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afford long to ignore the apparition in the sky of objects that defy the laws of its physics and the performance of its rocket planes. Within a few years, the advanced countries will place on this problem, openly or in secret, their best physicists, their best intelligence specialists, their best computer scientists. As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, the Star Wars defense project makes a study of UFOs a top-priority task. But our scientists may be powerless to utilize their expertise, because the phenomenon fits none of the usual categories. UFOs cannot be analyzed through the standard research techniques, if they are the means through which man's concepts are being rearranged. All we can do is trace their effects on humans, and hope that we will eventually stumble on some principle that explains their behavior. What is the variable being controlled in this control system? Thermostats control temperature; gyroscopes control the direction in which a rocket flies. What could a paranormal phenomenon control? J suggest that it is human belief that is being controlled and conditioned. My speculation is that a level of control of society exists which is a regulator of human development, and that the UFO phenomenon should be seen at this level. What would this explain? It would certainly explain why there is no overt contact. Direct contact would preclude genuine learning. It also explains some of the statements made by ufonauts ("you should believe in us but not too much"; "you will not speak wisely about this night"). It explains the absurdity of many cases, where reactions to the phenomenon may have been evoked in terms of nonverbal consciousness rather than in "logical" terms. This would explain why so many witnesses are incapable of finding words to describe what they have seen. And it would explain the sexual and genetic aspects, which reinforce the signal by encoding it with the most powerful emotions of which men and women are capable and with the violation of human taboos. The same idea was arrived at independently by two Soviet science fiction writers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, in their delightful novel Definitely Maybe. Faced with a series of weird coincidences and absurd communications aberrations, a group of scientists theorizes that without suspecting it, we've tread on the corns of some super-civilization and it has decided to regulate our progress as it sees fit. Vecherovsky introduced the concept of the Homeostatic Universe: "the universe retains its structure,” that was his fundamental axiom. When I speak of a spiritual control system I do not mean that some higher supercivilization has locked us inside the constrains of a space-bound jail, closely monitored by entities we might call angels or demons. What I do mean is that mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual trends have no real power. At that level, time frames are long and evolution is slow. Mass media, which are designed to give split-second images of transient noise (the noisier the better), miss this signal entirely. A society with an attention span of minutes (the interval between two TV commercial breaks) can have no concept of events that began when my grandfather was not yet born and will end after my grandson dies. But there are such long-term changes. They dominate the destiny of civilizations. Myths define the set of things scholars, politicians, and scientists can think about. They are operated upon by symbols, and the language these symbols form consistutes a complete system. This system is metalogical, but not metaphysical. It violates no laws because it is the substance of which laws are made. The theory does not explain how UFOs are made to appear to us, although it gives support to one idea about them: that they are constructed both as physical craft (a fact which has long appeared to Myth and Civilization But another scientist in the novel has a different theory: