While reading quietly one evening, A.B. heard a distinctive voice inside her head. The voice politely said: "Please don't be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you." While A.B. knew of this hospital, she had never been there and didn't know where it was.

The voices assured her of their sincerity, even supplying some factual tidbits for A.B. to confirm (she did).

Despite this confirmation, A.B. understandably feared that she had developed some form of mental illness. She promptly saw a psychiatrist, the aforementioned Dr. Azuonye, who diagnosed the episode as "hallucinatory psychosis." When A.B. started taking a prescription antipsychotic medicine, the voices went away for a while. But when she was on vacation abroad, they came back.

This time, they told her that she needed immediate medical care, and should return to England right away. She returned, and the voices gave her an address to go to; her husband was good enough to humor her, and actually took her to the address just for reassurance. It may not have been that reassuring when it turned out to be the CAT-scanning department of a large London hospital, and that as she arrived, the voices told her to go in and have a brain CAT scan.... [The voices] informed A.B. that she had a brain tumor.

Again consulting with Dr. Azuonye, she was advised to get the brain scan simply in order to set her fears to rest. Since she had no symptoms of a brain tumor, both she and the doctor expected nothing to be found. After some squabbling with the government-run health-care system, the CAT scan was eventually carried out.

The result? A brain tumor, which doctors thought to be a meningioma.

Meningiomas are neither the rarest nor the most common of cranial growths. Their cells, which arise from the brain's coverings, generally grow slowly without eating through the brain and only rarely float off to start new colonies elsewhere in the body (called metastasizing). But the space they take up squashes good brain. Removal, as soon as possible, is usually recommended. So while there were no headaches or specific neurological abnormalities, A.B.'s neurosurgeons opted for immediate surgery. The voices told her they agreed.

Surgeons found and removed a meningioma that measured two and half by one and a half inches -- about the size of an egg. When A.B. awoke from the anesthesia, the voices spoke once more: "We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye." They never returned. [Pp. 43-45]

In his discussion of the case in the British Medical Journal, Azuonye notes:

It is well known that intracranial lesions can be associated with psychiatric symptomatology. But this is the first and only instance I have come across in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient of their genuine interest in her welfare, offered her a specific diagnosis (there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the tumour), directed her to the type of hospital best equipped to deal with her problem, expressed pleasure that she had at last received the treatment they desired for her, bid her farewell, and thereafter disappeared.

Azuonye reports that while some doctors accept the case as genuinely paranormal, others have suggested either fraud or a subconscious motive. Those who allege fraud speculate that the patient

had been given the diagnosis of a brain tumour in her original country and wanted to be treated free under the NHS. Hence, they surmised, she had made up the convoluted tale about voices telling her this and that.

Azuonye objects:

But AB had lived in Britain for 15 years and was entitled to NHS treatment. Besides, she had been so relieved when the voices first disappeared on thioridazine that she had gone on holiday to celebrate the recovery of her sanity.

As for those who think something was going on in A.B.'s subconscious:

Their view was that, the total lack of physical signs notwithstanding, it was unlikely that a tumour of that size had had absolutely no effect on the patient. "She must have felt something," they argued. They suggested that a funny feeling in her head had led her to fear that she had a brain tumour. That fear had led to her experience of hallucinatory voices. She may have unconsciously taken in more information about various hospitals than she realised, and this information was reproduced by her mind as part of the auditory hallucinatory experience.

I think it's more likely that A.B. tapped into some channel of higher consciousness - whether that of "spirit guides" or deceased well-wishers or God - and obtained the information that way. Conceivably the tumor itself brought about changes in the brain that made her nervous system more receptive to such extracerebral influences.

One other interesting aspect of Azuonye's write-up is that apparently quite a large number of the doctors who heard his presentation were entirely comfortable with the paranormal interpretation. I doubt this would have been true a generation ago. Despite skeptical resistance, minds are changing - slowly but surely.

Or as the old Arabian proverb has it: The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

-----

*Azuonye, I.O. "Diagnosis Made by Hallucinatory Voices." British Medical Journal. 1997; 315:1685-86.

