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previous year. But the fact remains that the coincidence between these works of imagination and the actual details of the reports that came from the public is a remarkable one, and it opens the way to 1 unlimited speculation. Knowledge of the structure of time would imply superior knowledge of destiny (I am using the word "destiny" to designate not the fate of individuals but the mechanism through which physical events unfold and the canvas upon which they are implemented). Before we go on to the question of the psychic component of the experience, perhaps I also should remind the reader of two points we have touched upon earlier: (1) the relativity of time in Magonia, a theory passed on to us in numerous tales we have reviewed; and (2) that astonishing little remark made by a sylph to Facius Cardan, which antedates quantum theory by four centuries: "He added that God created [the universe] from moment to moment, so that should He desist for an instant the world would perish." As Jerome Cardan says, "Be this fact or fable, so it stands." It is difficult for the public to tolerate a mystery that refues to die. When encounters with unidentified flying objects were suddenly reported all over the United States during the first half of October 1973, after seven quiet years, and when two men from Pascagoula, Mississippi, told their tale of abduction by grotesque robot-like creatures, the public recognized the return of a specter that science had pronounced dead and buried with great pomp just a few years before. The burial had been performed by the University of Colorado at the cost of half a million dollars, and the eight- hundred page postmortem had clearly stated that the study of UFOs "cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby." Professor Edward Condon, who led the study, felt so strongly about the uselessness of the whole thing that he destroyed the project files. Three days before his death, in March 1974, he was still urging a physicist friend to drop his study of UFOs. When Condon was told that a documentary was being prepared, he advocated that all the footage be burned. The Air Force subsequently closed down its own public relations office for the monitoring of sighting reports (Project Blue Book) with a similar declaration. When the sightings again filled the world press, it became clear that the subject of UFOs was as alive as ever. It was easy for flying saucer enthusiasts everywhere to exclaim: "We told you so!" But it was not easy for the witnesses to understand what they had seen. Ant it was even harder for them to forget it. Some never will. A husband and wife who drove a truck in the Midwest were fired from their job when they reported that an object had followed them along a Missouri road one October night, emitting a burst of light that blinded the husband (inducing some loss of eyesight) and caused the plastic frame of his glasses to melt. Like the Pascagoula story of robot-like monsters, the facts were unbelievable to local scientists who examined them out of the context of the overall phenomenon. Professor Condon had had the same problem. Incredibly, all the members of his team had been selected because they had no previous knowledge of the subject! Yet it is only when one analyzes the thousands of similar occurrences in the last forty years and in all countries that one achieves some 1 c 1 , " degree of understanding. During the 1970s, the report of paranormal events in connection with close encounters with UFOs seems to have become the rule rather than the exception, and most investigators have found it very difficult to deal with this aspect of the cases because it does not match their expectation of what an extraterrestrial visit would be. Such paranormal events might take the form of minor unexplained coincidences in which a man might have had a dream prior to the sighting (or answered a knock on the door only to find no one there, as happened to a policeman who later the same evening reported 6. The Psychic Component: Metalogic Return of a Specter