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building itself up into giant proportions, with muscular limbs developed like statuary of bronze, and of the color, there came into disconnected, independent vigorous life, apart from the medium, an ancient Egyptian.... I now got the spirit to measure hands, placing its palm on mine. The hand was small—like all Easterns’, and the wrist was also small, but the arm was massive, muscular, bronzed, and hairy. Its eyes were black and piercing, but not unkindly; its hair lank and jet, and mustaches and beard long and drooping; its features full of life and expression, yet Sphinxlike. Its headdress was very peculiar, a sort of metal skullcap with an emblem in front, overhanging the brow, which trembled and quivered and glis- tened. I was suffered to feel it, but as I did so, it seemed to melt away like a snowflake under my touch, to grow solid again the moment after.” In a seance room such an entity is automatically regarded to be a spirit—the shade of a long-dead Egyptian. But if the same entity wearing the same metallic skullcap should stride out of the bushes in West Virginia and alarm clandestine lovers in a parked car, he would be considered a spaceman. ATA. Now we can reach another tentative conclusion. In order to material- ize and take on definite form, these entities seem to require a source of energy; a fire or a living thing—a plant, a tree, a human medium (or contactee). Our sciences have not reached a point where they can offer us any kind of working hypothesis for this process. But we can speculate that these beings need living energy that they can restructure into a physical form. Perhaps that is why dogs and animals tend to vanish in flap areas. Perhaps the living cells of those animals are somehow used by the ultraterrestrials to create forms which we can see and sense with our limited perceptions. Perhaps human and animal blood is also essential for this process. In 1823, young Joseph Smith woke up in a farmhouse near Palmyra, New York, to find a faceless ‘“messenger’’ standing beside his bed. Within a few years, ‘“‘Spring-heeled Jack’’ was leaping around the British coun- tryside, his cape fluttering in the still night air. In 1846, the skies went mad with strange lights and peculiar meteorological phenomena. In 1847, the house occupied by the Mitchell Weelaman family in the tiny hamlet of Hydesville, New York, only a few miles from Joseph Smith’s former home in Wayne County, developed a ghost. Somebody kept knocking on the door—but there was never anybody there. An eight-year-old girl in the family screamed that a cold, invisible hand touched her and caressed 208 / Operation Trojan Horse The Birth of Spiritualism