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228 REVELATIONS theatre stage, not that of real participants in real operations. This leads to the key question raised by these revelations: if the rumors about autopsies and crashed disks have been manufactured out of whole cloth, who is responsible for this deception? And again, what could be the goal it is designed to achieve? Are persons like Bill English and Bill Cooper, John Lear and his major informer Robert Lazar, deliberately lying to us? Not necessarily. I lean toward the view that these men are sincerely convinced that what they say is the absolute truth. The urgency with which they want to communicate it skips over such niceties as facts, controls, and hypothe- ses. They sincerely believe they know the truth, the simple, horrible truth. And that sense of urgency is incredibly contagious at all levels of our society, from the old, lonely woman who picks up a tabloid at a supermarket in a small town in the Midwest, to the businessman who takes time out from studying a financial report by watching an interview of an abductee on television. As we reach the Millennium, the belief in the imminent arrival of extraterrestrials in our midst is a fantasy that is as powerful as any drug, as revolutionary as any delusion that marked the last millennium, as poisonous as any of the great irrational upheavals of history. The expectation of a Superior Race that swept away the intelligence of the citizens of Nazi Germany was inspired by a similar myth. So was the fear of witches that moved the upright and moral Christians of England, Germany, or Massachusetts to the indiscriminate killing of thousands of innocents. Yet the UFO phenomenon is undeniably real. It is annoying, consistent and tantalizing, seductive and secret; always just a fraction of an inch beyond our reach. And it draws much of its irrational power from the very experts who deny it. The rationalists, the smart astronomers who keep explaining away the universe on televised talk shows, the pundits of the human mind who think they are so clever that they can always analyze all the sightings in terms of sociological, mythological, anthropological, or psychological theory without bother- ing to interview a single witness. But if John Lear and others are telling the truth as they see it, what could have motivated the massive decep- tion of which they, like ourselves, are the victims?