esearches might have a bearing on a discussion <strong>of</strong> human reactions to UFOs.)The technological use <strong>of</strong> schedules <strong>of</strong> reinforcement is rapidly expanding.... Techniquesinvolving schedules have been adapted to a wide range <strong>of</strong> species. Surprisingly similarperformances, particularly under complex schedules, have been demonstrated in organismsas diverse as the pigeon, mouse, rat, dog, cat and monkey. At the human level the analysis <strong>of</strong>schedules has proved useful in the study <strong>of</strong> psychotic behavior and in the design <strong>of</strong>educational techniques for normal human subjects.... Other applications to the problem <strong>of</strong>the control <strong>of</strong> human behavior, as in law and penology, religion, industry, and commerce,<strong>of</strong>fer considerable promise.The above appears in a highly technical volume called Patterns <strong>of</strong> Reinforcement by Charles Fersterand B. F. Skinner reporting on research sponsored by the Office <strong>of</strong> Naval Research.Although the design <strong>of</strong> their experiments is complex, the findings <strong>of</strong> Ferster and Skinner can besummarized in a few lines. Drastic modification <strong>of</strong> the behavior <strong>of</strong> an animal (including man) canbe achieved by selectivly reinforcing certain actions, for instance by giving food to a pigeon onlywhen he presses a certain lever. However, certain ways <strong>of</strong> reinforcing behavior lead to betterlearning than others. If the training is too even and monotonous, the subject may stop in itsdevelopment or even return to an earlier state. The best schedule <strong>of</strong> reinforcement is one thatcombines periodicity with unpredictability. Learning is then slow but continuous. It leads to thehighest level <strong>of</strong> adaption. And it is irreversible. It is interesting to observe that the pattern <strong>of</strong> UFOwaves has the same structure as a schedule <strong>of</strong> reinforcement.A newspaper column commented upon the apparent lack <strong>of</strong> reality <strong>of</strong> the whole UFO phenomenon:"It does not attack us. It does not affect our daily lives. It does not help us with our many problems.It has brought us nothing <strong>of</strong> value. It may have scared a few folks here and there, but then so dothunder storms and tornadoes. The whole thing, as a social issue, is <strong>of</strong> no consequence whatsoever."The journalist who wrote this column was superficially right, <strong>of</strong> course. But he forgot another fact:human life is not ruled by the juxtaposition <strong>of</strong> problem-solving exercises. Human life is ruled byimagination and myth; these obey strict laws and they, too, are governed by control systems,although admittedly not <strong>of</strong> the hardware type. If UFOs are acting at the mythic and spiritual level itwill be almost impossible to detect it by conventional methods.If UFO activity operates in a fashion similar to Skinner's reinforcement, which is the least amenableto extinction, then the learning will take time but it will never be forgotten. And we may never meetour teachers.How can we verify whether such conditioning is in fact operating? We should firmly establish theprimary effects. We should go on analyzing landing traces, interviewing witnesses and "abductees,"feeding computers with sighting details, and scrutinizing the heavens with cameras and radiotelescopes. But this activity will be completely useless if it is not related to an investigation <strong>of</strong> thesecondary impact, the shift in our worldview that the phenomenon produces. A phenomenon thatdenies itself, that annihilates evidence <strong>of</strong> itself, cannot be mastered by engineering brute force. Ifthe logic <strong>of</strong> the UFO phenomenon is a metalogic, it is not useful to gather in the evenings around aspoon a psychic has bent and wait in the dark for cosmic messages. More kitchen utensils willcertainly become useless, and there will be cosmic messages, to be sure! But any expectation <strong>of</strong>higher wisdom will be soon brought to naugh by their insane incoherence or their calculated fallacy.If the phenomenon is forcing us through a learning curve, then it has no choice but to mislead us.When Skinner designs a machine that feeds a rat only when the right lever is depressed, this isextremely misleading for the rat. But if the rat doesn't depress the correct lever, he becomesextremely hungry. Man is hungry for knowledge and power, and if there is an intelligence behindthe UFOs it must have taken this fact into account. We also tend to forget that we have no choiceeither: we must eventually study UFOs, and that study, unavoidably, will in turn contribute to thereinforcement itself.A civilization such as ours, which is oriented toward what it regards as technical progress, cannot
afford long to ignore the apparition in the sky <strong>of</strong> objects that defy the laws <strong>of</strong> its physics and theperformance <strong>of</strong> its rocket planes. Within a few years, the advanced countries will place on thisproblem, openly or in secret, their best physicists, their best intelligence specialists, their bestcomputer scientists. As I mentioned at the beginning <strong>of</strong> this book, the Star Wars defense projectmakes a study <strong>of</strong> UFOs a top-priority task. But our scientists may be powerless to utilize theirexpertise, because the phenomenon fits none <strong>of</strong> the usual categories. UFOs cannot be analyzedthrough the standard research techniques, if they are the means through which man's concepts arebeing rearranged. All we can do is trace their effects on humans, and hope that we will eventuallystumble on some principle that explains their behavior.What is the variable being controlled in this control system? Thermostats control temperature;gyroscopes control the direction in which a rocket flies. What could a paranormal phenomenoncontrol? I suggest that it is human belief that is being controlled and conditioned.Myth and CivilizationMy speculation is that a level <strong>of</strong> control <strong>of</strong> society exists which is a regulator <strong>of</strong> humandevelopment, and that the UFO phenomenon should be seen at this level. What would this explain?It would certainly explain why there is no overt contact. Direct contact would preclude genuinelearning. It also explains some <strong>of</strong> the statements made by ufonauts ("you should believe in us butnot too much"; "you will not speak wisely about this night"). It explains the absurdity <strong>of</strong> manycases, where