TO OUR READERS

RICHARD CORLISS, writer of the cover story on big- and small-screen aliens, recalls having to sleep with the light on after seeing the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a lad. "In a way, thinking about the terror a good movie could provoke made me want to be a film critic." Since 1980 he has been that at TIME, also reviewing theater, music, sports and the occasional theme park. He keeps an open mind on alien autopsies and abductions. His wife Mary, though, is a believer in editorial abductions, especially on those late nights when Corliss is in his TIME office, staring at a blank computer screen with that familiar dreadful thrill.

SAM GWYNNE and LARRY GURWIN, who collaborated on this week's investigative story on the controversial Austrian trading company Nordex, used to be fierce rivals. Before joining TIME last year, Gurwin wrote for the Economist and the now defunct business magazine Regardie's on the early 1990s scandal involving the Bank of Credit & Commerce International (B.C.C.I.)--a story that Gwynne had reported on for Time. What's more, they both co-authored books on that tangled tale. It was useful preparation for their encounter with Nordex. Unlike B.C.C.I., Nordex has never been charged with any crimes, although it has been under scrutiny by police and intelligence agents for years. To find out why, Gwynne and Gurwin gathered information from sources in the U.S., the Middle East, Russia and other European nations. "We went to extraordinary lengths to find out everything we could," says Gurwin. One of the best sources was Nordex president Grigori Loutchansky, says Gwynne, "because he's anxious to clear his name."

SCOTT MACLEOD, TIME's veteran middle East reporter, was in the Emirate of Bahrain, just minutes away from boarding a flight to Paris, when he got word of the terrorist bomb attack at the American military compound near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Without a moment's hesitation, he had his luggage removed from the plane and started working on getting a visa. It was hardly a sure thing, since MacLeod had recently reported a TIME story that the Saudi royal family found displeasing. But by the next day he was at the scene of the explosion. "It was my misfortune to have seen this sort of tragedy before," he says. As a wire-service correspondent in Beirut in 1983, MacLeod was one of the first journalists to arrive on the scene after the bombings of the U.S. embassy and the U.S. Marine compound there. "I found the same thing at the base in Saudi Arabia as I did in Beirut 13 years ago," he recalls, "good-hearted and well-intentioned Americans quite dazed by the furies of the Middle East."