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a good look at the landing gear could well inspire a smart savage to invent the wheel! Such is our position with respect to UFOs. Are they real? Why do they seem to violate the principles of our physics? And why are they interacting with us? While the minds of many scientists are closed to the unknown, a few of us believe that these questions are very much open. They provide one of the most exciting challenges ever presented to science, to our collective imagination, to human reason. I do not have the answer to the mystery, but I do have a great deal of relevant data. Much progress has been made in the last several years, and in my own work I have come to think of the UFO problem in terms of three distinct levels. The first level is physical. We now know that the UFO behaves like a region of space, of small dimensions (about ten meters), within which a very large amount of energy is stored. This energy is manifested by pulsed light phenomena of intense colors and by other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The second level is biological. Reports of UFOs show all kinds of psychophysiological effects on the witnesses. Exposure to the phenomenon causes visions, hallucinations, space and time disorientation, physiological reactions (including temporary blindness, paralysis, sleep cycle changes), and long-term personality changes. The third level is social. Belief in the reality of UFOs is spreading rapidly at all levels of society throughout the world. Books on the subject continue to accumulate. Documentaries and major films are being made by men and women who grew up with flying-saucer stories. Expectations about life in the universe have been revolutionized. Many modern themes in our culture can be traced back to the "messages from space" coming from UFO contactees of the forties and fifties. The experience of a close encounter with a UFO is a shattering physical and mental ordeal. The trauma has effects that go far beyond what the witnesses recall consciously. New types of behavior are conditioned, and new types of beliefs are promoted. Aside from any scientific consideration, the social, political, and religious consequences of the experience are enormous if they are considered over the timespan of a generation. Faced with the new wave of experiences of UFO contact that are described in books like n tr. oo mn nr Cubs paws gd 1 Communion and Intruders and in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, our religions seem obsolete. Our idea of the church as a social entity working within rational structures is obviously challenged by the claim of a direct communication in modern times with visible beings who seem endowed with supernatural powers. This idea can shake our society to the very roots of its culture. Witnesses are no longer afraid to come forward with personal stories of abductions, of spiritual exchanges with aliens, even of sexual interaction with them. Such reports are folklore in the making. I have discovered that they form a striking parallel to the tales of meetings with elves and jinn of medieval times, with the denizens of "Magonia," the land beyond the clouds of ancient chronicles. But they are something else, too: a portent of important things to come. Today there are many reasons for expecting a change in attitudes toward alien intelligence. Our national scientific effort has temporarily run out of objectives that can capture the public's imagination and enthusiasm. The eager anticipation of encounters with other intelligent beings would help in transcending local conflicts on this earth and in achieving within a single generation behavioral changes that might otherwise take hundreds of years to complete. If this is the contribution of the UFO phenomenon, then we are in fact dealing with one of history's major transitions.