Will Chuck Berry save a future alien race from Millennial-driven genocide?

Pictured: Chuck Berry, a future alien messiah? 

What do Chuck Berry, aliens, the Prime Directive, and Millennials have in common? This blogpost. They've also all been in the news lately. And, as we'll see, they're more connected than you might think at first.

First, Chuck Berry. The legendary musician died last week at age 90. Many consider him the founder of rock 'n' roll. Between his guitar-centric, bluesy output, his theatrical stage persona, and wild personal life, it's hard to object to this title (unless you think Marty McFly deserves credit). The semi-autobiographical* "Johnny B Goode" may not have technically been the first rock 'n' roll song, but it was probably the most influential of rock's early period, earning Berry a legion of fans and imitators:



When the British Invasion began, many of its soldiers professed and demonstrated an admiration for Berry. The Beatles were fans; the first song they played at their first American concert was a cover of his "Roll Over Beethoven":



And here's The Beatles' version:



For further testament of Berry's influence on The Beatles, witness John Lennon's live performance with Berry:



And George Harrison's rendition of "Johnny B. Goode":


As befits the band that John Lennon (rightly) called "Son of Beatles," Electric Light Orchestra also covered Berry's hit, producing a raucous, 8-minute long uptempo rocker with orchestral snippets and backing that I consider the song's best cover:

Even without being inducted to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame's inaugural class, Chuck Berry has earned a place in rock 'n' roll history. Looking at the state of rock today, a cynic could even say he outlived rock itself.

Though Chuck Berry may have died to this world, he will actually outlive all of us. For in 1977, NASA affixed a golden record to two probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, sent into deep space for a journey from which they would not return. Scientist Carl Sagan, among others, chose the contents of that record to maximize the information an intelligent alien race that might find it would glean about Earth and humanity from it. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the record includes "15 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music." Some specific items include:
-A silhouette of a male and a pregnant female
-DNA structure
-Diagrams of eating, licking (but remember: Licking doorknobs is illegal on other planets!), and drinking

The music selections included were some more classically-oriented works...and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode." One of the Voyager record's other compilers objected to Berry's inclusion, calling the song "adolescent." To which Sagan replied: "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet." Indeed, some of those adolescents may have watched the 1977 Saturday Night Live sketch in which Steve Martin played a psychic who revealed the first four words uttered by extraterrestrials, words that would appear on the front cover of the next week's Time Magazine: Send More Chuck Berry.



There are far worse ways to establish first contact. In fact, a recent poll revealed that American human beings might not be so accommodating if we find the aliens first. We would, instead, be quite likely to violate what is known in Star Trek lore as the Prime Directive, the principle (routinely ignored in the show) that dictated strict non-interference in the affairs of civilizations that had not yet achieved faster-than-light travel.

The YouGov Poll (full results here), released last week, asked the following:

How I wasn't called about this poll, despite my expertise in this area, is a mystery and a rank injustice of the highest order. Anyway, here were the overall responses: 

I would have gone with option four myself. 

A plurality of overall respondents favor breaking the Prime Directive to help the alien race advance. And eight percent (!) of the human race would favor revealing ourselves to a discovered alien race, and either enslaving or destroying it. Go humanity.

Millennials, a demographic cohort still being defined (stipulated in this poll as current 18-24 year-olds which seems about right to me), but to which I belong, had the most fascinating responses to these questions:




Yes, you read the correctly: Millennials, supposedly the most tolerant and open-minded generation in American history, are more enthusiastic about enslaving or exterminating an alien race than any other polled demographic. To be fair, we're also more enthusiastic about helping that race advance than any other demographic (though "Generation Z" or whatever it's called wasn't polled). Maybe it's just that we're more sure of ourselves in general. Whatever you think, though, it's an interesting result. The fate of a future alien race may depend on whether it and and the humans who ultimately make first contact know about Chuck Berry**. Be good, Johnny. Be good.

*The lyrics speak of a young person who learns how to play guitar in a bid for immortality:

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans,
Way back up in the woods among the evergreens
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood,
Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode
Who never ever learned to read or write so well,
But he could play a guitar just like a ringing a bell...

