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When two curious events (A) and (B) happen in close time and space proximity, it is natural for the human mind to merge them into a single mystery. Yet this often turns out to be a mistake. The fact that solid citizens have seen strange objects fly over Groom Lake (event A) does not substantiate Lear's claims that there are hangars with disks in them 82 REVELATIONS who had spent much of their life designing and critiquing delicate experiments in parapsychology suddenly buy the story of hard material proof, of captured saucers in Air Force hangars, without demanding an opportunity to probe into the obvious discrepancies of these claims? The answer probably lies in our continuing frustration with a phe- nomenon that remains maddeningly beyond our reach. These revela- tions came at an ideal time to relieve the pain caused by this frustration. It promised physical evidence, a proof we might all see and touch, if only we had the clearances to get inside Dreamland. . . . The irony of watching a roomful of psychic luminaries falling for a story of captured saucers because "at last we have something tangible, something physical," was quite remarkable. Pitfall Five: the Coconut Fallacy This common trap has been explained earlier in the section entitled "Who Can Hold the Coconut?" As long as you are restricted to the position of watching it, rather than holding it, there is no way for you to ascertain what is actually happening to the coconut. If the President of the United States announced tomorrow that aliens had landed and were being held in a secret base in New Mexico, how would the scientific community find out if the statement was true or not? What are the limits of what can be faked? If something is recognizable as a mystery, doesn't that automatically imply that it is within the scope of our scientists' detecting instruments, and therefore could have been faked by other scientists, possibly equipped with slightly more advanced instruments? Pitfall Six: Mystery Merging