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189 DEATH OF AN ASTRONOMER ments like “all the people I tell this to meet with untimely ends. In two years you'll be dead as a doornail." He scribbled some marginal notes in her copy of The Philadelphia Experiment before disappearing again, as drifters and bums are wont to do. But he offered no new explanation of what he had seen. Somebody used the Philadelphia Experiment, and the Roswell inci- dent, to promote an absurd, yet seductive and powerful myth: extrater- restrial aliens had landed on earth and were cooperating with our governments. The hoax of Majestic 12 had its roots in the distortion of the facts in Philadelphia, which played a role in the despair and eventually the death of Jessup. The net result in both cases has been to steer research- ers away from genuine UFO reports. And the process continues today. After forty years of accumulating observations, rich with physical and psychological data, the world is still waiting for the first objective study, for the first unbiased examination of the evidence.