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near them.” No one around Owatonna reported any of the extensive UFO sight- ings to the Air Force. ‘‘We’re all disgusted with the government,” Mrs. Butler declared. “‘We know they’d just tell us it was all swamp gas.” There were airship sightings in Owatonna in 1897. And in 1880, the home of a Mr. Dimant was plagued with poltergeist-like activity. Explo- sions of undetermined origin took place in his house, the doorbell rang frequently when no one was there, and so on. So perhaps this isolated little community of 14,000 is of some special interest to the mysterious ultraterrestrials. Mrs. Butler’s story may sound bizarre, but I have heard the same things too many times in too many different places to dismiss them lightly. In case after case, I have heard about strange men who paid pointless visits and sometimes posed as Air Force officers. The descriptions are always the same—slight of stature, dark olive skins, sharp pointed features. And most of these scattered witnesses specifically noticed that these men were dressed in clothes that seemed brand-new. Even the soles of their shoes appear to be unwalked on. If they have occasion to pull out a wallet or notebook, that also is brand-new. (Most men, even Air Force officers, carry beat-up old wallets.) I have carefully kept many of these small details to myself and have never published them or discussed them. They provide a yardstick by which I can measure the validity of new stories. The sudden, blinding headaches described by Mrs. Butler are also very common among percipients who have been involved in close sight- ings or actual contacts. ; Finally, there is the curious experience of her friend who was seized by some kind of trance and parroted someone else’s words. This, too, has happened far more frequently than one might imagine. But such stories rarely go very far because they are so weird and unbelievable. The phrase “What is your time cycle?’’ had special meaning to me. I had heard it before, from other percipients. In December 1967, Tom Monteleone, an aspiring young science- fiction writer in Adelphi, Maryland, allegedly had a contact with a grounded UFO and conversed with a man in “‘shiny coveralls’? who identified himself as ‘‘Vadig.”” Because time travel was already a well- established theme in science fiction, Monteleone made up a contactee story about traveling to a distant planet where everyone walked around nude. Asserting that he had been a victim of a time loss, he hit the UFO lecture circuit and appeared on radio talk shows. When he discovered that 166 / Operation Trojan Horse in the trees behind our house at night. But something keeps me from going mane than»