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and I am now convinced that many of these hoaxes were actually engineered deliberately—and successfully—to discredit the UFO phe- nomenon. Let’s review briefly some of the salient points in this chapter: (1) It is obvious that a great many unidentified flying objects were present in our skies in 1897. (2) It is also obvious that they were manned by at least three different types of beings: (a) the regular types, some with beards and including women, as reported by several of the contactees of the period; (b) the Oriental type, the “Japs” as reported by Judge Byrne; , (c) the unidentifiable creatures described by Alexander Hamilton. (3) It sounds as if some of them, the stranger types, made a real effort to hide from witnesses who stumbled upon them accidentally. (4) The occupants of these craft knew a great deal about us, were able to speak and possibly write our languages. If they were just fresh in from Mars, this would have been very unlikely. Allow me now to do some educated speculating based upon my experiences with more recent situations. Let us assume that an unknown group of well-organized individuals, some of them quite alien from us in appearance, speech, etc., found it expedient to conduct a large-scale “survey’’ of the midwestern United States in 1897 by air. Because no aircraft existed in the United States at that time, they knew that they might attract undue attention, and attention was the one thing they did not want. They didn’t want us even to know that they existed, and if we became conscious of their aircraft, we would automatically become aware of them. So they had to devise a plan by which this “invasion” would go relatively unnoticed, or at least seem harmless. In 1897, everyone had at least heard of lighter-than-air craft. Crude dirigibles had already been flown in Europe, and pictures and drawings had appeared in American newspapers and magazines. So the obvious ploy for the people I call ultraterrestrials would be to construct a few craft that at least resembled dirigibles and make sure that they were seen in several places by many people, such as Chicago. These decoys would get a lot of publicity, and from then on everything that anyone saw in the sky would be classed as ‘“‘the airship,” even if it were shaped like a doughnut and had a big hole in the middle. Such a plan had to go further, however, because the aerial activity was going to be most intense in some areas. Some kind of explanation for the mystery airship had to be tendered. This could best be done by staging deliberate landings in relatively remote places and contacting a few random individuals, telling them the ‘‘secret invention’’ story, and letting 90 / Operation Trojan Horse