...His mother told him, "Someday you will be a man,
And you will be the leader of a big old band.
Many people coming from miles around
To hear you play your music when the sun go down.
Maybe someday your name will be in lights
Saying 'Johnny B. Goode tonight'."

**Maybe history will remember Chuck Berry as the "representative" of the rock era. And maybe we will find that the aliens have fashioned their civilization after the Chuck Berry recording; something similar happened in many Star Trek episodes.

When C.S. Lewis combined aliens and Christianity

C.S. Lewis, a pretty cool dude

Longtime readers of this blog--if there are any--know that I am fascinated with aliens. Perhaps less well known is the fact that this fascination extends at least as far back into my life as high school. It was during that time that my high school library, which periodically gives away books it was trying to get rid of, set out for the taking the three volumes of the Space Trilogy, written by C.S. Lewis (better known, of course, for The Chronicles of Narnia and Christian apologetics such as Mere Christianity). I had somehow heard about these books, which are combine aliens and vintage science fiction with Christian theology, before I saw my library trying to give them away. Hardly one to pass up free books anyway, and already interested in the promised synthesis of extraterrestrials and religion, I scooped them up, thinking I would read them at some point if not right then.

And I did--six years later. I may procrastinate, but I eventually get around to the thing I set out to do. In this case, I'm glad I did. All three novels--Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength--were great reads, though Perelandra stands out as the best of three. After reading all of the books, I wrote essays for the Patheos blog "Love Among the Ruins" about each, interpreting them in light of Catholic doctrine (even though Lewis wasn't Catholic, he might as well have been). I started with the first, obviously, which recounts a trip to the planet we know as Mars, but is known in the book as Malacandra. The main character, a Lewis stand-in named Elwin Ransom, finds himself unwittingly dragooned into a sort of imperialist mission by two other characters to conquer Mars in the name of "human progress," but all three human characters find that the inhabitants on Mars have something to teach the human race. As I wrote in my essay on Out of the Silent Planet:

Thus do three humans travel to a world two of them consider benighted, yet where one of them discovers it quite the opposite. Ransom finds that it is, rather, the full flowering of a world that never diverged from the naturally ordained order of its Creator, as the supreme contentment and harmony of its inhabitants bear out. Instead, Earth is the place that needs help, as it is the domain of humans of a wounded nature.

The inhabitants of Malacandra, then, actually point humanity toward a better way to live in relation to our Creator. 

As Lewis followed up Out of the Silent Planet with Perelandra, so I followed up my response to the former with one on the latter. Perelandra once again details a journey by Ransom to another planet. This time, however, he is sent willingly, to a world that is not old, as was Malacandra, but to young, Edenic Perelandra (to us, Venus). There, he confronts an attempt by an all-too-familiar evil to corrupt that world as it once did our own. Though Ransom wonders whether he must save Perelandra at all, or whether such thoughts are instead vain, even blasphemous speculation on his part, he accepts that this is the correct course of action. As I wrote in my essay on Perelandra:

...he realizes that, though God became Man because of sin, this was not the good that God had prepared for man. “That is lost for ever. The first King and first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing; and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good; and what they lost we have not seen.” Though good came of it eventually, and the great good will come of it in the end, it was not God’s original plan for man and deprived him of the graces of his Original State. Thus does Ransom’s agonizing over his mission end; for so long he had wondered: “Had Hell a prerogative to work wonders? Why did Heaven work none?” His conclusion: “He himself was the miracle.” He was sent to Perelandra to answer that greatest of what-ifs, to prevent a recurrence of the Fall on another world.

Ransom's wondering why the Fall happened on Earth and questioning whether it was necessary, then, both enable him in good conscience to go about saving another world from a similar fate, and deepen his own theological understanding of the Fall of Man.

