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Ah, that comes up time and again! Why isn't there any hardware left behind? Surely they must crash sometimes, surely they must... [but] Think of the thousands of commercial planes flying daily over the U.S., yet years go by without a single crash.

Jacques Vallee, coauthor with Hynek of The Edge of Reality, was present but did not challenge this statement, which, as Klass points out, is obviously incorrect. There was an average of five fatal airline accidents (aside from nonfatal crashes) in the United States during each of the five years preceding this pronouncement. The resulting 809 fatalities were not fictional inventions. One of these crashes even happened near Hynek's home in Chicago!

Klass sums up his observations of Dr. J. Allen Hynek with this suggestion: "Another explanation for the lack of any artifacts of extraterrestrial origin, despite tens of thousands of reported UFO sightings, is that there aren't any extraterrestrial craft in our skies."

Sounds reasonable to me...as reasonable as Martin Gardner's assessment of Hynek as "the Arthur Conan Doyle of UFOlogy. "British newspapers were full of UFO news in January 1979, and there was great anticipation of startling revelations to be made before the august House of Lords. On January 17, the Earl of Clancarty rose to address the House on the subject of unidentified flying objects. He coupled this lecture with a motion that the House vote funds for UFO research. He admitted that he had for years been writing about them under a pen name; that name, though he did not reveal it to the House, was Brinsley Le Poer Trench. (Why, I cannot say.) He is also the founder of Contact International (which is not a worldwide matrimonial service), a coauthor of George Adamski's first UFO book, and a cousin of Winston Churchill. Some credentials!

Lord Clancarty evoked many interesting comments from many interested Lords. The preponderance of comment was very much with him and displayed an abysmal ignorance of science and logic. One noble Lord showed that he could not differentiate between a comet and a meteor, which are as unalike as candles and atom bombs. A few, we may be thankful, brought the House some sanity, and Lord Strabolgi, speaking on behalf of Her Majesty's Government, summed up the discussion nicely, pointing out that the believers accepted—and quoted, as Lord Clancarty had—dozens of totally fictitious accounts. He singled out several, acting as an excellent antidote to the biblical references that had been used in support of Clancarty's comments, and saying to one member of the House who stood to declare his opposition on grounds that such things were in contradiction to the Bible, "There really are many strange phenomena in the sky, and these are invariably reported by rational people. But there is a wide range of natural explanations to account for such phenomena. There is nothing to suggest to Her Majesty's Government that such phenomena are alien spacecraft... certainly Her Majesty's Government do not consider that there is any justification for the expenditure of public money on such a study." Lord Clancarty took the hint and withdrew his motion. It seems there is hope for the British, after all, at least among the nobility.

Finally, to dispel any notion that the members of the United Nations are concerned about UFOs, I must mention the 1977 proposal of Sir Eric Gairy, Prime Minister of Grenada, who asked that body to declare 1978 "The Year of the UFO." The proposal failed; it was the first and only proposal to date to obtain no response from the floor. Gairy printed 149 copies of his request and mentioned that Grenada had issued a three-dollar and a five-cent stamp bearing UFO pictures. It was obvious that he was very much interested in making his mark at the UN with the proposal. In a small group discussion following the submission of his proposal, he was heard by a CSICOP member to remark that he didn't "give a damn about UFOs" but was only interested