This sort of visitation was then happening constantly: John Lennon had been given an egg by visitors from another planet, and passed it on to Uri Geller because it was, he said, too much of a drag on his mind. All across the United States, Australia and Europe, even the Middle East and Russia, people—including no less a man than Jimmy Carter—were seeing lights in the sky and making contact with entities that were either from other worlds or part of an eternal mind that dreamed the human race. Perhaps there was in the end no difference between the two. The naive perception of what an alien might be was yielding to stranger and more numinous conceptions of panspermic space gods, energy beings and sentient ideas. It would have been more startling if, over time, I had had no such moment of transcendence.