Lewis concludes his trilogy with That Hideous Strength, and I of course concluded my own trilogy with an essay on it. Lewis brings the action back to Earth in this novel. He shows through the actions of the seemingly well-intentioned National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiment (N.I.C.E. [!]) how man utterly divorced from the spiritual and consumed by the material can be just as dangerous as a religious fanatic, if not more so--especially when armed with the latest technology and a completely utilitarian mindset. Standing against the N.I.C.E. is a seemingly meager resistance that draws its strength from a more integrated, organic view of man, one rooted, moreover, in religious precepts. Lewis offers some advice in the novel of significant import to those who despair at the state of the modern world, which I quote in my essay on That Hideous Strength:

We must change the culture, starting by living lives consistent with John Pauline principles, and then spreading outward to the lives of our peers and the character of our institutions by our examples. For while proponents have lost much ground, the divine lingers in the world and its people. Therefore, “[t]he whole work of healing Tellus [another name for Earth] depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each…” It is now up to us to put his advice into practice.

Those who want to do something about the state of the world, then, must work outward from the goodness that still lingers in even the most lost and corrupted souls and institutions of our society. (For another take on That Hideous Strength, click here.)

Given the Space Trilogy's thematic depth, fantastic settings, and intriguing characterizations and plotting, I would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in aliens, religion, or both. Give them all a read, and tell me what you think. I hope you take less time to read them than I did.

50 years ago, a UFO landed (?) in Hillsdale, Michigan

Newspaper front page from the day after the sighting (via the Hillsdale Collegian).

On March 21, 1966, a UFO appeared on the campus of Hillsdale College. Though it was only one of many sightings to occur around that time in Michigan, it had by far the most witnesses; according to contemporary accounts, at least 87 people on and around Hillsdale's campus got some glimpse of the mysterious object. The sightings gave significant exposure to the UFO phenomenon.

Surprisingly, given my interest in paranormal phenomena, I did not know about the Hillsdale UFO before I chose to attend Hillsdale. If I remember correctly, my first knowledge of it came from an excerpted archive of a past article of Hillsdale College's newspaper, The Hillsdale Collegian. From that fateful moment on, I wanted to know everything that I could about this sighting (and to prove the jokers wrong).

My desire for knowledge finally bore fruit almost exactly one year ago today in the second semester of my senior year at Hillsdale, when I researched, wrote, and published what I then considered the definitive account of the Hillsdale UFO. I drew on material from our newspaper's archive, other research, and, most fascinating to me, interviews with firsthand witnesses who were actually there and saw the UFO. I encourage you to read the whole thing here, but I'll publish some choice excerpts below (I hope the Collegian doesn't get mad at me):

...At about 10:30 p.m. [on March 21, 1966], according to an eye­witness account written by [Hillsdale alumna] Gidget Kohn three days later, dozens of girls and other wit­nesses — 87 total — began to watch an “intense silver-white light.” The event was later described in Project Blue Book, the United States Air Force’s decades-long inves­ti­gation of UFO sightings nationwide as “football-shaped.”
The room of Josephine Evans ’69 had one of the best views of the object; many girls crowded into it to watch.
“We suddenly spotted what appeared to be this strange light in the [college's] arb[oretum],” Evans said. “It was odd the way the lights were, but it was also weird the way [the UFO] traveled.”
“There was a glow around it and the lights appeared to be pul­sating,” Kohn’s account added. “The glow was gone and there were three lights which were yellow-white…then the middle light turned red and then the one on the left. [We] watched for about 10 minutes and then the object seemed to move up and then to the right and left very slightly.”
...As the girls, trapped in the dorm by curfew, along with dorm moms and Van Horn, kept watching the object, it con­tinued to behave bizarrely, moving unpre­dictably and flashing lights of varying colors, inten­sities, and sequences.
“It is not really nec­essary to describe all the movements,” Kohn wrote. “Let it suffice to say that it moved like nothing earthly and [Hillsdale Civil Defense Director] Mr. [Buck] Van Horn was seeing it too.”
Meanwhile, around the same time, Harold Hess, then a Hillsdale police officer, was on a midnight to 8 p.m. shift with his partner, Jerry Wise, checking lots on Carlton Road, near where today the CVS [correction: Walgreen's] pharmacy stands. But something quickly caught their eyes, even though Hess said it was about a mile away.
“Then, over by the college, we saw a real brilliant light in the sky at a low altitude,” Hess said. “You couldn’t look at it, it was so bright.”
Hess and Wise drove over to the arboretum, where they dis­covered the mys­terious uniden­ti­fiable object that was the source of the blinding light.
“It wasn’t a chopper. There was no humming. I took my weapon out. Jerry told me to put it back,” Hess said. “‘Whatever it is, I don’t think it’ll bother it one bit what you’ve got at your side,’ Jerry told me.”
Then, Hess said, the light split, and went in two dif­ferent directions. The action had physical effects on the object’s surroundings.
“We got into our patrol car and we couldn’t transmit. We just got static,” Hess said.
“It’s one of those things that runs your hair up on the back of your head just thinking about it.”
...“It was the most unusual thing that happened to me in college. And it was very inter­esting,” Evans, who hadn’t even con­sidered the pos­si­bility of UFOs being real before seeing one herself, said. “I didn’t realize how unusual it was or inter­esting until much later. You grow up and look back and say, ‘holy moly, did that really happen?
The incident has also stuck with Hess, despite the inter­vening years.
“It’s just one of those things you never forget even as your memory fails,” he said.

