I am not convinced that we make a fetish of the preposterous. I think our feeling is that in first gropings there's no knowing what will afterward be the acceptable. I think that if an early biologist heard of birds that grow on trees, he should record that he had heard of birds that grow on trees: then let sorting over of data occur afterward. The one thing that we try to tone down but that is to a great degree unavoidable is having our data all mixed up like Long Island and Florida in the minds of early American explorers. My own notion is that this whole book is very much like a map of North America in which the Hudson River is set down as a passage leading to Siberia. We think of Monstrator and Melanicus and of a world that is now in communication with this earth: if so, secretly, with certain esoteric ones upon this earth. Whether that world's Monstrator and Monstrator's Melanicus--must be the subject of later inquiry. It would be a gross thing to do: solve up everything now and leave nothing to our disciples. I have been very much struck with phenomena of "cup marks." They look to me like symbols of communication. But they do not look to me like means of communication between some of the inhabitants of this earth and other inhabitants of this earth. My own impression is that some external force has marked, with symbols, rocks of this earth, from far away. I do not think that cup marks are inscribed communications among different inhabitants of this earth, because it seems too unacceptable that inhabitants of China, Scotland, and America should all have conceived of the same system. Cup marks are strings of cup-like impressions in rocks. Sometimes there are rings around them, and sometimes they have only semi-circles. Great Britain, America, France, Algeria, Circassia, Palestine: they're virtually everywhere--except in the far north, I think. In China, cliffs are dotted with them. Upon a cliff near Lake Como, there is a maze of these markings. In Italy and Spain and India they occur in enormous numbers. Given that a force, say, like electric force, could, from a distance, mark such a substance as rocks, as, from a distance of hundreds of miles, selenium can be marked by telephotographers--but I am of two minds-- The Lost Explorers from Somewhere, and an attempt, from Somewhere, to communicate with them: so a frenzy of showering of messages toward this earth, in the hope that some of them would mark rocks near the lost explorers-- Or that somewhere upon this earth, there is an especial rocky surface, or receptor, or polar construction, or a steep, conical hill, upon which for ages have been received messages from some other world; but that at times messages go astray and mark substances perhaps thousands of miles from the receptor: