But the difference between science and theology is that science can make room .for new things. In 1932 Dr. Albert Einstein stated, "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." Within the decade, he would write President Roosevelt the letter that started the United States on the road to splitting the atom and creating the atomic bomb.

"I know in my heart that they might possibly be here," one skeptic said to me, "but if they are, and they're acting like this, it's just so damned disappointing that I prefer not to believe it."

Why disappointing? Why not leave the question open for now? True, the visitors have not come down from their spaceships and given us a holographic atlas of their "home planet"...

or the secret of their interstellar drive. They are very strange. But that could be a two-way street. We may also be very strange.

Looking back over my experiences with the visitors, I cannot say that I felt inferior to them. On the contrary, the people I encountered did not seem superior so much as wiser, but also more simple and unformed as individuals. And they not only feared me, they seemed in awe of me. When they asked me what they could do to help me stop screaming, there was an edge of panic among them.

They are not all-powerful superbeings. They are frail, limited individuals far from home

— if indeed this world is not their home.

I can discern a visible agenda of contact in what is happening. Over the past forty or so years their involvement with us has not only been deepening, it has been spreading rapidly through the society. At least, this is how things appear. The truth may be that it is not their involvement that is increasing, but our perception that is becoming sharper.

The evolution of this increase in perception may have a very definite design. We initially noticed objects from afar, then closer, then we remembered seeing the visitors, and now we are beginning to remember being with them. More than one of those taken were told that he or she would remember nothing "for five years," or "until 1984," or "in a few years." Will the visitors emerge into our world on a hood of memory?

And if so, then why? Why not simply land, open the hatch and come out? It could be that they wish to avoid what Cortez did with such eagerness. It is not difficult to crush the flower of a culture's spontaneity. A friend of mine sat in a Native American medicine circle within hearing distance of a hissing interstate highway — and he heard the emptiness in the old chants, the sadness where conviction once rang. And no new stories are being woven in Papua, New Guinea. The streets are becoming a ramshackle version of Lansing, Michigan.