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There were scores of political assassinations even while millions of people experienced religious rebirth. It was almost as if some mysterious force was embracing all of us and changing everything. ‘From 1964 to 1968, strange lights were zipping around the skies of every country, generating wonder and leading whole populations to consider cosmic things they had never even thought about before. Two major countries, the Soviet Union and the United States, embarked on a very expensive—and ultimately futile—search for extraterrestrial life. Dr. Carl Sagan and his cronies founded the shaky science of exobiol- ogy...the study of life on other planets. Without any actual samples to examine, it was a very difficult science, indeed, but a very profitable one. By the end of the decade, a brand-new ‘“‘New Age”’ blossomed. In the early 1970s, millions of people were reconsidering their souls as they toyed with crystals, Tarot cards and meditation mantras. Major universi- ties were offering courses on witchcraft, UFOs and shamanism. The newsstands were glutted with New Age publications. Astrologers were peddling their books for $2,000,000 advances. It looked as if the excite- ment and intellectual titillation of the 1960s was paying off, that the human race was changing subtly for the better. How wrong we were! But we tried again in the mid-1980s when still another “‘New Age”’ took place. Spirit mediums became “‘channellers”’ and an almost unlimited number of new conspiracies and evil plots were introduced into the battered public consciousness by assorted cranks and delusionary types. It took four years to research and write this book back in the 1960s. I had to travel all over the United States, interview hundreds of people in person and thousands of others by mail and telephone. It was necessary to locate and study countless books, old magazines and obscure newslet- ters in a massive and very expensive effort to find out what was really going on. Twenty years of controversy and nonsense generated by science fiction writers and Hollywood scenarists had yielded no results at all. The whole subject had, in fact, been totally misrepresented by both the untrained and uninformed UFO advocates and the various governmental agencies that had been sucked unwillingly into the fray. The hard facts were buried in a sea of insane polemics. Sorting it all out drove me to the hated Af baat. brink of bankruptcy. A major publisher, G. P. Putnam’s, cleverly scheduled the publica- tion date of Operation Trojan Horse (OTH) to coincide with the great stock market crash of May 1970. Introduction / 7 A Thousand Trojan Horses