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her "the best psychic in the U.S.") as prophesying an imminent change in our understanding of UFOs, "and it will bring great benefit to Mankind," she says. According to an interview with Dixon published in May 1974, the UFOs are flown by women pilots and come from a planet located beyond Jupiter but still undiscovered: "The people in the UFOs are interested in us, but have avoided contacting us until now because we have not been mentally a0 ready." As a society, we are developing a great thirst for contact with superior minds that will provide guidance for our poor, harassed, hectic planet. I think we may be ready to fall into a trap, perhaps a kind, benevolent pitfall. I believe that when we speak of UFO sightings as instances of space visitations we are looking at the phenomenon on the wrong level. We are not dealing with successive waves of visitations from space. We are dealing with a control system. The thermostats that regulate your house temperature summer and winter are an example of a control system. In summer, a thermostat allows the air to get warmer until a certain limit is reached, and then the cooling system is triggered. But in winter, when the outside atmosphere turns cold and the temperature drops below another limit, a different mechanism, the heater, comes into play and warms the house. A naive observer might try to explain all this by assuming that warm is "good" and cold is "bad." He or she would be right half the time. Another naive observer of the opposite school might take a reversed view and decide that warm is "evil." He or she would also be right half the time. To understand the whole phenomenon one needs a grasp of the control concept, and one must be ready to understand that it needs two opposite principles for its function. I propose that there is a spiritual control system for human consciousness and that paranormal phenomena like UFOs are one of its manifestations. I cannot tell whether this control is natural and toto tro ad ta c , c 1 14 cola spontaneous; whether it is explainable in terms of genetics, of social psychology, or of ordinary phenomena — or if it is artificial in nature, under the power of some superhuman will. It may be entirely determined by laws that we have not yet discovered. I am led to this idea by the fact that, in every instance of the UFO phenomenon I have been able to study in depth, I have found as many rational elements as absurd ones, as many that I could call friendly as I could call hostile. This is what tells me that we are working on the wrong level. And so are all the believers, and this definitely includes the skeptics, because they believe they can explain the facts as strongly as the most enthusiastic convert to Ms. Dixon's vision of Jupiterian Amazons! There are ways to gain access to the reference level of every control system. Even a child, if smart or daring enough, can climb on a chair, change the dial of a thermostat, and elicit a response. (The response in question might be a sound spanking from his father, of course. The road to higher knowledge has such accidents.) It must be possible to gain access to the control of the UFO phenomenon, to forget the spirits and the pranks and the claims of extraterrestrial contact, and do some real science. But it will take a very smart approach — and a very daring one. Psychologist B. F. Skinner has shown under what conditions an organism reacting to an external phenomenon /earns a new behavior. We also know under what conditions this learning is irreversible. These conditions are precisely similar to the pattern that the UFO phenomenon has been following over the years — intense activity followed by quiet periods when it seems to have gone away entirely. Is it trying to teach us something? With every new wave of sightings, the social impact becomes greater. More people become fascinated with space, with new frontiers in consciousness. More books and articles appear, changing our culture in the direction of a new image ec of man. Skinner has been working for half a century to study behavior and the process of modifying it. His experiments, which are hotly debated, have centered on observations of rats, pigeons, and other animals placed in reinforcement situations. (I am indebted to Mr. Fred Beckman of the University of Chicago and to Professor Douglas Price-Williams of UCLA for the suggestion that these A Schedule of Reinforcement