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belief patterns; the kind of thorough dispiriting that would take place if the impact was strong and unexpected enough, would naturally have repercussion throughout man's 'system'. It would even impact his biology, his physical stability—it's well known how negative or anxious psychological states weaken the immunology networks! You can imagine how many generals and top brass with big egos backed by 'god—and-country' were taken down several pegs by a bunch of little gray gumbys from Betelgeuse when they started showing their family slides! All you have to do is undermine confidence and let a state of depression set in—the mind is much more vulnerable to suggestion when it's morally defeated, when the resistance—systems are fatigued 1 4 1 a0 "On the other hand," Hopper opines in a sudden maniacal staccato presciently borrowed from his Blue Velvet character, "isn't it just possible this indirectly validates the whole spiritual thing, like...doesn't this just act to put the whole church bag in a positive perspective, give it a new lease on life by reverse psychology?...you know, man," he snorts, laughing. "I mean, if these little gray dudes who are obviously you know negative in so many ways are making such an effort to convince the powers—that—be how they're at the bottom of the whole Jesus-trip and all that, isn't it kind of evident they're attempting to discredit it by association?" "Or else," Nicholson lifts a forefinger as if to instruct the jury on a subtle legal point, "it's a triple—reverse psychological ploy, and they're really trying to make their identification with it so obvious as an attempt to discredit that they succeed in driving people right back into the arms of standard religion which is where they really want them to be all along!" "Hey, what about all the 'Virgin Mary apparitions and things," Fonda considers sedately as he peers, with myopic nearness, into the glowing tip of the joint, "do all those phenomena that have been seen by thousands like at Lourdes or Fatima tend to confirm conventional religion, or do they fit more into the general engineering format that these little critters have been revealing?" "Well it all depends," Jack smiles sideways as if building momentum for another roll, "since each of those phenomena have their own individual character in a lot of respects...if you take the very first one for example, the Lourdes thing that happened to the little French girl Bernadette in the 1800s, why that caused a great deal of consternation to the entrenched church authority; that whole thing carried some messages that weren't at all acceptable to Catholic dogmas, whereas some of the later ones seem to fit more conveniently into the standard religious mold—in fact a Jot of them tend to be so specifically Catholic in content and tone that it gets many 76 T-Bird_Vs_The_Flying_saucers.htm by sudden overload." "Whew," Fonda exhales, "would you mind running that by one more time?" "I can't!" Nicholson chuckles after considering the request with ponderous deliberation, "It's hard for me to follow that one myself."