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the base. 164 REVELATIONS obtain secret firing codes, or simply to test the defenses. You suddenly see a helicopter flying low over the electrified fence in your direction. It has no running lights. What do you do? Presumably, you do your duty. You raise your machine gun and you start shooting. Now let us suppose you are a devout Catholic. Drifting over the fence is not a threatening engine of war with its rotor blades, but a beautiful image of the Blessed Virgin smiling at you and throwing rose petals to the ground. What are you going to do now? I don't know many Catholics who would swing that machine gun and pull the trigger. Let us go one step further. Presume that the object coming over the fence is neither a recognizable threat, nor an obvious religious entity like Our Lady, but a flying saucer surrounded with lights. Perhaps some alien creature can be seen through the glass dome. If you fire, you might start an interplanetary war. Most guards will hesitate before that situa- tion and request further orders. The resulting delay, seconds or minutes of elapsed time, may be all that is necessary for the invaders to secure Farfetched? Yes. But antiterrorist exercises in which the attackers disguised their craft as a flying saucer have actually been run more than once, and such tests of base security probably explain a fair number of the UFO sightings around missile silos that are so often advanced as evidence by the amateur groups and cited by one television documen- tary after another as proof that extraterrestrials are surveying our strate- gic assets. In most cases the base that is under simulated attack is never given the actual explanation for what happened, precisely because the test would be worthless if the target knew about it. I have received confirmation of the existence of such maneuvers from men who were trained in the penetration of nuclear plants and missile bases. But other reasons exist for the use of devices disguised as flying saucers in psychological warfare. One such reason is, very simply, the calibration of the judgment of the observers. In such a situation (where a real enemy might be tempted to use such a disguise), how would guards react? How would enlisted men, intelligence officers, pilots, policemen react? Would they still follow orders? What would the