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Vessels travel in time. At first sight, time travel poses difficulties once described in a book as the paradox of the grandfather (past) and knowledge (future). Barjavel wrote a science fiction novel in which a careless traveler went back in time and changed it. He inadvertently killed his grandfa- ther before the mother of the traveler was born. This means he could not have been born, or have made this voyage, or have killed his grandfather for that matter. Hence the paradox. A book (could it be this one?) about future knowledge was dictated 1 toe aoe, a ew toate by a time traveler from the future to a man from the present. He had it edited. This knowledge thus became part of the present, in which case it was no longer part of the future. So who was the real author of this information? The real problem lies in the causality of such phenomena. A correct definition of “travel” and “time” is indispensable to understanding time travel. A concise answer could be that time travel does not exist and that it is therefore futile to even consider it. It would be superfluous to challenge the concept of causality because it is the very foundation of science born under Descartes. It is impossible to travel a road that does not exist! The issue of time travel is not a simple matter of imagination that we will be able to concretize some day, because it actually boils down to rejecting the basis of science: reproducibility! If strict causal- ity is the attribute of the essence of phenomena, everything is repro- ducible, as scientists love to think. It is then enough to create the conditions of a cause to produce an expected and measurable effect. However, we have seen that reality is changed by how we look at it. Discussing time travel leads us to some rather curious questions: what is traveling really, under which conditions, and why? That last question is hardly ever asked. However, it constitutes the heart of the problem. In fact, it seems to be brought up by the very word. If this mystery seems inaccessible to us, is it not because we are not ready? Is it not because the wishes underlying our questions change their mean- ing and render them inadequate? Just as watching one single thing changes it and makes it appear (quantum mechanics), so could wish- ing for something very well close the path to it or, quite the opposite, make it happen. It is often said that a large part of consciousness is perception. How- ever, would there not be a higher degree of consciousness that consists of wishful thinking? Apparently, this wish is not only related to future things, but also to things in the past. In other words, does not the cause 352 The Science of Extraterrestrials: UFOs Explained at Last * Eric Julien