“Since the acts of mankind most easily observed from a distance are A-bomb explosions, we should expect some relation to obtain between the time of the A-bomb explosions, the time at which the space ships are seen, and the time required for such ships to arrive from and return to home base.” CHAPTER XV It was early in October 1949 when I finished the reversal of our space-exploration plans. I spent the next two days running down a sighting report from a town in Pennsylvania. Like three or four other tips that had seemed important at first, it turned out to be a dud. When I got back home, I found Ken Purdy had been trying to reach me. I phoned him at True, and he asked me to fly up to New York the next day. “I’ve just heard there’s another magazine working on the saucer story,” he told me. “Who is it?” I said. “I don’t know yet. It may be just a rumor, but we can’t take a chance. We’ve got to get this in the January book.” That night I gathered up all the material. It looked hopeless to condense it into one article, and I knew that Purdy had even more investigators’ reports waiting for me in New York. Flying up the next morning, I suddenly thought of a talk I’d had with an air transport official. It was in Washington; I had just told him about the investigation. “If they are spacemen,” he said, “they’d probably have a hard time figuring out this country by listening to our broadcasts. Imagine tuning in soap operas, ‘The Lone Ranger,’ and a couple of crime yarns, along with newscasts about strikes and murders and the cold war. They might pick up some of those kid programs about rocket ships. A few days of listening to that stuff—well, it would give them one hell of a picture.” Except for some hoax reports, this was the first funny suggestion I’d had about the spacemen. But now, thinking seriously about it, I realized he had an important point. It was possible that men from another planet might have to reorient even their way of thinking to understand the earth’s ways. It would not be automatic, despite their superior technical progress. Evolution might have produced basic differences in their understanding of life. Humor, for instance, might be totally lacking in their make-up. What would they be like? I’d tried to imagine how they might look, without getting anywhere. Dr. H. Spencer Jones hadn’t helped much with his _Life on Other Worlds_. I couldn’t begin to visualize beings with totally different cells, perhaps able to take terrific heat or bitter cold as merely normal weather. There were all kinds of possibilities. If they lived on Mars, for instance, perhaps they couldn’t take the heavier gravity of the earth. They might be easily subject to our diseases, especially if they had destroyed disease germs on their planet—a natural step for an advanced race.