School and medical officials said the first girl to faint was brought to the Vong Dong Senior Secondary School's nurse Thursday. The five girls that accompanied the 13-year-old to the nurse's office then fell unconscious.

Emergency medical personnel arrived to take the children to hospital. Dozens of students in their classrooms, who saw the girls being carried away, also suddenly collapsed.

Most of the girls were released from the medical centre the same day. But according to Nhan, four students remain in the hospital in stable condition.

"Everyone was so worried about the case," said Nhan. "We still don't know what the cause was."

Holy figures have been perceived in bricks, wooden logs, the gritty underpass of a Chicago expressway, a Tennessee coffee shop called Bongo Java and, last month, a tiny gold nugget found in the Arizona desert.

In 1977, a woman making burritos in Lake Arthur, N.M., saw the face of Jesus in the pattern of skillet burns on a tortilla. She built a shrine to house the Jesus tortilla, which was blessed by a priest, and thousands of people from across the country came to gaze and pray for its divine assistance in healing their ailments.

Christians aren't the only ones to find the holy in the ordinary: Followers of Islam have said they've seen the Arabic script for ''Allah'' or ''Muhammad'' on fish scales, chicken eggs, lambs and beans.

The phenomenon is so common that scientists have given it a name: pareidolia, the perception of patterns where none are intended. And according to Stewart Guthrie, one of a handful of professors who have studied it, such perceptions are part of the way human beings are "hard-wired."

''It's really part of our basic perceptual and cognitive situation,'' said Guthrie, a cultural anthropologist, retired Fordham University professor and author of the book ''Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion.''

''It has to do with all kinds of misapprehensions that there is something humanlike in one's environment, when really there's not.''

At the root of the phenomenon, he said, is is the survival instinct.

''It's a built-in perceptual strategy,'' Guthrie said, ''of better safe than sorry. In a situation of uncertainty, we guess that something is caused by the most important possibility.''

Hence, if you're alone and hear a strange sound -- even on a gusty night -- you're more likely to ask, ''Who's there?'' than think it's the wind. And if you happen to be religious, according to Guthrie, your answer to ''Who's there?'' may well be, in a broader context, God. More specifically, Jesus in a fried tortilla.

The feelings generated by these perceptions can be powerful. At Bodega Chocolates, Santacruz and her co-workers quickly placed the chocolate Madonna in a small plastic case, and as news of the apparition spread, a stream of the curious and devout began making pilgrimages to the shop, where they prayed, crossed themselves in awe and knelt in veneration.

''It's really emotional,'' Santacruz said later. ''I can't describe the feeling; the emotions make me cry.''

Other alleged miracles have proved profitable: A 10-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich with a pattern resembling the Virgin Mary sold on eBay in 2004 for $28,000; a pretzel in the shape of Mary cradling the infant Jesus fetched $10,600; and a water-stained piece of plaster cut from a shower wall bearing what looked like the face of Jesus brought in nearly $2,000.

Some manifestations get worldwide attention.

In 1996, the owner of Bongo Java in Nashville, Tenn., said he discovered a cinnamon bun bearing the likeness of Mother Teresa in profile.

Dubbed ''the miracle nun bun,'' the pastry got so much notice worldwide that he parlayed it into a commercial venture, selling nun-bun T-shirts and coffee mugs on the Internet.

The items were taken off the market when Mother Teresa complained, but he refused to stop exhibiting the renowned sweet even after she died.

Eventually the venerated bun was stolen during a 2005 Christmas Day break-in and, despite the offer of a $5,000 reward, only photographs of it were returned -- anonymously to a local newspaper.

Starting about the same time, an estimated 500,000 visitors flocked to see the glass facade of a home finance building in Clearwater, Fla., said to bear an iridescent image of a veiled Virgin Mary. Skeptics said it was merely a stain created by corrosion.

Eventually the building was bought by a Catholic revivalist group from Ohio, which dubbed it the Virgin Mary Building before replacing the miraculous windows, broken by vandals using slingshots, with a large picture of Jesus Christ.

But it was the famous Jesus tortilla of New Mexico that some believe set the world standard for claims of miracle sightings.

After discovering it one morning while making her husband's breakfast, Maria Rubio mounted a display of the tortilla, which, by 1979, reportedly had been visited by more than 35,000 people bearing flowers and photos of their ailing relatives.

