Page Content (OCR)
216 REVELATIONS be left to underlings like Professor Silanov! For further comic relief the reporter went on to interview two American cult members from the Aetherius Society. Even the psychosociological explanations flourished once more: some media authorities interpreted the sighting by saying that traditional Russian imagination had always been wild and that the UFO story expressed the people's need for escapism, which had finally blown the lid off the system after long years of repression. The UFO research community did not fare much better: the Center for UFO studies in Evanston, Illinois, speaking through a vice president, stated flatly that it knew the answer. "I am certain this is a hoax," the man was quoted as saying in the October 11 issue of the Hartford Courant. He had thousands of "more reliable sightings" in his files that described the space visitors as being three to four feet tall with large heads and spindly bodies. "The reports are remarkably similar down to the smallest of details," he said, to such an extent that the Center now uses some little-known details of the aliens' anatomy as a test of the validity of the sightings. The tall occupants described in Voronezh did not fit the Center's patterns, and the case, accordingly, must be rejected. Such a position illustrates the dilemma into which American ufology now finds itself. No sinister manipulation of the researchers is necessary to throw them into confusion. In their eagerness to grasp onto a few tentative patterns, which they often reinforce by bombarding witnesses with leading questions under hypnosis, many researchers actually select the cases that match their preexisting expectations. This mockery of the scientific method can only lead to absurd results. While skeptical U.S. scientists and the true believers reacted with such flippant comments that are so characteristic of ignorance, it be- came obvious that not only the region of Voronezh, but a large part of Eastern Europe was in the grips of a major wave that ranked in impor- tance with the largest concentrations of UFO sightings ever reported. The French CNES, instead of jumping to hasty conclusions, took the trouble to call Dr. Silanov with a Russian interpreter on the line. The Russian professor verified the facts and added that a full-scale scientific