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ued despite all our explanations, we seemed to have only theories left—the arrival of Martians and Venusians. Already the erstwhile members of the Fortean Society, fans and followers of the late Charles Fort, were warming up in the bullpen. They had the answer even before they knew what all the questions were. You see, it worked out this way: In 1945, we dropped our atom bombs on Japan. The bombs sent a blast of energy into space, where it was detected by the sensitive instruments of superintelli- gent beings on other worlds. Said beings were terribly concerned that poor, bumbling man had discovered the secrets of atomic energy. So an expedition to the earth was formed to investigate. However, some superintelligent navigator made a slight error. Instead of leading his spaceships down to troubled Japan, he missed by a wide margin and ended up in Scandinavia instead. Sorry about that. The thousands of sightings of phantom dirigibles and mysterious airplanes from 1896 to 1938 provide us with a substantial body of evidence which indicates that the phenomenon is actually flexible and that it tailors itself to adopt acceptable forms for the time periods in which it operates. All of this raises a very sticky question for the believers. Did all of these things really exist? Or were all of these thousands of reports merely examples of mass hysteria, journalistic jokes and misinterpreta- tions of some natural phenomenon? You can’t have both. Either a very large percentage of all these Treports are honest and valid—or they are all pure poppycock. If I were writing a book on, say, the Civil War, I would go to these very same sources—old newspapers, historical records, letters of the actual participants—and I would produce a book that would be accepted by scholars and historians with little or no questions asked. But flying saucers have been dragged down by the amateur theorists and thrown into disrepute by the believers in extraterrestrial visitants. Their efforts have produced skeptics who have found the obvious flaws in the beliefs and have therefore decided that all UFO data are equally invalid. If a farmer of the 1860s fought in the Civil War and left behind a packet of scrawled letters describing his experiences, historians would pounce on those letters and quote them over and over again in scholarly tomes. But if this same farmer saw an unusual object in the skies over California in 1875 and reported it to the local newspaper in the form of a letter, that printed letter would become a source of controversy today. Unidentified Airplanes / 123 Mystery Helicopters