are few reports after 6:00 A.M. What could this mean? That the activity of the objects is nocturnal by nature and by choice. Then why do the reports decrease in frequency around midnight? Simply because people go to bed: after 10:30 P.M. the number of potential witnesses is severely reduced. Then let us ask how many reports would we have if people did not go to bed but stayed outside to watch these so-called spacecraft. The answer is about thirty thousand. We would have to multiply the number of cases by a factor of fifteen, and the actual peak would then be between 1:00 and 3:00 A.M. Now, this last figure does not begin to approximate the actual number of events, because we know from many independent studies that only one case in ten ever gets reported. Then we should have not thirty thousand but three hundred thousand cases in our files! But this still isn't the whole story: most landings occur in unpopulated areas, away from dwellings. If the earth's population were distributed evenly instead of being concentrated in city areas, how many reports would we have? Again, taking a conservative multiplying factor of ten leads us to the staggering conclusion that the UFOs, if they are spacecraft engaged in a general survey of our planet, must have landed here no fewer than three million times in two decades! [I first reported this finding ten years ago in a paper could be a lot smarter. There Are Too Many Landings