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logic." UFOs." 211 THE MYSTERY LINGERS an Air Force base and be so blatantly casual about security, even if he wasn't about to reveal to the world the secrets of the UFOs!" Yet even as this particular source faded into relative obscurity, an- other breathless informant popped up. He was a pilot from the Mid- west. He had a friend who was in the Air Force and who had an incredibly horrible UFO story to tell. Of course, his name was not available; neither was any verifiable fact, date, or location. . . . Then there is the revelation by investigative journalist Howard Blum, in his 1990 book Out There, that a certain Colonel Harold E. Phillips had convened a UFO Working Group at the Pentagon in February 1987. Giving the impression that he had uncovered the secret organiza- tion whose existence ufologists have suspected all along, Blum claims that Phillips gave instructions to keep the existence of the group a secret from the public and from government agencies. Its goal was to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life. The acceptance of these new revelations by the ufologists is another example of what psychiatrists call "a low capacity for spotting lapses in Blum's book (published by Simon & Schuster) is subtitled The Gov- ernment's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials and glosses over the fact that if such a working group had to be convened as late as 1987 to study the phenomenon—bringing together technical analysts who, judging by their reactions to the initial briefing, knew very little about the sub- ject—then the U.S. government must indeed have been very blind, stupid, or both, in the previous forty years. The key to the Phillips Working Group might be found in the very way in which the revelation came to light: Blum was approached by an NSA employee while he was working on a book about the Walker spying case. "There's been a lot of talk around the NSA about outer space. Weird stuff. UFOs." And the man continued: "They got some kind of all-star working group. A panel of hotshots zeroing in on Such a statement by an employee of NSA is about as likely as the Pope calling up Playboy to suggest they send a reporter to the Vatican to interview him about his sex life. Unless, of course, somebody at NSA