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232 REVELATIONS such a device might well have been brought down during a thunder- storm. Given the extremely high sensitivity of anything related to the bomb or to radioactivity at the time, it would have been a high priority, top secret task to recover any lost device of that type and to explain it away at all costs: as a weather balloon, as a radar test instrument, as a probe, or even as a crashed flying saucer. It would not have been difficult to plant an egg-shaped device in the desert to divert attention from the real debris, and even to scatter a few diminutive bodies to represent dead aliens. The Air Force had several days to do it. Perhaps the mysterious "team of archeologists" who were at the site when the first recovery troops arrived, and who have never been found again in spite of all the efforts made to locate them, were, in reality, the specialized workers who planted the fake disk and the fake bodies, miles away from the primary crash scene? I am not very disturbed by the fact that the material found at Roswell was strong and nearly indestructible, as tested by the farmers and some of the military men. Material that can be hit with a sledgehammer without damage, yet will remain flexible and will not burn, is not beyond modern technology at all. I am bothered, however, by the alleged hieroglyphics found on the balsa wood. You would think that Air Force intelligence could have come up with something better. AN OLD TRICK This is the last decade of the twentieth century, a time for unlimited expectations. Technology offers us some breakthroughs the best scien- tists of thirty years ago could not imagine. Better health, plentiful leisure, longer life, more varied pleasures are beckoning. Yet the hopeful vista comes with a darker, disquieting side. There is more danger, crime, environmental damage, misery, and hunger around us than ever before. It will take a superhuman effort to reconcile the glittering promises of technology with the utterly disheartening dilemma, the wretched reality, of human despair.