reactions to the phenomenon may have been evoked in terms <strong>of</strong> nonverbalconsciousness rather than in "logical" terms. This would explain why so many witnesses areincapable <strong>of</strong> finding words to describe what they have seen. And it would explain the sexual andgenetic aspects, which reinforce the signal by encoding it with the most powerful emotions <strong>of</strong>which men and women are capable and with the violation <strong>of</strong> human taboos.The same idea was arrived at independently by two Soviet science fiction writers, Boris and ArkadyStrugatsky, in their delightful novel Definitely Maybe. Faced with a series <strong>of</strong> weird coincidencesand absurd communications aberrations, a group <strong>of</strong> scientists theorizes thatwithout suspecting it, we've tread on the corns <strong>of</strong> some super-civilization and it has decidedto regulate our progress as it sees fit.But another scientist in the novel has a different theory:Vecherovsky introduced the concept <strong>of</strong> the Homeostatic Universe: "the universe retains itsstructure," that was his fundamental axiom.When I speak <strong>of</strong> a spiritual control system I do not mean that some higher supercivilization haslocked us inside the constrains <strong>of</strong> a space-bound jail, closely monitored by entities we might callangels or demons. What I do mean is that mythology rules at a level <strong>of</strong> our social reality over whichnormal political and intellectual trends have no real power. At that level, time frames are long andevolution is slow. Mass media, which are designed to give split-second images <strong>of</strong> transient noise(the noisier the better), miss this signal entirely. A society with an attention span <strong>of</strong> minutes (theinterval between two TV commercial breaks) can have no concept <strong>of</strong> events that began when mygrandfather was not yet born and will end after my grandson dies. But there are such long-termchanges. They dominate the destiny <strong>of</strong> civilizations. Myths define the set <strong>of</strong> things scholars,politicians, and scientists can think about. They are operated upon by symbols, and the languagethese symbols form consistutes a complete system. This system is metalogical, but notmetaphysical. It violates no laws because it is the substance <strong>of</strong> which laws are made.The theory does not explain how UFOs are made to appear to us, although it gives support to oneidea about them: that they are constructed both as physical craft (a fact which has long appeared to
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Foreword by Whitley StrieberThere a
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It is sad that, as the twentieth ce
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PART ONE: THE ALIEN CHRONICLESIn th
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lot about it, but nobody said 'Let'
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The resemblance of the Dogu statues
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various forms of error worship unde
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them. These apparitions are scarce,
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was again shot at. Another creature
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The story is fantastic. Yet it remi
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their virginity in the sanctuaries
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A letter from a British woman begin
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The recollections of the legionnair
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lades. In less time than it takes t
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e called Smith said: "No, we cannot
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Celtic legends, along with the docu
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probably took place in the second p
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Australian Air Force Intelligence p
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ings in the fields and prairies?One
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From behind the object, two beings
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"in smooth English." They did not s
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to four feet tall, dressed in white
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expectations as if they were mere t
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came out of it, but this person was
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6. When men did not inhabit most of
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the negative reactions of scientist
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other in appearance, dress, mode of
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saw that they had made a grin, he h
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and rode out after dark in search o
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sighting, and the Sonny Desvergers
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PART TWO: ANOTHER REALITYDuring the
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pencil in a buttonhole with a piece
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short perpendicular line on each en
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sudden displacement of warm air or
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popular today. But a second - and e
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ecorded about 1825 in the Vale of N
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The ikal of the Tzotzils flies thro
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the door, he turned and recieved a
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If Stewart came back today, he woul
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The devil does not have a body. The
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interested in the social implicatio
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Very well, little son. Come back to
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measure. But the phenomenon does ap
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and physical, to determine whether
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previous year. But the fact remains
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- Page 126 and 127: like piezo-electricity, or static e
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- Page 150 and 151: About the AuthorAn astrophysicist b