I recently read an interesting book on UFOs. The book
consists of a set of articles written by nine different
authors, and so presents a nice variety of views and
information. The book is "UFOs: The Final Answer?", edited
by Barclay and Barclay, (C) 1993 Blandford Press. I bought
my copy for about $10 at Waldenbooks. Perhaps these excerpts
will inspire some of you to read the book.

Page 60:

Carl Sagan once surmised that, on the face of it, there
should have been a man on the moon by the Middle Ages. Such
a speculation is not so outre as it might first appear. Many
ancient civilizations -- most noticeably ancient Greece and
China -- obviously had very good, basic knowledge of the
properties of matter, astronomy, mathematics, natural
philosophy and so on. Therefore, assuming those societies
should have progressed in some exponential form, one would
have expected a global, technological society by the
thirteenth or fourteenth centuries of our era. History shows
that it did not happen -- why not? Why is it that not one
ancient civilization has survived to go on to greater
things? The answer has to be: we are being controlled and
manipulated by an unidentified consciousness, the nature of
which is to provoke mankind into adopting irrational and
rigid belief systems. This statement is really quite
shocking, and destructive of all that we hold dear to our
hearts; but even more shocking than this is the fact that
this control is still being exercised today in the guise of
the UFO phenomenon.

Page 63:

We can now declare with some certainty that UC [unidentified
consciousness] works on humanity in such a way as to cause
its progress to be halted, or to be altered in some radical
way... The UC is operating on the ESP-prone individuals in
our society. It is they who are receiving the absurd
messages during close ancounters with anomalous phenomena.
It is an ongoing pandemic process which, thankfully, does
not always result in the message taking societal root; but
on those occasions when it has, it spreads like wildfire and
its theme is always culturally calamitous. This UC is
demonstrably monolithic in intellect, impregnable,
unstoppable, and -- if deduction is not a defunct discipline
in dealing with it -- would seem to be the originator of all
the world's major religions.

Page 99:

It is a matter of public record that on 20 June 1908, at
approximately 7 a.m. an object that eventually exploded with
unprecedented violence in the air above the sparsely
populated area in the central Siberian plateau known as the
Tunguska, passed across the Himalayas, western China and
Mongolia... From start to finish, the observed behaviour of
the Tunguska object can be shown to be at odds with what
could be expected of an incoming bolide. Therefore, although
conventional science would feel less threatened by an
inanimate explanation for it, on the lines of meteor, comet,
small black hole or even contra-terrene matter, the recorded
behaviour of the object makes "intelligently guided device"
the most probable explanation.

Page 108:

[Regarding certain events in 1947] But what is clear is that
someone somewhere was economical with the truth, and that
implies -- as has been maintained by ufologists for years --
that some form of censorship, cover-up if you prefer, is
operating when it comes to UFOs. [Much supporting
information is provided.]

Page 128:

The circumstantial evidence is now such as to put beyond
reasonble doubt the main thesis that intelligently guided
vehicles of a kind not attributable to the efforts of human
technology are abroad in the world. To maintain otherwise is
to accuse a host of credible witnesses of being unable to
know and describe what they have seen. Such an attitude is
demeaning to your fellow man, and can only be subscribed to
by those whose intellectual arrogance is only outmatched by
their lack of maturity.

Page 151:

Apparently, once a few rat geniuses have solved any
particular puzzle, other rats immediately improve in
performance. In order to explain this transfer of
information, as well as overcome other problems in the life
sciences, Rupert Sheldrake suggested that each individual
has a morphogenic field, which exists independently of the
brain and acts as a template for that individual's
behaviour. This, in turn, is part of a greater species
morphogenic field. When a group of rats anywhere learn how
to solve a puzzle, their morphogenic fields register the
solution, which modify the information in the species
morphogenic field. From then on, rats everywhere will have
an increased chance of solving that particular puzzle for
themselves. The theory has been dismissed as mystical
nonsense by many of Sheldrake's contemporaries, as well as
by the editor of "Nature" magazine, who once asked if
Sheldrake's book was fit for burning. Yet the theory has
stood up well under experiments, some quite ingenious,
designed to test its validity. Something akin to Sheldrake's
morphogenic fields might have to be posited if we are ever
to explain how new archetypes are formed, and then
transmitted throughout the globe. An extension of this
theory could well explain the mechanics of the collective
hallucination.

Page 162:

The major reason that Ruth [an American living in London]
was in such emotional dire straits was that she was
hallucinating an apparition of her father which seemed to be
as real as any living person. This was not a case of
post-mortem return, as her father was alive and well back in
the USA. The point of this case, at least for ufology and
the abduction experience, is the fact that the paternal
doppelganger hallucinated by Ruth behaved in all respects as
if her father were really there. The phantasmagoric image
blocked out light and objects in the way normal bodies do
when interposed between them and the viewer... But the
incident that has ramifications in the area of
shared-abduction scenarios happened while she was in America
visiting her father: she created a doppelganger of her
husband -- which was *also* seen by her father. Apparently,
on two previous occasions, when her husband was away from
home, Ruth had created his doppelganger and made love to it.
Both experiences, she admitted, were sexually very
satisfying. Just like the real thing. Now tell me where
reality ends and phantasmagoria takes over?