Rubio quit her job as a maid to become full-time attendant to the shrine of the tortilla constructed in her home. And although a handful of competing miracle tortillas cropped up in subsequent years, none attracted anything approaching the fan base ascribed to the original.

Religious traditions are filled with tales of apparitions. On Dec. 12, Roman Catholics celebrate the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who they believe was first seen by a Mexican Indian named Juan Diego in 1531. Similar apparitions of a gentle woman speaking soothing words have been noted worldwide.

But a divine presence gracing a grilled-cheese sandwich?

Church officials say they don't encourage such interpretations.

''The church encourages Christians to see the face of Christ in the homeless, the poor, the destitute and the immigrant -- not in a plate of pasta,'' said Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. ''Imagine showing up on your judgment day in front of God, and he says, 'Where did you see me? Did you see me in the poor and the immigrant and the homeless?' And you say, 'Well, no, but I did see you in a piece of chocolate once.' Doesn't sound so good, does it?''

Carol Hogan, communications director for the California Catholic Conference in Sacramento, who once waited hours to observe a shadow resembling the Virgin Mary, said the real miracle wasn't what she saw on the wall.

''It was the people who came and stood in line,'' she said. ''That's the part that was so memorable to me. What it said is that there's a yearning out there for things spiritual; people have a great spiritual hunger.''

"He held my hands while we talked," Ekman recalled, "and I was filled with a sense of goodness and a unique total body sensation that I have no words to describe."

Now, the noted expert on human emotional expression understands what it actually feels like to be cheery and optimistic almost every day.

"If I was 30 years younger, I'd take it on as a scientific task to try to explain what happened that day," said Ekman, 72. "It was a great gift."

What is that gift?

Mind control? Charisma? A superhuman skill learned in some Tibetan Shangri-La? A touch of magic?

The Dalai Lama prefers not to talk of such things. "I have no extraordinary energy," he says with a dismissive wave his hand. "I'm just a Buddhist monk."

But some familiar with the Dalai Lama, and those who study religious figures, agree that every so often, people emerge who are perceived to offer proof of a higher authority, understanding or wisdom.

"It -- whatever it is -- can't be defined and is not to be confused with stardom or fame," suggested someone who knows a lot about both, Maria Shriver. "I think the Dalai Lama would say look within because it's in you, not someone else. It all comes down to whether you're open to being touched in your heart."

Shriver, a member of the Kennedy clan and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife, appeared onstage with the Dalai Lama in September at a conference in Long Beach, Calif., on women's issues. She also knew Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II and said they too projected an aura.

In India, one of the most popular spiritual leaders is Mata Amritanandamayi, a Hindu woman who is said to impart divine energy with a hug. Over the years, according to her followers, the "Mother of Divine Bliss" has hugged more than 20 million people.

"Personally, I don't know what it is she has, but I don't think it's a scam," said Dara Mayers, who has written about her travels with the woman guru. "It reminded me a little of a quality I've seen in some performers and politicians like Bill Clinton, who is famous for making the focus of his attention feel like the only other person in the room."

What these special figures have in common is their effect on others. They are perceived as being able to bring people to a higher state of being through their example, teachings, sufferings or touch.

"These people are operating at a level most of us are not, and they're not limited by denominations. The spirit blows where it will," said Thomas Craughwell, a devoted Catholic and author of several books on saints. "We don't run into them very often but when we do, we're rattled because it's like a brush with the divine and because we want a piece of what they have."

That kind of talk makes some scientists uncomfortable but also hungry to know more.

Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, still marvels at how her colleagues responded to the Dalai Lama during a meeting with him in India a few years ago.

"There was one physicist who, after a few days with the Dalai Lama, tearfully confessed his wife had cancer," she said. "He wanted a blessing. Specifically, he wanted a red blessing string for his wife."

Years ago, stories about the Dalai Lama's healing presence would have placed him squarely in Ekman's "Oh, give me a break" camp.

Now, Ekman wants to know how the Dalai Lama cured him literally overnight of a temper that had him in analysis for years.

