Subject: across that crazy quilt we call the classes From: Thane E. Plambeck Date: 1990-10-10, 00:57 To: plambeck@neon.Stanford.EDU take the ufo encounter as we find it in movies, in books, in television commercials. at the prole level (national enquirer) we find the abduction theme. the aliens seize a victim who is returned unharmed with vague and usually not altogether unpleasant recollections. higher up the cultural ladder (but not too high) we find the man, isolated in a rural environment, suddenly illuminated by a bright, mesmerizing light. the aliens inspect the human and move on, and the man understands himself to have been in considerable danger, perhaps because bright fireballs that burned circular patches into a nearby wheatfield may just have well have burned him alive and indeed looking at his fishing waders we find them to be singed at the seams. still higher on the cultural ladder we have what is known as ``the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence'' with radio waves, space-craft messages on records, and the musings of Carl Sagan. at the top we have twin peaks, where the ineluctable core of the idea is yanked out and thrown in with its true company, the unexplained murder, the mentally half-sane, the inscrutable closed community with symbolic visitor (agent cooper), prostitution, shady investment practices, and the far east.