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In H. G. Wells' prophetic Things to Come there is a vision of a world ravaged by war and divided into fiercetribes ruled by warlords. A handful of surviving scientists and thinkers band together and begin the task of restoring civilization by flying over the planet. They call their organization Wings over the World (WOW). Much of the UFO evidence suggests that a real WOW has always existed. Maybe one of their members handed a caveman the first flaming brand and the first wheel, just as some unknown party allegedly deposited the first compass outside that Mormon tent. A friend from WOW could have handed the original Ptri Re’ts map to some ancient Egyptian. After him it may have passed from the library at Alexandria to the palace in Constantinople. The key to the grid system was lost, so the map became useless. However, it is known that Christopher Columbus did have some strange maps when he set out for his short-cut to India.' It is easy to speculate and even easier to leap to mind-blowing conclusions. We must try instead to assemble the many fragments of tantalizing evidence and attempt to construct the whole. To do this, we must first recognize some very unpleasant facts. We must admit Just how stupid we w= Wee really are. Administration (NASA) have issued humble public statements admitting that our space programme has produced data which invalidates many of the most coveted conclusions and beliefs of our learned astronomers. Ideas which have been accepted as fact for many years have suddenly been proved completely false. The more we find out about the moon, the less we know about it. Space probes to Mars and Venus have tossed innumerable astronomical theories into a cocked hat Recent radar probes to the planet Mercury discovered that that planet is actually rotating slowly on its axis, even though millions of school children have been taught for generations that Mercury does not rotate. Leading astronomers are now arguing over the status of Jupiter. Some now suspect that it isn't a planet at all but is really a cold star. For the past two centuries astronomers have been peering through telescopes, counting stars, and making mathematical calculations to account for the motions and fiickerings they have observed. They hare published and taught their learned conclusions as the gospel. Now we know that they have been wrong in many key areas. Before the end of this century all the text-books will have to be scrapped. All of the old ideas will be discarded. "We used to think of the universe as nothing more than abundant fields of stars arranged in galaxies,’ Dr Frank Drake, Chairman of Cornell University's astronomy department, said recently. "But we underestimated the variety and quantity of matter in space by a factor of about one trillion. Which means that we were about as wrong as we could be.* In the early 1960s deep-dished radio telescopes discovered a maze of radio signals pouring in from outer space. At first there were wild speculations that we had made contact with some superdvifeation in some other galaxy. But further study discounted this fascinating notion. In recent months several different scientists attached to the National Aeronautics and Space " See Arlington H. Mallery. Lost America.