In May, Ekman crossed paths again with the Dalai Lama at a conference in Illinois and popped the question: What is it?

"The Dalai Lama smiled and said there are things science can't explain, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't try to," he said. "The Dalai Lama also said, 'Maybe science will figure these things out, which would be very nice. Maybe it won't.' "

It approached Raymond and gently touched him, and he fell to the ground terrified. His nine-year old sister Janine and two other children, who had followed him outside to play, now saw it too. The entity moved away, and Raymond, encouraged by the presence of others, began throwing stones as it left. One sounded as though it struck something metallic. The entity left the yard for a downhill pasture, where the children observed it enter an object they described as a "ball of fire," which soon ascended into the sky.

The children knew their parents and their community well enough to realize this was something best kept to themselves. But the next day at school Raymond told a friend, who told others. When it was overheard by a teacher she called the police. At the spot of the "ball of fire," officers from Saint Claude and Les Rousses found four triangular indentations in the ground and a clearly defined area of compression 12-feet in diameter with grass heavily flattened, like a pinwheel, in a counterclockwise fashion. "In addition," Jacques Vallee writes in Challenge to Science, "a pole fence had been grazed and the bark of a pine tree was scorched five feet above the ground."

But to me, the most interesting aspect of the story is the reaction of Raymond's mother:

Throughout this investigation, Mrs Romand displayed a very strange attitude. She seemed deeply shocked by the whole affair and reluctant to let the interview take place. She refused to believe that Raymond might have seen something. A very pious, devout woman, she stated plainly that "flying saucers" and "Martians" could not exist and that she would rather believe that an evil spirit, or the Devil himself, was prompting her son to lie.... A newspaper reporter who went to Premanon and spoke to the woman remarked that her home was probably one of the few places in France where the subject of "flying saucers" had never been discussed at the dinner table. The children themselves never used the term "saucer" or "Martian." They said and repeated that they had seen a "ghost." The idea of a "flying saucer" was started by the adults in Premanon.

To Mrs Romand it became of paramount importance, for both her family's reputation in the community and her until-then unchallenged assumptions of the way things were, that her son must have made the whole thing up. Think about that for a moment, and you may see what a common response it is to information that transgresses our base-beliefs. Sometimes, the consequences of admitting certain realities are thought to be so grave we would rather believe a loved one a lunatic or a liar for testifying to them.

But Raymond and the children didn't change their story: whatever they had seen, it was what they had seen, and the best reference they had for it was not the "flying saucers" of adults' presumptions but rather, vaguely (and so perhaps most accurately), a "ghost." Raymond was punished for his resistance to admit a lie, and was confined to the house until the episode was behind them and normalcy restored.

Edward Ruppelt, director of Project Blue Book, came to respect the ineffability of the UFO phenomenon, yet he also said "next to the 'insufficient data' file was a file marked 'C.P.' This meant crackpot. Into this file went all reports from people who had...inspected flying saucers that had landed in the United States." To this, Vallee remarks that if "we do not refuse to study the UFO as an aerial object, we cannot logically refuse to study it when it has reported to have landed." Furthermore, "we cannot dispose of the sightings made by pilots, customs officers, and railroad engineers, people who are not prone to go berserk, by saying that they have 'merely' had hallucinations or invented a science fiction story."

We all have our meta-narratives about Life, the Universe and Everything by which we interpret events and perceive trends. We need them if we aspire to critical thought, but we also ought to be conscious of them and of what they represent: they're the mental scaffolding to support our modeling of the world and to build a case about it, they are not the world itself. And so they need to be flexible, and we need to be humble enough to reconfigure them when necessary according to new evidence and fresh insight. If not, we can find ourselves in rabbit holes of our own making that resemble nothing so much as The Princess Bride's battle of wits. ("Truly you have a dizzying intellect." "Wait 'til I get going!")

With respect to UFOs, it's a fairly common parapolitical conceit to subsume the entire phenomenon to mind control, and relegate everything that doesn't fit, Ruppelt-like, to the crackpot file. Such absolutism regards the paranormal as a competing and even threatening meta-narrative: if UFOs and "aliens" have been hoaxed and employed as screen memories, then that's regarded as the depth of their reality. No further investigation is required nor considered beneficial.

