It is not enough for us to ascribe the visitor experience to some unusual manifestation of known phenomena and then ignore it. Science has not explained the visitors; indeed, it has not even begun to explore them. Nor is it sufficient to say that "higher" beings are studying us, and remain passively waiting for what tidbits of knowledge they may toss us.

A striking fact of the colloquy was the general expectation of catastrophe, a possibility that I also fear. Throughout the literature of abduction, there is a frequent message of apocalypse. This is also the message of Fundamentalism — and of some parts of both the peace and environmental movements.

Presently in the Soviet Union there is so much fear regarding the "end of days" that Premier Gorbachev has taken to wearing makeup on Soviet television to obscure a birthmark on his forehead because people have called it "the mark of the 294 beast." And there has been an undertone of fear in relation to the fact that the word chernobyl in Ukranian means

"wormwood," the name of the star in the Book of Revelation that is poison to a third of the waters.

As the ninth century closed toward the first millennium, the Western world was also swept by wave after wave of millennial hysteria. The end of days was expected momentarily.

Of course, they did not have nuclear weapons and an expanding hole in the ozone layer.

The Celtic tradition held that the veil between the worlds of man and spirit could grow thin at certain seasons of the year. Maybe there are seasons of ages, and the veil between matter and mind is note growing, thin. It could be that thought is beginning to cross into the concrete world, or even that mind is learning how to manipulate reality to its own secret ends.

Why did an actor report that a UFO was the source of the great New York City blackout, considering that the first "UFO-induced" blackout took place in a play? And the first recorded instance of a UFO killing a car's engine seems to have been in a work of fiction.

Understand, I am not dismissing the phenomenon with yet another version of the "wind making the stars sway" explanation. No, the visitors may very well be real. Quite real. But what are they, and what in their context does the word real actually mean? I do not think that this is a question that will in the end admit itself to a linear and mechanistic answer.

The visitor experience drives us to extremes. Those who have seen the devices or their occupants are often convinced that they are extraterrestrial m origin. And science debunks that, just as the clergy debunked the fairies in centuries past, and for the same reason: These outrageous enigmatics so threaten the established order of belief that they must at all costs be rejected. There was no room in seventeenth-century Christian theology for fairies, and there is scarcely more in twentieth-century scientific theory for visitors as peculiar as these.