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the universe summarizes the problem well. One of the sylphs believed the world had been created of all eternity. The other sylph expressed a theory closer to Islamic occasionalism: the universe is a world of events. This book you are reading is only an occasion of the book I wrote. Can you be certain that it is identical to all the other copies? The pen I am using to write these words is not necessarily the same pen I was using a minute ago; it may be a new instance, a new occasion of the same pen. ~ 1 Time and space may be convenient notions for plotting the progress of a locomotive, but they are completely useless for locating information. The apparent exception is the library, but anyone who has tried to find something in a modern library with its flat shelves along vertical walls will revognize the predicament in telling order from disorder in cartesian coordinates. Modern computer scientists have long recognized that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store a lot of data at high speed. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. It is much more convenient to sprinkle the records throughout storage as they arrive, and to construct an algorithm for retrieval based on some type of key word or on "hashing," a procedure where the record index is randomized. Probability serves as the link between something objective, the record location, and something subjective, the request for retrieval. The synchronicity and coincidences that abound in our lives suggest that the world may be organized like a randomized data base (the multiverse) rather than a sequential library (the four- dimensional universe of conventional physics). If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, the human brain may be traversing events by association. Modern computers retrieve information associatively. The user "evokes" the desired records by using key words, words of power. For example, if he requests the intersection of "microwave" and "headache," he may find twenty articles whose existence in the literature he never suspected. If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events. The philosophy we could derive from this line of speculation would be closer to Islamic occasionalism than to the Cartesian or Newtonian universe. And a new theory of information would have to be built. Such a theory might have interesting things to say about communication with the denizens of other physical realities, creatures of the multiverse. It might throw new light on the experience of the UFO abductees. Should we believe the witnesses who describe their experiences aboard UFOs? As I have pointed out throughout this book, there is no reason to doubt their personal integrity, their sincerity, and their honesty. The words of Dr. Simon about Betty and Barney Hill are still clear after twenty years: "The experience, undoubtedly, was real to them." Does this mean we should take their recollections literally? I do not think so. These events took place in a reality we simply do not understand yet; they had an impact on a part of the human mind we have not discovered. I believe that the UFO phenomenon is one of the ways through which an alien form of intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us sumbolically. There is no indication that it is extraterrestrial. Instead, there is mounting evidence that it has access to psychic processes we have not yet mastered or even researched. In the face of such interaction at the symbolic or mythical level, all the hypnosis sessions and the searches for implants may well be as futile as the questions of the inquisitors to the witches returning from the sabbat and the frantic search for the devil's mark on their bodies. Until we have much more evidence about the physical nature of the UFO phenomenon, I find myself repelled by the indiscriminate probing of the witnesses' minds by amateur hypnotists who believe strongly their particular theory of extraterrestrial visitation and are eager to obtain confirmation of it at any cost. Creatures of the Multiverse