The Litvinenko story provides an interesting example of competing meta-narratives. The current Kremlin line is that the former spy was not assassinated, but rather unintentionally poisoned by polonium-210 he was peddling to al Qaeda for use as the trigger for a nuclear bomb. It's fascinating to watch this digested by some in the West who, if told a similar tale by the White House, would probably respond How gullible do they think we are? Polonium makes an unlikely choice of poison, unless the assassination was also a myth-making exercise to suggest the Chechens had the bomb. In any regard, answering the rhetorical Cui bono? is not so easy, unless you want to be a Wallace Shawn about it.

Senator Tim Johnson's critical illness is another. Could it be an assassination attempt? Naturally; it always could be. But let's keep our hypotheses in an open hand, and not a balled fist, especially at this early date. Otherwise our theorizing can lapse into soap opera every bit as unreal, though with the appearance of reality, as "Lonelygirl15"'s flight from a thelema-like cult. (Besides, Johnson's no Paul Wellstone, whom Dick Cheney threatened with "severe ramifications" for voting against the war. And to think the Republicans need another body in order to control the agenda is to mistake parties for partisanship and the Washington consensus for representative democracy. )

And regarding 9/11, "inside job" for some means making the hijackers disappear altogether, and so Daniel Hopsicker's ongoing investigation into Mohamed Atta's deep political demimonde will be dismissed as a "distraction," "disinfo," or a threat best disregarded. Their mental scaffolding has become a fetish, and is incapable of innovation or correction.

We need nimble minds about this stuff, and to always be ready to erect new scaffolding when the old no longer serves us well. And when we see a ghost, perhaps we ought to say we've seen one. Even if we don't believe in them.

The conference host was Martin Jasek, a former Yukon resident who helped found the Yukon UFO chapter in the 1990s. He said the Wolf Creek resident shared his story last weekend about seeing the orange objects the same night.
The numbers attending the conference were down from the 60 who showed up at the 2002 gathering and just a faction of the 300-plus for the inaugural millennium event in 2000.
Jasek, however, remains insistent that openly discussing and questioning the unexplained remains as important as ever.
"I would like to see it accepted by the mainstream," Jasek reiterated in an interview Monday. "I think it is all of our responsibility . . . to ask officials questions.

"So the next time there is an election, and somebody is knocking on your door asking for your support, ask them what they think about the UFO issue," he said, matter-of-factly.
Jasek, a professional engineer who studies river flows in B.C., came to Whitehorse specifically to host the conference, which was to mark the 10th anniversary of what Jasek refers to as the giant UFO sighting. The event was witnessed by at least 31 Yukoners, from motorists travelling the highway near Fox Lake, to residents of Carmacks, Pelly Crossing and Mayo.

He said it was unfortunate the giant UFO anniversary of Dec. 11, 1996 doesn't fit well with the approaching holiday season and the ongoing office Christmas parties, which he suspects are part of the reason for the lower numbers.
Jasek and conference co-ordinator Cher Davidson of Whitehorse travelled to Pelly Crossing last Sunday for a meeting sponsored by the Selkirk First Nation and organized by Jean Van Bibber.

Van Bibber, a candidate in October's territorial election, was witness to the 1996 sighting, and was one of three attending the meeting.

Still, Jasek and Davidson are not deterred, and plan to host another conference in 2008 at a different time.
"I have always been interested in weird stuff but I really did not get involved until the millennium conference," said Davidson, who has witnessed more than one inexplicable event.

One of the events involved a golden, V-shaped object in the sky over the area at the south end of Lake Laberge, she said.

Like Jasek, Davidson believes there is a need to maintain open discussions about UFOs, to advance the subject as something that needs to be talked about openly.
"I think the ridicule factor is slowly diminishing, but there is still a lot of it out there," she said. "But we will take your calls seriously, and we will listen to them and offer such support that we are able to."
Jasek: "The more people talk about it, the more people will take it seriously."

