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mirages. 10 REVELATIONS wasted valuable time and jeopardized their careers in the pursuit of In Part Three, entitled "The Cobweb Correlation," I have tried to show that the fast-growing belief in alien contact may well contain the germ of more dangerous developments. The fact that the genuine UFO cases have been ignored by professional scientists, and that even the great mythologists of our time like Joseph Campbell have remained utterly blind to them, makes the phenomenon, with all its wonderful physical and psychic complexity, a convenient medium that can be sculpted with complete impunity by the manufacturers of alternative theologies and the professional manipulators of the human mind. All that can be said today about the genuine UFO phenomenon is that it involves human consciousness as well as physical effects in its manifestations. The study of such enigmas is what science is all about. But the line between belief in the reality of that phenomenon and the fascination with those who claim to control it, or to be in intimate contact with it, is very fine indeed. This book demonstrates how this fine line has repeatedly been crossed and what the consequences of the resulting delusions could be. More importantly, the UFO mystery holds a mirror to our own fantasies, it expresses our secret longings for a wisdom that might come down from the stars in new, improved, easy- to-use packaging, to reveal the secrets of life and tell us, at long last, who we are. In return, of course, for a modest fee, an easily affordable spiritual, social, and political investment. Why is it that in this process we are always told that we have to relinquish the right to interrogate the higher entities we worship? Why are we afraid to ask them who they are, and to demand what makes them so interested in teaching us, in frightening us, or in enlisting our help in the great cosmic saga of their allegedly higher endeavors? In the process of such interrogation we might well discover the ultimate hor- ror, as in the poem by Borges quoted at the beginning of this book: there may be no higher entities lurking in the maze after all, and no little grayish aliens with bug eyes in the morgues of the Pentagon. In the final analysis the labyrinth of our expectations may be empty, and it may require a completely different approach to solve the problem of detect-