projected into human perception by an unknown underlying intelligence.

          The year before that, I went to Nepal and came back and got my first newspaper job, and a Swiss fellow named Erich von Däniken put out a book called Chariots of the Gods?, just right around the time he was being imprisoned for embezzlement, in which he speculated that aliens made Stonehenge and the Pyramids and inspired our religions.

          For quite a while now, folks have been suggesting that we didn’t just suddenly start being visited in the nineteen-forties, but that – whatever those UFOs are doing up there – they’ve been hanging around earth for a while. Or at least, have been dropping in for appearances.

          And if you’re going to take the view that they’ve been here for a while – and that they’re real, not far-off birds or hallucinations or psychological whats-its – you can generally go one of two ways with that: the they-come-here-from-another-dimension way, like Vallée; or the they-come-here-from-another-neighborhood way, like von Däniken. Either way, though, you’re settling for the view that UFOs are old news.

          That view was not welcome with a fellow in New York named Budd Hopkins. Hopkins, an author-researcher on the abduction phenomenon, was adamant that the (alleged) events he studied were not continuous with the kinds of mythic encounters Vallée classed them together with. Hopkins believed a historically discrete sequence was unfolding, and that aliens had started up the practice only lately. Moreover, he would have no truck with people saying that aliens were anything other than biological beings who fly about in spacecraft and sometimes snatch up unwilling subjects for their odd experiments.

          But even some people who were generally on his side didn’t agree with him on all of this. Hopkins influenced John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist, to begin his own study of the abduction phenomenon, and Mack came to believe his subjects had actually had the experiences they claimed they’d had. But he wasn’t as sure as Hopkins was that these were aliens who lived for so many years and had faces you could pinch if you got close enough. He thought they were real, but he didn’t know how. So maybe Mack was more like Vallée, saying, “They’re here, but who knows whether their mode is like ours; they might not be quite solid – they might be related to consciousness.”

          So you could say “aliens” have been here from time immemorial – whether they are generated from the ground of consciousness as interdimensional or paranormal visitors, or are, rather, advanced beings from elsewhere in space, looking in upon human development.

          Or you could say they started coming by right around when they showed up in the papers, and that one long historical episode has been unfolding since the nineteen-forties.

          And nowadays, people like to ask whether they might be time-travelers. If that were the case, you’d expect them to turn up all over the past.

         Well, maybe they all started arriving in the forties – concerned about the nuclear weapons we unpredictable humans had learned to manufacture. But you do seem to find references to objects just like them in historical documents, and hear tell of saucer-like manifestations in legends. And it is odd that all these congruent observations should be in these ancient sources.

         A small number of examples will suffice to make the larger point.

         In ancient Rome, various historians and scribblers took down reports of “flying shields” whooshing about in the sky and sometimes crash-landing (in one case, in the middle of a battle!).

         In medieval Japan, someone made a note that they’d seen a giant “earthenware vessel” zip by overhead.

         In sixteenth-century Nuremberg, half the town saw globes and spears swarming about in the air. And a few years later, the same thing happened in Basel!

         And yet we cannot talk to any of the folks who could elaborate for us upon these rather cryptically reported images, to help us better understand what they thought they had seen. Heck, we can’t even come to a final agreement as to what is (or isn’t) in our skies today. That being the case, I do not see how we can hope to declare that something miraculous did or did not happen hundreds or thousands of years ago – in a moment now vanished as any UFO. Whatever happened then, when we read about it today, the only past that we know – or can know – is a story.

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         Until next time, I remain –

         Very truly yours –

         Murray J. Penglass