If it had just been an investigation into a mysterious death, the Stevens inquiry would have been pointless - there was no mystery, so there was nothing worth investigating. But Stevens served a second purpose which has little to do with providing dry facts for a coroner. He has presided over Britain's first official inquiry into a conspiracy theory. The result is devastating: a relentless line-by-line refutation of Mohamed al-Fayed's elaborate story of how MI6 officers arranged the murder of the mother of their future sovereign because she was planning to marry Fayed's son, Dodi.

Nearly every chapter begins with a paragraph headed 'claims in support of conspiracy allegation' and ends with each and every claim lying in pieces. Fayed alleged that the princess and his son planned to marry because she was carrying his child. The royal family 'could not accept that an Egyptian Muslim could eventually be the stepfather of the future King of England' so - QED - they ordered her murder. Well, asks Stevens, was Diana pregnant? Absolutely not, said the forensic scientist who tested a blood sample. Did anyone see the strobe light that blinded the driver in the seconds before the crash? No, no one saw it, says Stevens, because it wasn't there. What of Henri Paul, Fayed's driver? Was he truly drunk or acting on the orders of the British state? Of course he was drunk, says Stevens, his blood samples proved it.

Reading his findings is like watching someone tear down an elaborate folly. Brick by brick, he takes apart the baroque structure of fantasies and half-truths Fayed built to cover the inconvenient fact that the accident was the fault of a reckless driver in his employ.

There are many in Whitehall who feel that the effort is worthwhile. The allegation that they murdered the princess infuriates MI6 officers. They want the facts on the public record. Meanwhile, diplomats worry that conspiracy theories can be far more dangerous than those who laugh at them believe. With gruesome timing, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran made their point for them last week when he convened a modern equivalent of a Nuremberg rally in Tehran at which Islamist clerics, Ku Klux Klanners and European Nazis insisted the Holocaust was a myth. They had a political purpose that clearly was worth combating. Today's far right needs to deny the Nazi concentration camps for the same reason today's far left needs to deny Serb concentration camps in Bosnia. For modern fascists or Serb nationalists, the images of Jews at Auschwitz or starving Bosnian Muslims behind barbed wire have to be dismissed as the forgeries of conspirators because the crimes they record are huge obstacles in the way of a revival of support for fascism or Serb nationalism.

The Foreign Office must believe that the Diana conspiracy theory is a similarly malign myth. Within days of the princess's death, Colonel Gadaffi and thousands of others in Middle Eastern politics and journalism were agreeing with Fayed that the royals had ordered a murder to stop the princess marrying an Arab. I can see how diplomats could argue that they had to combat a fantasy that was adding to already Himalayan levels of suspicion about Britain. If they were to look more closely, however, they would see that this conspiracy theory doesn't fit neatly into a clash of civilisations argument between 'the West' and 'Islam'. It is much weirder than that.

After all, Fayed's greatest champion isn't the proprietor of some radical Islamist journal but the editor and readers of the Express, an old Tory newspaper which long ago lost the last of its marbles. Fayed himself isn't turning to Gadaffi for support but to Lyndon LaRouche, an American Trotskyist turned conservative loon who believes that Elizabeth II and Prince Philip are leading a British conspiracy to take over the United States with the help of Lord Rees-Mogg, the 'Joseph Goebbels of the British oligarchical mob'.

The great American novelist Don DeLillo, who has made paranoia his theme, long ago explained the appeal of Fayed and even LaRouche to otherwise reasonable people when he said that 'if we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme... [It] is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach.'

Nothing Lord Stevens can say will change the minds of the readers and journalists of the Express and millions of others who feel themselves to be DeLillo's outsiders. Like children with their noses pressed at a grimy window, they try to make a 'rough sense' of the murky world beyond by imagining that the British government - of all incompetent institutions - has the ruthless intelligence to get away with organising an astonishing crime. You can't explain away their fantasies with the half-rational explanation that they are manifestations of wider conflicts - not least because the overwhelming majority of Express readers aren't Muslim. They believe in this conspiracy theory, as they will believe in the next one, because conspiracy theories bring order to a chaotic universe. The hundreds of pages of patiently collected witness statements will make no difference to those who are too frightened to accept the messiness of life.

After the princess and his son died, Fayed proclaimed that: 'If this planet lasts for another thousand years people will still be talking about the terrible event we are now living through.'

The awful truth is that he is probably right.