How interesting that such an outrageous perceptual joke would be played on a skilled perceptual scientist — who himself has superb perceptual equipment. Or perhaps the visitors were indifferent, and chance played the joke. Then again, maybe it wasn't a joke at all. What about the light shining in his eyes — did they use it to learn something from him, or induce him to act in some drama of importance to their enigmatic designs?

I would not be at all surprised if the visitors are real and are slowly coming into contact with us according to an agenda of their own devising, which proceeds as human understanding increases. If they are not from our universe it could be necessary for us to understand them before they can emerge into our reality. In our universe, their reality may depend on our belief. Thus the corridor into our world could in a very true sense be through our own minds.

The idea of parallel universes is neither proven nor new. It has a distinguished history in physics. Of course, the conditions under which movement between universes might be possible are not known.

We have seen that the visitors are not fairies, and that their ships are not figments of the wind. Now that we know this, what more will we learn?

Humanity could be clutching the frail barque of an outmoded world view while the wind of the mind is swaying the stars into very real craft, and out of them is coming... a faint call for help from a lady in a flowered dress.

This is not a "mere" matter, to be explained away by one facile dodge or another. It is an immense human reality, vast in its impact and complexity. It has coherence, strange but undeniable, and thus there is certainly a process of thought that will draw it into our understanding. Presently it is lacking effective definition. To leave it this way when it seems so rich with potential would be a shame. But has science the wit to study such an elusive and multidimensional enigma?

I say yes. Resoundingly so. Even a brilliant but arrogant curmudgeon of my acquaintance, who denounced it all as "Preposterous," is important to an understanding of it. Blind denial is as empty a response as blind acceptance, and operates on the same level of validity. There is no real intellectual difference between the haughty psychiatrist or physicist and his refusal to accept the truth, and the nervous "contactee" eager to see the phenomenon as a dimensionless cartoon of space friends. We must break through both distortions — and we certainly can.

The visitor experience may be our first true quantum discovery in the large-scale world: The very act of observing it may be creating it as a concrete actuality, with sense, definition, and a consciousness of its own. And perhaps, in their world, the visitors are working as hard to create us.