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by the mysterious little men. In story after story, from North and South America and from Europe, the creatures are seen alighting from their shiny craft, picking up plants, and taking off again before amazed witnesses. Such behavior is well designed to make the investigators of such stories assume that the visitors are gathering samples with all the care and precision of seasoned exobiologists. Are we not, after all, designing robots that will continue analysis of the Martian surface begun when the Viking probe reached that planet? In a few cases, the visitors even take the time to interview the witnesses at lenght concerning agricultural techniques! Such was the case in a 1964 landing that, curiously enough, took place in Tioga City, New York, on the very day of the Socorro landing, about ten hours before Officer Zamora observed the egg-shaped, shiny object so familiar to us now. Gary T. Wilcox, a dairy farmer, was spreading fertilizer in his field. Some time before 10:00 A.M., he stopped to check a field surrounded by woods, about a mile away from his barn. He wanted to see whether ground conditions would allow plowing. As he approached the field, however, he saw a shiny object that he first took to be a discarded refrigerator, then a wing tank or some other aircraft part. When he drew closer, he realized that the object was egg-shaped and about twenty by sixteen feet, had the appearance of durable metal, and did not look like anything he had ever seen before. He touched it. It was not hot. He observed no door or hatch of any kind. And yet two human-like creatures suddenly appeared. They were about four feet tall and wore seamless clothing, with headdress and a full-face hood that did not allow Wilcox to observe any facial features. They appeared to have arms and legs. They talked to him "in smooth English," but their voices did not come from their heads, as far as Wilcox could tell, but from their bodies. "Do not be alarmed, we have talked to people before. We are from what you people refer to as planet Mars," they said. In spite of Gary's conviction that "someone must be playing a gag on me," the strange conversation continued. The two beings were interested in fertilizers and expressed considerable interest in their use. They stated that they grew food on Mars, but that changes in the environment were creating problems they hoped to solve by obtaining information about our agricultural techniques. Their questions were quite childlike, and they appeared to have no knowledge of the subject whatever. Each one carried a tray filled with soil. "When they talked about space or the ship, I had difficulty in understanding their explanations. They said they only travel to this planet every two years and they are presently using the Western Hemisphere," Wilcox reported. They explained that they landed only during daylight hours, "because their ship is less readily visible in daylight," and they said they were surprised Wilcox had seen their craft. They also volunteered information about space travel. Our astronauts would not be successful, they said, because their bodies would not adapt to space conditions. Finally, they requested a bag of fertilizer but, as Wilcox walked away to get it, the craft took off, disappearing from sight in a very few seconds. The witness left a bag of fertilizer at the place; the next day it was gone. In many of the South American landings, entities have been described walking away with soil samples, plants, even boulders. Everything in their behavior seems designed to make us believe in the outer-space origin of these strange beings and their craft. And, indeed, such absurd incidents have greatly influenced the researchers, including myself, who have seriously thought that the UFOs were space probes sent by an extraterrestrial civilization. On November 1, 1954, Mrs. Rosa Lotti-Dainelli, forty years old, was going to the cemetry at Poggio d'Ambra, Bucine, near Arezzo, Italy. A devout Italian woman, she was carrying a pot containing flowers. Her mind at that moment must have been far from science fiction speculation, yet what happened to her in the next minute constitutes perhaps the strangest of the entire wave of 1954 incidents. As Mrs. Lotti-Dainelli walked past an open grassy space, she saw a vertical, torpedo-shaped machine with pointed edges — a machine, in other words, shaped like two cones with common bases. In the lower cone was an opening through which two small seats were visible. The craft looked metallic. It did not resemble anything the witness had seen before.