The logical implications of saucers being a mistake had the feel of paradigm shift to Kottmeyer, like suddenly learning that one of the axioms one learned in school forming the base of Euclidean geometric reasoning had just changed. One was not living in a Euclidean universe, but a Riemannian one where a straight line was no longer the shortest distance between two points. All those people in 1947 who reported seeing circular, disc-shaped, saucer-shaped crafts (82% of the 853 cases collected by Ted Bloecher) had based their expectations on a mistake, a rumor with journalistic credentials. They weren't seeing what Arnold saw, only what they were told he saw. Similarly the rumor shaped the ufo phenomenon for decades afterwards keeping the shape dominant throughout the culture, shaping film imagery, saucer photography, ufo illustration, contactee tales, and high strangeness abduction experiences By one tally 82% of the craft descriptions in alien abduction reports fall into the flying saucer category. It can be found in nearly all the well-known cases: Betty & Barney Hill's interrupted journey, Herb Schirmer, Travis Walton, the Andreasson affair, Whitley Strieber