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Angelology is a fascinating offshoot of demonology. The appearances of angels have been chronicled down through the ages, and several new angel reports still turn up each year. Once again we find that these reports contain all the basic ingredients of the UFO reports. The same phenome- non is at work, utilizing a different frame of reference or being misinter- preted by devout witnesses. A writer named Gustav Davidson spent several years of his life sifting through all the religious, occult and psychic records to compile his massive Dictionary of Angels. The reflective factor, so common in ufology and demonology, seems to have bothered Mr. Davidson, too. Davidson wrote in the introduction to his book: At this stage of the quest I was literally bedeviled by angels. They stalked and leaguered me, by night and day. I could not tell the evil from the good... I moved, indeed, in a twilight zone of tall presences... I remember one occasion—it was winter and getting dark—returning home from a neighboring farm. I had cut across an unfamiliar field. Suddenly a nightmarish shape loomed up in front of me, barring my progress. After a paralyzing moment, I managed to fight my way past the phantom. The next moming I could not be sure whether I had encountered a ghost, an angel, a demon, or God. There were other such moments and other such encounters, when I passed from terror to trance, from intimations of realms unguessed at to the conviction that, beyond the reach of our senses, beyond the arch of all our experience sacred and profound, there was only—to use an expression of Paul’s in I Timothy 4—“‘fable and endless genealogy.” Fable and endless genealogy. That sums up what we face in trying to isolate the UFO phenomenon from the larger and more important ‘‘big picture,” the overall situation of which the UFOs are merely a small and perhaps even insignificant part. When I was just a farmboy new to the big city, I metan elderly woman who hired me to type up a book manuscript she had written. It was largely incoherent, and I suspected she was a little bit off her rocker. The book described her interminable conversations with an ancient Roman named Lucretius. She first met him while walking along Riverside Drive one afternoon. He materialized suddenly in front of her, Roman toga and all, and when their conversation ended, he melted away into thin air. He had long flowing hair, aquiline features, and dark, piercing eyes. To the best The Cosmic Jokers / 201 The Elementals