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54 When I had finished, I stared out the plane window, curiously disturbed. Like most people, I had grown up believing the earth was the center of everything--life, intelligence, and religion. Now, for the first time in my life, that belief was shaken. It was a curious thing. I could accept the idea that we would eventually explore space, land on the moon, and go on to distant planets. I had read of the plans, and I knew our engineers and scientists would somehow find a way. It did not disturb my belief in our superiority. But faced with this evidence of a superior race in the universe, my mind rebelled. For years, I had been accustomed to thinking in comic-strip terms of any possible spacemen-- Buck Rogers stuff, with weird-looking space ships and green-faced Martians. {p. 63} at least two hundred years ahead of our civilization--perhaps thousands. In their eyes, we might look like primitives. My conjectures before the take-off had just been idle thinking; I had not really believed this could be the answer. But now the question came back sharply. How would we react to a sudden appearance of space ships, bringing that higher race to the earth? If we were fully prepared, educated to this tremendous adventure, it might come off without trouble. Unprepared, we would be thrown into panic. The lights of Philadelphia showed up ahead, and a thought struck me. What would Philadelphians of 1776 have thought to see this DC-6 flying across their city at three hundred miles an hour? What would the sentries at Valley Forge have done, a year later, oe Ce re ce toa. 14 aorta 1a But there was a difference now. We had had modern miracles, radio, television, supersonic planes, and the promise of still more miracles. We could be educated, or at least partly prepared, to accept space visitors. In fifty years we had learned to fly. In fifty years more, we would be exploring space. Why should we believe such creative intelligence was limited to the earth? It would be incredible if the earth, out of all the millions of planets, proved the only inhabited spot in a AL 1 tee This was the last sighting listed before World War II. But now, if these sightings were true, the shoe was on the other foot. We would be faced weta oe Lt with a race of beings if this lighted airliner had streaked over their heads? Madness. Stampede. Those were the plain answers. the whole universe.