Page Content (OCR)
peddling outerspace nudism was a hard way to make a buck, he recanted and spent the next twenty years selling articles about his terrifying brushes with the hardcore UFO buffs, experiences far more chilling than meetings with extraterrestrial nudists. Aside from Tom’s ventures into his inner mind, time is one of the most important aspects of the UFO phenomenon. It plays a strange but significant role. Part of the answer to flying saucers may lie not in the stars but in the clock ticking on your mantelpiece. Our world exists in three dimensions: height, width and breadth. We can move in many directions within these dimensions: up, down, side- ways, forward and backward. We measure space in relation to our own size, by inches, feet, yards, miles, light years. If we were 25 feet tall and our planet were the size of Jupiter (many times larger than the earth), we would undoubtedly have adjusted our measurements of space accordingly. Our inch might be equal to an earth foot, our mile might be equal to ten earth miles. Space does notexist except when we make it exist. To us, the distance between atoms in matter is so minute that it can only be calculated with hypothetical measurements. Yet, if we lived on an atom and our size was relative to its size, the distance to the next atom would seem awesome and beyond reach. The ant lives in a world of giants where even a blade of grass is a gigantic structure and a tree is a whole universe. If ants had measurements, their inch might be the size of the point of a pin, and their mile would be less than a foot. How dare we try to reduce the universe to our own terms? We can’t even see or sense a large part of the world around us. Man is not the final, perfect end product of evolution. He is the beginning. There is another man-made measurement called time. Unlike the other three dimensions, time has us trapped. We can move in only one direction through it—forward. This forward motion is governed by physical laws. We cannot leap ahead fifteen years any more than we can slide back to 1848. We are all trapped in this moment of time. This instant. The only way we can bridge time is to create something that will endure beyond the immediate moment. We construct buildings, pyramids, works of art, and even laws that become material and lasting things. Our moments become seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Our lives revolve around clocks and calendars. Time becomes very real to us, and it is almost inconceivable that we could live without it. Yet time doesn’t really exist at all. “What Is Your Time Cycle?" / 167