Is this the moment we’ve all been waiting for since we were kids? And are we missing it? Shouldn’t we all be, you know, absolutely losing our minds right now?
You know what I’m talking about right? Are we being visited by … aliens?!
Because if creatures from outer space are buzzing around the Earth, I figured there would have been more hubbub, more mass hysteria, more people walking the streets with fake googly eyes and plastic antennae. Sure, the Super Bowl is big news – did you see Rihanna’s beautiful bump?! – but is a football game bigger news than honest-to-goodness UFOs?
Maybe. It seems in the fractured world of 2023, flying saucers may not have enough juice to overtake flying footballs. It sure wouldn’t have been that way when we were kids, though. And by that I mean all of us, young or old.
Every generation has been captivated by stories of unknown visitors from the sky. For you old-timers, you must still remember the time Orson Welles terrified the masses with a radio performance of The War of the Worlds in 1938. Have you found the pants that Welles scared off you yet?
And Baby Boomers, you grew up wondering what the heck happened in the desert near Roswell, N.M. And you also grew up watching Captain James T. Kirk fight Klingons and seduce green alien ladies. Talk about boldly going where no man has gone before.
And Gen X, you haven’t forgotten about your best bike-flying buddy, have you? For 41 years you’ve been thinking about what you would do if E.T. showed up in your tool shed, and how much fun it would have been to have Drew Barrymore as a little sister.
Mork and Mindy, ALF, Chewbacca, the Predator, Marvin the Martian, Michael Jackson – we have long been obsessed with creatures from another world.
So, uhhhh, is it all happening now? Has the Mothership landed?
Credible sources, as well as the New York Times, are reporting that the United States has shot down multiple unidentified flying objects in American and Canadian airspace over the last couple of weeks. Now, I’m not one to go to deep into conspiracy theories, but have any of you considered that if you abbreviate the term unidentified flying object, you get UFO?
Ahhhhh! What’s going on? Did we just fire missiles at aliens?!
On Monday, the White House press secretary said “there is no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”
Sure, buddy. What else would you say after shooting down Baby Yoda?
But somehow this may not even be the biggest airspace story of the past month, let alone the past century.
Before the UFO shootouts, we had an attention-grabbing appearance of an IFO – a balloon from China, that was either spying or taking weather data. Now I’m no espionage expert, but a big white balloon that everyone can see slowly drifting across the entire country does not seem like the world’s best spy craft. But what do I know? The United States shot it down anyway.
Want something closer to home? Several people captured photos of a burning object moving through the sky Friday morning in the B.C. Interior, near Kelowna. Castanet reports that none of the people who captured the scene on camera were particularly sure what it was, and the Kelowna International Airport says they are unaware of the incident and, whatever it is, it doesn’t involve aviation.
And then there’s the Airlander 10, a prototype airship, reputed to be the “world’s longest aircraft,” which seems like an aviation marvel but also, from some angles in some photographs that recently resurfaced, looks very much like…. Well, I’m not sure I can say what it looks like in a family newspaper. Here's a link to click, if you dare. I won't say it's NSFW, but it's not necessarily SFW either.
Suffice it to say, though, that you wouldn’t soon forget it if you spotted it hovering over your head.
Maybe there are practical, scientific, Earthly explanations for all these things.
By all means, go back to your daily lives, eating your Corn Flakes and watching your Canucks lose. Just maybe, though, take a quick check of the supplies you have on hand for greeting aliens, nice or nasty. Is the basket on your bicycle securely in place? Are your phasers set to stun? Do you have extra Valentine’s Day candy for green aliens or curvy blimps?
With all the weird stuff we’ve seen from humans over the past handful of years, it seems about time to give an alien race a try. How much worse could they be? The truth is out there.
Andy Prest is the assistant editor of the North Shore News. His lifestyle/humour column runs biweekly. [email protected]
