The appeal to authenticity of experience is what brings the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy together. This appeal is socially constructed, for it is clear that not only individuals, but also various social groups can vary in their definitions of the authentic. What seems immediate to one group is highly mediated to another. In our culture, children may interpret cartoons and picture books under the logic of transparent immediacy, while adults will not. Even among adults, more sophisticated groups may experience a media event as hypermediated, while a less sophisticated group still opts for immediacy. In the mid-1990s a film became widely available (even in video stores) that purported to show the autopsy by American doctors of an alien creature. When both sides in the UFO debate pored over the film, their argument really concerned the logic by which the film should he read. Critics were looking for signs of mediation or staging-for example, that the telephone on the wall was of the wrong kind for the supposed date of the autopsy. Believers, on the other hand, were trying to establish that the film was a transparent recording of a "real" event. All debates about UFO films and photographs turn on the question of transparency.