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a scar or a mark. The authorities went to great extremes to find it and were usually successful: what normal individual doesn't have a scar whose origin is forgotten or unexplainable? Many of these alleged witches were tortured and burned at the stake. What does it all mean? Let us forget that the hypnosis, in the majority of cases, has been poorly performed, under the leadership of untrained practitioners or even of rank amateurs. Let us ignore the leading questions, the preconceptions about the answers, the extreme suggestibility of the witnesses subjected to such unscientific practices. The skeptics and the debunkers will have a field day with these obvious flaws, and for once I agree with them. But let us forget these problems and take all the material at face value. Do we obtain a picture that suggests extraterrestrial contact with advanced visitors? My answer is an emphatic no. I asked earlier: what kind of spacecraft pilots are these, if they still have to use maps to navigate? Now I have to ask: what kind of doctors are these, who need to induce such trauma in hundreds of patients to collect a little blood, a few embryos? Any doctor today can draw one cubic centimeter of blood without leaving a scar or a mark. From the analysis we could determine if the patient used to have a Siamese cat as a pet when he was six years old! Molecular biology, a science in its infancy, is already capable of providing incredible amounts of information from minute amounts of human cells. In vitro fertilization has reached a level such that the so-called genetic experiments allegedly performed aboard UFOs seem ludicrous and grotesque. The ufonauts should go back to medical school. Using the advanced paralyzing devices they possess, it should be simple for them, if they were an extraterrestrial task force, to raid the blood bank of any modern research hospital where they would also find collections of frozen embryos at various stages of development. And what kind of psychologists are they, if any amateur hypnotist can readily uncover from the witness the details of an abduction that was supposed to be totally erased from his or her mind? We have mind control 1 wou wWroo44an atao4 drugs that ensure permanent, selective memory loss. Wouldn't smart extraterrestrials know as much? In my view, the interaction remembered by the witnesses, if it was a real occurrence, should be treated at the symbolic level. It does not tell us anything about the extraterrestrial origin of the beings, and the idea that they must perform such experiments to enrich their race is merely another contribution to the absurd character of the entire phenomenon. Emerging fully armed into our local universe, the UFOs provide the physical support for our own dreams. We do the rest. Our brains erect a ladder of symbols toward the darkened skies where the strange machines hover, and we meet them more than halfway across the bridge of their strangeness — perhaps because we vaguely percieve that their irresistible, pathetic adventure is closely related to our own. But the extraterrestrial theory is not good enough, because it is not strange enough to 1 woe After forty years of puzzlement, we have plenty of data to document the impact of the UFO phenomenon on our society. We have only to look around us and examine the shift that takes place right now in human mythologies. We need only observe to what extent the subject of contact with extraterrestrial life has become fashionable. We are as likely to find mention of it today in the arguments of the scientists as in the statements of the fortune tellers. At one end of the academic spectrum, our radio astronomers suggest that we ought to listen to the stars to decipher in the galactic noise the possible murmur of newly born societies or the wise warnings of long disappeared cultures. Astronomer Carl Sagan, long a UFO debunker, recently published a novel called Contact. At the other end of the spectrum, Jeanne Dixon is quoted by a tabloid (which calls explain the facts. 10. The Control System Contact or Control