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In 1897, the airships deliberately dropped peeled potatoes, newspa- pers and messages at the feet of astonished witnesses to create and support the secret inventor myth. In recent years the same kinds of objects have been dispensing strips of metal and globs of purple goo suggestive of machine oil to support the idea that we are being visited by “‘a superior intelligence with an advanced technology.” Some contactees have pro- duced moon rocks and moon dust as proof of their experiences on other worlds, but these substances have been discouragingly like the rocks in your own backyard. The endless messages from the space people would now fill a library, and while the communicators claim to represent some other world, the contents of those messages are identical to the messages long received by mediums and mystics. I do not believe that the Saratoga was real in 1897. Nor do I believe that the aluminum-spewing spaceships of 1957 were any more real. The engraved message from the Saratoga was real; the aluminum shavings are real. But I would hate to have to go into a court of law and prove the reality of extraterrestrial visitants on the Laat. .0 4... --t4---~ basis of such evidence. Because flying saucers may not actually exist as physical machines, we must study these witnesses and closely examine the experiences which led them to believe that UFOs were real and extraterrestrial. The UFO phenomenon seems to be largely subjective; that is, specific kinds of people become involved and are actually manipulated by the phenomenon in the same way that it manipulates matter. These subjective experiences are far more important to our study than the random, superficial sightings. Like Canadian scientist Wilbert Smith, Dr. Condon and so many others, we are obliged to forget about the meaningless sightings and concentrate on the claims and experiences of the contactees. The Physical Non-Evidence / 163