LOL! Okay, Wolfgang, you have succeeded in putting a smile on my face this morning. :-)

As you've noticed, I get touchy over ETV's (or UFO's). I imagine we all get touchy over something...I used to be such a scientific-minded, utterly sceptical little conventional know-it-all prig that I have retained a lifelong anger against that particular attitude when I think I see it in somebody else...it's really my own past I am reacting against, in all likelihood, rather than you.

My father and his brother are/were like that too. His brother was in the Manhattan Project in WWII, and had to be the most insufferably arrogant person I have ever known. He had the answer to everything...supposedly...but I caught him on some errors when I was a kid, like the time he insisted that our Pearl Gourami was a Siamese Fighting Fish. When I showed him the fish book with the pictures of these fish, he glared at the book, and said "Some idiot has put the wrong headings under these pictures!" The man was utterly impervious to anything except his own ego.

Unlike you, he never admitted to an error in his whole life, and I don't think I ever met anyone who liked him much, except his mother. She thought he was a genius.

- LH