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.

Truly, such an act of mutual insight and courage would be communion... two universes spinning each other together... the old weaver of reality rethreading creation's loom. Who knows, maybe really skilled observation and genuine insight will cause the visitors to come bursting to the surface shaking like coelacanths in a net.

Something is here, be it a message from the stars or from the booming labyrinth of the mind... or from both. It must have left a signature somewhere, a thread in the snow, the scratch of a strange nail upon a wall. And we can certainly find that thread, if we bring humor and honesty and courage — and great care — to the effort. In taking the thread we might find ourselves in possession of a very real key to the universe. In any case accepting that. the visitor experience is not a false unknown will relieve a lot of suffering.

Once the thread is in hand, our own mythology will tell us where it leads. for it will be the same thread that the maiden Ariadne handed to Theseus when he stood before the maze of the Minotaur, voting and strong and mad with courage.

And we will all o down the labyrinth, to meet whatever awaits us here.

APPENDIX I

A Statement from Donald F. Klein, MD