Recklessly, Yolie thrust her arm into one of the beams; she had been thinking that the beam might be a jet of water that had somehow been concentrated into a parallel-sided beam. What she felt, however, was a powerful sensation of heat — but there was no effect on her skin.

Yolie ran indoors. There, the temperature had risen from 6o°F ( 16°C) to a stifling 104 F (40°C). The air was filled with a sulphurous smell and everyone felt burning, prickling sensations in their skin. Yolie’s mother was praying, and Argentina and Yolanda were pleading with their father not to go outside.

The house was lit up as bright as day. Nobody was able to explain where the light was coming from; none of the witnesses noticed whether the light from the discs was passing through the walls of the house, though this is a possible ‘explanation’.

The light had a powerful effect on the household animals. The Morenos owned three very fierce dogs and noticed that, whenever the light fell on the animals, they immediately became quiet and listless. When, occasionally, the beams fluctuated, the dogs seemed to come to life.

Next, the object closest to the house swung its tubular beam of light in the direction of Trancas. The beam advanced slowly for some so or 15 minutes until Yolie estimated it had reached the outskirts of Trancas; then, amazingly, it switched the tube in a U-turns back towards the house. Next it slowly withdrew the tube of light ­which was, like the others, about so feet (3 metres) wide — until it vanished completely, and then moved towards the other objects on across the sky at about 10.15 p.m., about the the railway line. Finally all six objects rose and flew off at low altitude in an easterly direction towards a mountain range, Sierra de Medina.

The time from the beginning of the sight- conducting some kind of investigation — but ing was then about 40 or 45 minutes. For what did they hope to find? Another pos­more than half an hour after the objects had sibility is that they were simply carrying disappeared, the horizon was tinged with an out repairs to their craft. The light beams orange glow. Once the Morenos had re- appear to have been used to discourage covered from their shock, they ventured out onlookers from approaching the craft. What-into the garden. The cloud produced by the ever the purpose of the unknown pilots’ visit, object that had been nearest to the house was it seems they did not wish the Morenos any still hanging in the air. It was very thick and there was a strong smell of sulphur. The cloud did not disperse until four hours later. A journalist who visited the family the next day said that the heat and the smell of sulphur inside the house were still quite striking.

Underneath the spot where the object had hovered the Morenos found, forming a per­fect cone 3 feet (1 metre) high, a pile of small white balls half an inch (I centimetre) in diameter. Next day they found similar little balls on the railway line.

The balls were found to disintegrate under gentle pressure. ‘They were later ana­lysed in the laboratories of the Institute of Chemical Engineering in the University of Tucuman and found to contain 96.48 per cent calcium carbonate and 3.51 per cent potassium carbonate.

An enquiry into the events at the Mo­renos’ farmstead was quickly mounted by the local police. It was found that a Senor Jose Acosta and an entire family named Huanca had seen the strange illumination on the railway embankment, while a Senor FranciscoT ropiano had seen the six discs flying.

File for the future

Have you ever had a premonition? Sudden, strong intuitions about absent friends or future incidents — amounting almost to a certainty — are more common than one imagines, although it’s only the truly spec­tacular premonitions (about heads of state, famous personalities or disasters involving hundreds of people) that make the news.

For example, when President John Kennedy was assassinated (above) there were scores of people all over the world who claimed to have had a premonition that something terrible was going to happen to him. On a happier note, Bjorn Borg’s fifth Wimbledon win (below right) was the sub­ject of a premonition. But did anyone fore­see the eruption of St Helen’s volcano in Washington in 1980 (below)?

The publishers of The Unexplained are interested in hearing about your premon­itions, whether they concern international

or purely personal events, whether they’re about Prince Charles’s future wife or the unexpected arrival of Uncle Bill from Aus­tralia. If you have a striking dream or just a ‘strong feeling’ about something that could happen in the future, send the details to us. We’ll acknowledge every letter, and explain how you can help us check when they come true. Later on, we hope to publish the results of this survey.

