We speculate that in high energy diffractive scattering many features of data can be explained under assumption that the scattering amplitude contains sizable part sensitive to the spin of colliding particles. This spin-dependent part of the amplitude does not vanish at high energies and becomes leading at momentum transfer -t>1--2 GeV² and energy \sqrt {s}>10--20 GeV. In terms of Regge approach, the amplitude corresponds to exchange of a reggeon with vacuum quantum numbers, negative signature, intercept \alpha (0)\approx 1 and zero slope.

PACS numbers: 12.40.Nn, 13.60.Le, 13.75.Cs, 13.88.+e