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The third day of the convention we'd established, by phone, that our scheduled meeting at the hotel with Col. Stevens himself (with whom we'd kept correspondence for a number of years, but who we'd never personally met) had misfired; so we doubled back that afternoon to Tucson where we were finally able to interview the Colonel in his home. previously." "How come?" "It seems they've more or less withdrawn; they're no longer actively participating as they were in the various 'Earth—projects'. They've largely given up trying to communicate with our governments through Billy. The proofs they furnished him with, seem to have been rejected or ignored. They've also given up on an undersea project they were hopeful about for a while; they told Billy they can't succeed in some of the salvaging projects they'd begun for this planet, without the cooperation of a significant part of the planetary population. They'd hoped their presence would be recognized by now, and their help accepted openly. As you can plainly see, that hasn't at all happened. "The last time Billy had contact was a couple years ago, when they provisionally saved his life by pumping fluid out of his lungs; he's still got the pleurisy though, even though he works just as hard all day on his farm." 41 The hard "demand" of documentation from the quarters of Authority, then, held a flimsy pose that could be shifted according to purely self—substantiating requirements. When the Regencies of physicists, psychiatrists and anthropologists refused to recognize the significance of similar reports from disparate times and places (or simultaneous times, different places) excluding mutual contact to a high degree of probability, solely on the basis of deviation from The norm, where was the incentive for the general public to take such accounts more seriously? Yet unofficially, the collective psyche (as popularly indexed at its peak form in the headlines of pulp periodicals at the checkout counter) endowed those verboten subjects with a dream validity where "logical" validity wasn't allowed. And in a sense, the persuasiveness of the psyche would prove more potent than the authoritarian containment—categories, as massing waves of undeniably similar contents came crashing in from every corner, imbuing the body of research—work (built largely out of the "marginal" domain of hypnotic regression) with a cumulative power that couldn't be denied; the piled testimony of "plain people" from every walk of life could no longer be refused the dignity of acceptable Documentation. Yet the topic of "documentation" was still argued. The question seemed, as always, at this convention as everywhere else, to be an epistemological one of the most basic kind (i.e. "how do we know what we know"), drawing everyone—teplete with his own particular theme—into the general quandary as to what constituted "acceptable content", and what therefore was the authentic standard of validation. It grew plain as the days of the Convention passed, that such an implicit question was coming to comprise an underlying problem to many in attendance who still held their particular piece of the puzzle in their own particular hand but who, hoping to find the supportive pieces at this landmark gathering so as to flesh out the 88 T-Bird_Vs_The_Flying_saucers.htm "What of Billy?" we asked. "When was the last time you'd seen him?" "It's been a few years already," Mr. Stevens replied. "He's not nearly as active with the Pleiadeans as he was The Philadelphia Embarassment