Russell Baker 7/93
People who believe in UFOs demonstrated at the White House the
other day demanding that the government come clean. Their placards
said the government knew UFOs "are real," and they want it to quit
pretending they're not and tell what it knows about those visitors
from out yonder.
I tend to believe almost anybody who says the government is
suppressing the facts. That's what comes of living through the
Vietnam War, Watergate and the CIA's reporting on the robust health of the Soviet Union.
Well do I recall stories of Ernest Hemingway telling friends
the FBI was watching him. Everybody said it was sad evidence that
Papa had gone round the bend into raving paranoia. Later Herbert
Mitgang of The New York Times won access to the files and - how
about this, paranoia fans! - the FBI had been watching Hemingway
all along.
So I am in no hurry to ridicule people who say the government
is engaged in a UFO cover-up. Truth to tell, being a romantic as
well as a skeptic, I'd like there to be extraterrestrial things
fooling around with Earth.
The same romantic streak makes me want Elvis to be still alive
somewhere making music privately, or maybe with Nat "King" Cole.
(Have you noticed that another Nat "King" Cole record comes along
almost every year even though the papers reported his death back in
1965?)
Still, the skeptical part of me resists the UFO people. The
question I have never been able to answer satisfactorily is, why
Earth? Let's try a little role reversal and imagine that we, you
and I, live somewhere far out in the cosmos where the intellectual
brilliance is so dazzling that traveling faster than light is no
problem.
Having cracked the light barrier, we have the whole gigantic
universe at our disposal, so I can imagine us one night tooling
around faster than light, maybe just taking the old FO out for a
spin.
As an Earth person old enough to have experienced the
un-air-conditioned house, I remember an uncle piling everybody into his Whippet one breathless summer night and driving from
Belleville, N.J., all the way up to Suffern, N.Y., on a search for
cool air.
We might do the same thing if we had a machine that could leave
light in the dust: Just pile in, going for a drive as it were, and
nipping off to some lively corner of the universe. Off the beaten
track maybe we spot a funny little place full of funny little
things called people.
Maybe we've been headed out toward the big rock-candy galaxy
where the hens lay soft-boiled eggs and the cops have rubber legs
when we see this little place - Earth, of course - sitting well off the side of the road as it were. Strange sounds come off it.
Curious to see if maybe it's a revival meeting in progress, we
pause for a glance.
Now I am making us sound a lot more like Earth people than we
are. The fact is that compared with us, Earth people are as dumb as cabbages. So dumb they haven't even figured out how to crack the
light barrier.
They creep around their dreary, desiccated old planetary
neighborhood in ancient heaps made of primitive metals, inside
which they are comically dependent on an artificially provided
nitrogen-oxygen compound to maintain what they think of, with their utter lack of imagination, as life.
Mostly, however, their activity consists of moving about slowly
in clotted masses when not positioned motionlessly, apparently
narcotized, in front of boxes. This, I submit, is not a place where creatures like us are likely to tarry.
By our standards, it is strictly pre-history. In fact, there is
an excellent replica of it back home in the Museum of Prehistoric
Absurdity. Oh sure, maybe to amuse ourselves we stop, pick up a
couple of those cabbage brains, bring them into our FO and have a
little fun with them. You know, pretending we're not going to let
them go unless they can name the capitals of all 50 states or sing
the second verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Personally, I can't see us coming back. Or even hanging around.
Credit: discover-ghosts.blogspot.com
