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These witnesses have had a real, traumatic experience. They are weakened by it and ready to believe any explanation provided to them by someone in authority. Under the highly suggestible state created by hypnosis we can easily convince them of any half-baked interpretation of the phenomenon. This process is unethical and certainly unscientific. In a few cases (like the Hill episode) when hypnosis was used carefully, under medical supervision, and without leading questions, what was the outcome? We learned nothing useful about extraterrestrial life. But we learned that our current concepts of space and time were wrong; that a larger reality, other dimensions, existed; and that the time had come to challenge our current views about the universe. Let us speculate even more boldly. The subject invites many troubling, fundamental questions. If energy and information are related, why do we only have one physics, the physics of energy? Where is the physics of information? Is the old theory of magic relevant here? Are the writings of Paracelsus, with his concept of "signatures," a neglected source of inspiration? Until these questions are explored, it may be impossible to address what French physicist Costa de Beauregard calls "the truly fundamental problem," that of the relationship between psyche and matter. Even if we consider only the operational aspects of a piece of information, if someone learns something from it, physical theory dictates that the entropy of the universe must have changed. These are highly speculative questions. But at a time when we are beginning to suspect that ancient challenges are brought to light by high technology, creative speculation is necessary. Can a path be found toward realities that are not situated on faraway planets, but are right around us, outside our normal consciousness? Is this what happened to abductees like Helen and Kathy, or Travis Walton? Rather than a physical occurrence inside a spacecraft, did they experience a temporary translation of their consciousness into an altered reality followed by visions of archetypal creatures? Is it possible to promote coincidences and peculiar effects of apparently paranormal nature by creating physical structures shielded from everyday noise and serving as informational singularities? If the world around us is a world of informational events, the symbolic manifestations that surround UFO reports should be viewed as an important factor. If we regard the physical world as an associative universe of informational events, consciousness is no longer simply a local function in the human brain. Instead, I propose to define consciousness as the process by which informational associations are retrieved and traversed. The illusion of time and space would be merely a side effect of consciousness as it traverses associations. In such a theory, apparently paranormal phenomena like remote viewing and precognition would be expected, even common, and UFOs would lose much of their bizarre quality. These phenomena would be natural aspects of the reality of human consciousness. I submit that reports of alien "contact" must be studied at this level, even if we are a long, long way from being able to channel our speculations into the formal equations of anew physics. For many years, UFO phenomena have served as a support for human imagination, a framework for human tragedy, a fabric of human dreams. We react to them in our movies, our poetry, our music, our science fiction. And they react to us. They are not trying to communicate with a few individuals, with any group, with any government. Why should they? The phenomena function like an operational system of symbolic communication at a global level. There is something about the human race with which they interact, and we do not yet know what it is. They are part of the environment, part of the control system for human evolution. But their effects, instead of being just physical, are also felt in our beliefs. They influence what we call our spiritual life. They affect our politics, our history, our culture. They are a feature of our past. Undoubtedly, they are part of our future.