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A great celebration in San Francisco: a thousand young people, the nucleus of everything psychic and countercultural in northern California, have gathered in a large auditorium. There are booths selling health food, cosmic advice, tantric yoga courses, and consciousness training. A colorful crowd pulsates through the aisles and fills the seminar rooms. The One World Family Commune of Berkeley runs a restaurant. It is directed by Allan the Messiah, wearing an impeccable red uniform and advertising the Everlasting Gospel revealed to him by the saucers. His information indicates that the earth is hollow, with the saucer people inside. "Do you really believe that?" asks a friend of mine. "Certainly," Allan replies. "If you were going to make a planet, would you waste all that good dirt?" I find myself on a panel with Dr. Andrija Puharich, Arthur Young, mathematician Charles Muses (Young and Muses are the two authors of an excellent book called Consciousness and Reality), and an Army scientist, Tom Bearden. Puharich describes his latest experiences with Uri Geller. Puharich explains to the audience that he gets messages on his tape recorder, coming from a mysterious cosmic source. But the tape vanishes regularly. There is nothing he can do to prevent it, and he is totally committed to the idea that he and Uri are now guided by a very high source of wisdom and that the only course for mankind is to place its destiny in "their" hands. The floor is given another speaker. Humanity, he says, stands on the brink of catastrophe, at the edge of a chasm. How are we to reach the safe side? A flying saucer hovers above the chasm, our only hope: "Do you want a lift?" asks the UFO, helpfully. This topic is a familiar one in the "New Age" movement. The 1987 celebration of the so-called "Harmonic Convergence" used similar themes. ati. fo 141n 1 ae 1 pub a ted, toe Salvation from heaven. Shouldn't we know something more about the helpful stranger before we jump on board? Shouldn't we make sure that the chasm is real, and that we cannot bridge it with our own resources? Cannot we reach the other side — our future — by our own means? When we are asked to suspend all our rational thoughts, to forget our "obsolete" critical faculties, to throw control overboard, then the time has come to take all the data and go away with it to a quiet place to think. My fear is that the problem will not be seriously studied by scientists until it has begun to generate a high degree of public awareness, and then the approach will be an entirely classical one: millions of dollars to consultants and research institutes, thousands of questionnaires, field investigators with glass bottles, sociologists filling out correlation matrices, medical personnel adjusting electrodes over the frontal lobes of ranchers. This would only be another wrinkle in the learning curve, another step in the conditioning. There is a strange urge in my mind: I would like to stop behaving as if I am a rat pressing levers — even if I have to give up the cheese and go hungry for a while. I would like to step outside the conditioning maze and see what makes it tick. I wonder what I would find. Perhaps a terrible superhuman monstrosity the very contemplation of which would make a person insane? Perhaps a solemn gathering of sages? Or the maddening simplicity of unattended clockwork? In the first part of this book I have tried to document, as fully and as carefully as I could, the historical record that leads to the modern UFO phenomenon and to the belief in alien contact. In Part Two we dealt with reports of abduction from various times and various countries and with a a 1 : the psychic and spiritual component of the contact experience. In Part Three we have built a case for aggressive new research while becoming sharply aware of the factors that inhibit such research: the triple coverup, the political motivations. We have come to realize that we are dealing with a genuine new phenomenon of immense scope. The UFOs are real physical objects. Yet they are not necessarily extraterrestrial spacecraft. To put it bluntly, the The Salvation Myth Conclusion: Exploring Other Dimensions