When witnessing any strange or drama­tic event, such as spotting a UFO, it is very important to be able to recall exactly what you saw. But try this experiment: look at the picture on the left for about so seconds. Stop reading this article while you try to remember what was in the picture. Draw it from memory. You will probably find that your attempt is far from being a perfect reproduction of the original.

You might think this experiment has little relevance to UFO spotting. Surely a UFO would present such an unusual sight that it would make an indelible impression on the memory? But ex­perience with witnesses of accidents or crimes, which are not everyday observ­ations for most people, does not bear this out. What we see is not always the same as what we are able to recall having seen.

After looking at the picture, men will probably be more likely to have a good recall of the young lady at the head of the bus queue. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to remember details of her clothing.

Our memories of what we have seen tend to be conditioned by what interests us personally. And what we remember also depends to some extent on past experiences — what we are used to seeing. People unfamiliar with London’s black cabs or double-decker buses will prob­ably have noticed them in the picture, but may not remember the time on the clock or the number of the bus — nor even have noticed them at all. Similarly there will be some who fail to spot the UFO on first glancing at the picture. How much did you take in?

The miracle of life

Established science holds that life came about purely by accident and that it can be explained entirely by the laws of physics and biology. But, as COLIN WILSON explains, there is another, more exciting possibility: could life be a force independent of matter, which somehow controls mechanical processes for a purpose of its own?

ACCORDING To the theories of modern astronomy, our Universe began about to billion years ago with a tremendous explo­sion. After a billion or so years, great clouds of steamy gas formed into galaxies, and eventually the whirls and eddy in this spinning gas contracted into stars. Until this point, there had been nothing in the Universe but the two ‘simplest’ gases — hydrogen and helium. But as the stars contracted, the pressure became great enough to crush to­gether these simple atoms to form carbon ­the basic building block of life.

But life cannot exist without various heavy elements, such as iron, phosphorus and sul­phur, and these were also locked up in the cores of the gigantic stars. Billions more years had to pass, until the original stars grew old, gave off most of their energy in the form of radiation, and collapsed and exploded, before the essential elements floated free.

And how did life evolve? The usual ac­count is that the various elements — carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen, hydrogen, iron — somehow came together in the great witches’ cauldron of our cooling planet, were fused together by lightning, and formed complex molecules called amino acids, the basic constituents of all living organisms. But in 1963, astronomers discovered mole­cules of combined oxygen and hydrogen out in deep space; science calls them ‘hydroxyl groups’. A few years later, radio astronomers also discovered water, ammonia, formal­dehyde and methyl alcohol in space. No one is quite sure how these atoms came to be formed, but they could have come into existence in outer space and been brought to Earth by comets as Fred Hoyle has argued.

And now we come to the more difficult and controversial part of the story. How did this dead matter turn into life? The standard account is that the organic molecules found their way into the oceans and, over millions more years, accidental collisions formed every conceivable shape and size of molecule. And finally, a molecule was formed that had the amazing power to reproduce itself.

But there are problems in this explan­ation. In 1953 the American scientist Stanley Miller conducted an experiment in which electrical discharges — artificial lightning ­were passed through a mixture of water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen, the sub­stances that were believed to have formed the primitive atmosphere of the Earth. At the end of a day, the mixture turned pink; at the end of a week, Dr Miller found that two of the simplest amino acids had been formed. The latest findings of modern research sug­gest that the early atmosphere of the Earth was in fact made up of carbon dioxide and water vapour. But, when Dr Miller’s experi­ment was repeated using carbon dioxide and water, similar results were obtained — again, simple amino acids were formed.

CHARLES BOWEN describes the extraordinary experience of the Moreno family, near Trancas, Argentina, in 1963

DESPITE MANY people’s scepticism about the existence and reported sightings of uF0s, some accounts are so vivid and detailed as to merit serious discussion. There are elements of the case of the Moreno Family that inevitably keep alive the search for an expla­nation, in particular the length of time that members of the family were able to observe and what they had described they had seen invading their ranch.

