In general the contactees tell essentially the same story, with minor variations: Earthling (the witness) sees a flying saucer; saucer lands. Extraterrestrial occupant emerges, extends friendly greetings, confides his wish to help the human race solve its problems, takes Earthling for a cruise to another planet, brings Earthling back. After promising to maintain a sort of guardianship over the earth, the visitor says farewell and flies back to his home planet. Although these stories are told in the first person, purportedly as fact, they perhaps should not be called hoaxes, for they can deceive only the credulous who want to believe that supermen from other worlds are hovering near to save our troubled planet. With no suspense, little characterization, and ludicrously bad science, these naïve accounts are fiction of such poor quality that they would be rejected by even the most hard-pressed editor of fantastic tales. Whether from Venus, Mars, Saturn, or the planets of other solar systems, these gods from the machine all look just like human beings and either speak the colloquial language of the contactee or communicate by thought transference. Their physical appearance, clothing, tastes in food, habits of thought, and ethical values usually seem indistinguishable from those of the citizens (whether American, French, or Brazilian) who report the visitors. _The “Contactees”_ One man who supposedly was privileged to make contact with visitors from space was Daniel Fry who, while strolling in the New Mexico desert on the evening of July 4, 1950, noticed a flying saucer that had apparently just landed. When he approached and started to touch the ship, he suddenly heard a voice speaking in friendly caution: “Better not touch the hull, pal, it’s still hot.” The voice, he discovered, belonged to an extraterrestrial being in a mother ship that was hovering some 900 miles above the earth. The craft on the ground needed no crew, for it was a “remote-controlled cargo carrier,” sent down to collect samples of the earth’s atmosphere. Communicating by mental telepathy, the spaceman revealed that, although he came from a remote planet, his ancestors had been earthmen who had migrated from the island of Lemuria in ancient times (see _Chapter_ II). Strangely enough, although the visitor’s first remark had shown a remarkable command of contemporary English, he did not know what a roller coaster was! He took such a fancy to Fry that he invited him to enter the cargo craft and treated him to a quick flight to New York and back, a round trip of 4000 miles completed in half an hour![X-3]