My historical survey has found that the core experience of seeing flying disks and small figures goes back a long, long time. If we are dealing with extraterrestrials, would they really have been here, say, for a couple of thousand years and remained hidden all that time? Or did they come recently, and find a way to slip themselves into a preexisting human mythology in order to hide there? Or even more extraordinary, it is possible to consider that they might have really, physically arrived sometime in the future, and then spread out across the whole of our history, in effect going back into time to study us. This might mean that they could be here only a short time — say a few weeks or months-but are carrying out a study that would seem to us from our position in sequential time to have extended over our entire recorded history. Of all the theories, this one alone explains why creatures in 1986 would seem so unaware of our languages, nature, and even our clothing, and yet possibly have a history as fairies and gods going back thousands of years. It might also explain why they are so enigmatic and seemingly immaterial. If time travel can exist and is involved, God only knows what the travelers would look like to us as they reached back from the future. From our perception, they might appear in the skies one moment and have full understanding of our entire history, our cultures, and our languages the next. This would be because they would travel back across the whole of our time in the few moments between discovery and understanding, picking up and assimilating all the details at their leisure, while we would be presented with the illusion that they already knew us well even though they had, in effect, just arrived.

All these hypotheses are interesting, but none of them is in the least provable. They' do suggest, though, the rich range of possibilities that are available for further study.

The central question remains, Is there anything real about all this?

I have spent a great deal of time in the past few months searching what could only be described as a morass of literature on the subject of unidentified entities and their craft. I have talked to scientists who think that it's all nonsense and to scientists who are not so sure. I have read dozens of case histories and met many other people who have had visitor experiences.

Something is happening. This is clear. It is not a version of known phenomena.

In my research I found an undertone of claims that the government knew more about this mattes than it was saying I decided to do some investigation into the truth of this possibility.

I found myself in a minefield. Real documents that seemed to be false. False documents that seemed to be real. A plethora of "unnamed sources." And drifting through it all, the thin smoke of an incredible story.