The expansiveness of the terrain gives a motorist going 85 mph a sense of traversing a sizable chunk of the planet Earth. There are distant mountain ranges, ancient sea beds, a palpable sense of tectonic forces throwing up giant slabs of crust. When the sun goes down the stars come out as though there is no intervening layer of atmosphere. You drive down that highway and sense the truth that eludes us in the big cities -- that we really are space travelers, all of us. On this rock we zoom through the universe.

At a UFO convention in Laughlin, a strip of bright lights along the Colorado River about 75 miles south of Las Vegas, I met two women who believed that they, themselves, were alien entities. Both were striking blonds, perhaps 40ish, and they were on an amazing voyage of self-discovery. Miesha Johnston ran a support group for people who had had "experiences" with aliens. She was gradually coming to terms with the theory advanced by her roommate, Jan Bingham, which was that they were aliens in human bodies, or "starseed."

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