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.In The Zone . .Emotional Chaos . ..Number 9. . .September 11

Emotional Chaos
Weekly Column by Brian Codagnone

January 12, 2006

WATCH THE SKIES

Those of us who remember "Project Blue Book", the Air Force's investigationinto UFO sightings back in the 1960s, are surely wondering whatever happened to all those UFOs. In those days, the skies were lousy with UFOs, strange lights and all sorts of weird and unexplainable things. So why have sightings dropped off? Have the aliens lost interest? Or is it us? We have more cable channels now than we ever dreamed of back then, so staring up at the night sky has lost a lot of the appeal it had back in the days when we were limited to network TV. Coincidence? Maybe not.

How did it all start, you ask? It began in a small town named Roswell, New Mexico (and we're being generous here. "God forsaken wasteland" might have been a more apt description. Now, before you Roswellians start sending angry letters and e-mails threatening lawsuits and rectal probes, let me say that I'm sure Roswell is a nice place. What I'm saying is that in 1947 it wasn't exactly Paris in springtime).

People around Roswell began seeing what were described as "flying saucers". Before that, UFOs had been known as "Warp Drive Interstellar Spacecraft", but "Flying Saucers" looked better in the tabloids. Reliable (by the standards of the day, given the amount of alcohol consumption back then) sources even reported seeing wreckage and bodies of aliens described as "really mangled, but hey, you try to look good after a UFO crash". It seemed like a slam-dunk: our neighbors from beyond the solar system were visiting, and boy, were they lousy drivers. But, then something happened. With all the attention being focused on this small hamlet, as well as increasing paranoia over the Cold War (when, apparently, everyone had a Communist under the bed, if only for emergencies), the Government backpedaled on the claims that aliens had indeed landed/crashed/stopped for a quick bite in Roswell. Soon very convincing pictures of military officers holding wreckage were described as "downed weather balloons" rather then "the debris from the crash of a highly sophisticated interstellar vehicle". In fact, they were quite insistent about it when dealing with the locals. "Listen, Cletus", they'd say with more than a little menace, "That glowing, spinning thing you saw do an Immelmann roll over your dirt farm and then shoot up at Mach 6 and crash with a blast roughly the size of Hiroshima was just a weather balloon". If it was a weather balloon, it must have been the Hindenburg, and even someone as inbred and habitually inebriated as Cletus must have seen it.

Cletus: "Wouldn't it be more convincing to tell me it was a top secret experimental aircraft from the nearby Air Force base, which, as I recall, spends most of its time testing top secret experimental aircraft?"

Major: "Uh, I suppose..."

Captain: "Hey, that WOULD make more sense!"

Cletus: "I mean, THAT I'd believe, or even, 'It's a matter of national security, so don't tell anyone'. But a weather balloon? How dumb do you think I am?"

Major: "Well, you DO live in a packing crate."

Captain: "And your wife does bear a striking resemblance to you. Close enough to be your sister!"

Cletus: "Twin, actually. But that's besides the point. Before you came, I'd have believed anything the government told me, but now I'm afraid I'll have to tell the tabloids."

Cletus never did, of course, as he was never seen again, but somehow the word got out. Soon, everyone was watching the skies for UFOs.

And what of the aliens themselves? Beings that have mastered deep space travel seem to have certain glaring limitations. For openers, they always dress alike, and usually in jumpsuits (preferably silver). And why do such advanced beings rely so much on rectal probes to gather information? Do they know something we don't? What happened to the Star Trek scanners, the ones that Bones would simply wave around and obtain such key information as, "Jim, this man's a Klingon!". He never had to say, "Bend over" to learn what he needed to know. In fact, you never heard him say, "Turn your head and cough", either. That's MY idea of advanced medicine!

So, is there a method to their madness? Are they trying to keep us guessing? The aliens always try to maintain a low profile (or as low as one can in a glowing, spinning spacecraft that looks like a Christmas tree in heat). They never land anyplace where the collective IQ is beyond the double digits, either. Maybe that's why they have such a low opinion of us. It can't simply be from monitoring our television broadcasts. If they based their opinion of us on that they would have vaporized the planet by now.

NEXT:

Who's having these "Close Encounters" and why!

EMOTIONAL CHAOS ARCHIVES

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