The figures were undoubtedly humanoid’

At 7 p.m. on 21 October 1963 there was a breakdown of the private power plant of the Moreno family at their Santa Teresa Ranch, 2 miles (3 kilometres) from the small town of Trancas in the Tucuman province of Ar­gentina. Since there was no light, the family retired to bed early, at about 8 p.m.; 21-year­old Senora Yolie de Valle Moreno (her maiden name is used at her request) stayed awake to feed her baby son.

Suddenly the maid, Dora Martina Guzman, is, knocked on Yolies door,

went outside the house to see for themselves. At first they could see nothing, but as they ventured further away from the house they saw, apparently on the railway line to the east, two bright, disc-shaped objects linked by a shining tube; Yolie described it as `something like a small train, intensely il­luminated’. A number of silhouettes — the sisters estimated about 4o — were moving about inside the tube. The figures were undoubtedly humanoid and the witnesses thought at first that there must have been a crying that she was frightened. Yolie put this down to the loneliness of the place and took no notice. But moments later Dora Martina was back — there were strange lights outside the house, for which she could see no cause. She explained that every time she went outside the house the whole farmyard was suddenly lit up for a few seconds. This could not have been lightning; there was no thun­derstorm brewing, and there were only a few clouds in the sky. Yolie and her sister Yolanda got up and derailment on the line, or some sort of sabotage.

The sisters decided to go closer and inves­tigate. They returned to the house for warm clothing, and Dora Martina fetched her Colt .38 pistol, which she kept as a safeguard for when she was alone in the house. Yolie woke her other sister Argentina, and asked her to listen for her baby. When Argentina heard what Yolie and Yolanda proposed to do she warned them of the dangers of guerillas and saboteurs and then, being curious, ventured outside to see for herself. She let out a terrified scream, shouting that there were strange machines near the house. As she ran away from them she fell over a pile of bricks that was lying in the yard.

Yolie, Yolanda and Dora Martina con­tinued investigating; as they walked round the southern side of the house they could see a pale greenish light ahead of them near the front gate of the farm. They thought this must be from the headlights of the truck riven by one of the farm employees and Dora Martina ran forward to open the gate for it. As she ran ahead, Yolie shone her flashlight at the green light.

Instantly a disc-shaped, domed object was revealed, hanging in mid-air in front of them. It had six brightly lit windows and was some 3o feet (9 metres) wide; metallic in appear­ance, it had a number of sections that were joined together with rivets at the seams. The dome was also metallic, but it was darker and had no rivets. The object was rocking gently to and fro.

Suddenly a multicoloured band began to rotate inside the windows, a whitish mist thickened around the object, which emitted a faint hum. The witnesses became aware of a sulphurous smell.

The three women took in all these details in less than 3o seconds. Then, without warn­ing, a tongue of flame shot from the object, hit Dora Martina and hurled her and the two sisters to the ground. At the same time three more discs along the railway lit up, making six in all.

By now the parents, who had been woken by the sound of falling bricks, were watching the object nearest the house from the window of Argentina’s room, which faced eastwards. As the band inside the craft rotated faster and faster, they watched while the disc gradually became enveloped in the white mist until all that could be seen was an orange-coloured cloud. A ‘tube’ of light emerged from the top of the object and probed the features of the house, as if conducting a careful scrutiny. Double ‘tubes’ of light probed forward from three of the objects on the railway line — one pair focused on a hen house, another on a tractor shed, and the third on a neighbour’s house. The ends of these ‘solid’ light beams or tubes edged forwards slowly, penetrating a fence as they went.

It took a few minutes for the beams to cover the distance of 200 yards (18o metres) from the railway line to the shed, and they finally stopped about 6 feet (2 metres) from the front of the shed.