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176 REVELATIONS by definition, would be above suspicion of tampering? Should we con- clude that U.S. military communications channels may have been com- promised by one or more cults with extreme beliefs and with the willingness to exploit the naivete of the ufologists to further their own goals? Such an action would certainly throw a new light on everything we have said earlier in this book about UMMO and about other at- tempts to create and manage high-demand groups based on the belief in alien abduction. If the reader follows my line of reasoning to this point, then he is led to a final question: who could have the bizarre motivation and the highly compartmented knowledge to access an encrypted network and to target these six soldiers to send them on such an absurd mission? Was it an exercise of the same genre as Pontoise and Bentwaters, a project that played games with the gullibility of the believers in order to test the feasibility of deception within a vital element of the armed forces? And is the American public the ultimate target of that deception? After their release, three of the soldiers went straight back to Gulf Breeze. In a relaxed, casual interview they told a television reporter that they had never been interested in the rapture or the Antichrist. Every- thing was just a big misunderstanding. They had merely decided to come and visit a friend! Of course, if you are ready to believe that Mr. Ed was actually abducted by little gray aliens, then you might as well believe that six intelligence specialists will go AWOL just to go see a friend across the ocean. Perhaps they were simply homesick? But the tough questions cannot be swept under the rug. Why isn't anyone telling the truth? And why doesn't the Army reveal what was written on the precious com- puter disk the soldiers were carrying with them when they were arrested in Gulf Breeze?