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took him most seriously and passed the story on to one of Argentina’s largest and most respected newspapers, Diario de Cordoba, which carried the full account two days later. Even though the U.S. Air Force and various civilian groups struggle to discount and discredit contactee stories, they continue to turn up everywhere. Many of them contain such ludicrous details that they are easy to dismiss—until you realize that the same ludicrous details are appearing in Italy, Brazil, Sweden, Africa, the Soviet Union, Australia and nearly every other country on earth. Consider the improbable tale told by movie actor Stuart Whitman, star of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and many other big-budget films. According to Mr. Whitman, he was trapped in his twelfth-floor suite in a fashionable New York hotel during the big blackout of November 1965, when he heard ‘“‘a sound like a whippoor- will’ whistling outside his window. He looked out and saw two luminous disk-shaped objects, one blue, the other orange. At least that’s what he later told Hollywood columnist Vernon Scott. Then he heard a voice, which sounded as if it were coming from a loudspeaker. “They said they were fearful of earth,’’ Whitman explained, ‘“‘because earthlings were messing around with unknown quantities and might disrupt the balance of the universe or their planet ... the blackout was just a little demonstration of their power, and they could do a lot more with almost no effort. They said they could stop our whole planet from functioning.” No one else in the crowded streets of darkened New York reported seeing these objects, and no one apparently heard that loudspeaker. But Whitman sticks to his story. Why is anybody’s guess. He certainly doesn’t need publicity. At least not that kind of publicity. Senhor Helio Aguiar didn’t seem to be looking for publicity, either, when he spun his strange story to Brazilian journalist Joao Martins in 1959. A thirty-two-year-old statistician employed by a bank in Bahia, Brazil, Aguiar not only claimed to have received a message from a UFO, but he took a series of startling pictures to back up his story. While riding a motorcycle near a place called Piata on April 24, 1959, Senhor Aguiar says he observed a silvery disk with a number of windows visible on the dome on top. The underside of this object bore three markings or symbols, which were actually faintly visible in the originals of his pictures but, unfortunately, do not reproduce well. Aguiar stopped his motorcycle, unlimbered his camera and took three quick shots as the object performed leisurely movements overhead. Then, according to “You Are Endangering the Balance of the Universe!" / 177