The case received such national prominence that Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a Northwestern University professor, technical consultant on Steven Spielberg's 1977 UFO film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a leading UFO investigator/debunker for the U.S. Air Force, came in to to investigate. Through his investigation, Hynek came up with the explanation that the UFO was actually "swamp gas," the first time that anyone used what remains probably the second-most common explanation for UFO sightings (after weather balloons). But many were, and remain, skeptical of this:

“It was my con­siderate opinion that Dr. Hynek had his mind made up as to what his findings would be before he ever reached the City of Hillsdale,” [former Hillsdale Civil Defense Director Buck] Van Horn said in a May 26, 1966 Col­legian article. “I also observed that his main line of ques­tioning was relative only to that which would fit the Marsh Gas Theory.”
[Hillsdale alumna Gidget] Kohn also said that sub­sequent testing of the arb revealed high levels of radiation, boron, and destruction of micro­scopic plant and animal life.
[Hillsdale alumna Josephine] Evans also remains skeptical of both the swamp gas explanation.
“Dr. Hynek came to Hillsdale and I think he just wanted to get rid of us,” she said. “Hynek was pressured to play it down. Makes you wonder if there’s some kind of cover-up.”
She also doubts it was a prank.
“Some people said it could have been frat guys pulling a prank,” Evans said. “But they were way too busy drinking to do something like that.
“It was a UFO. I’m con­vinced to this day that’s what it was.”
Hess also denies the official explanation.
“I don’t believe it had anything to do with swamp gas. This was just slow, huge. Swamp gas would never be bright. It was like looking into 20 spot­lights,” Hess said. “They’ll never convince me it was swamp gas. I just truly felt it was a UFO. I have no knowledge as to what it was, no spec­u­lation as to what it could have been.”

My story received a lot of attention, both on and off campus. In fact, it got me in touch with a biographer of Hynek, who told me that Hynek himself did not actually believe in or possibly even originate his explanation. The following account I received from Hillsdale College religion and humanities professor Dr. Thomas Burke, a student of Hynek's at Northwestern, lent some credence to this biographer's version of events:

...In class, Hynek told us about his experience. He said the Air Force kept bugging him for an answer so he gave out the most ridiculous answer he could think of hoping just to get them off his back so he could continue to work on it. So he blurted out ‘swamp gas’ as a sort of joke. Immediately they ran with it and closed the investigation down, but he told us one thing he knew: It was not swamp gas.
...Hynek also showed us a graph where he plotted clarity and strength of evidence for being a genuine UFO on one axis and reliability of the witnesses on the other. (He had investigated a great many cases.) Most of the cases fell into a low evidential area of the graph either because the evidence was not strong (poor viewing conditions or capable of natural explanation) or because the witnesses were not very reliable, or both. There were a few cases however where the witnesses and the viewing conditions were very good and the sightings inexplicable enough that he felt they provided good evidence for being a genuine UFO.

As with many of these events, we may never be sure what actually happened, although today the Michigan Mututal UFO Network  is holding a 50th anniversary commemoration of the 1966 string of Michigan UFO sightings of which the Hillsdale UFO was by far the most significant; maybe they'll figure it out there. Whatever the truth of that day was, though, I consider it somewhat preordained that I chose to attend the college at which one of the most famous UFO sightings of all time occurred without even knowing about it before I came there.

It's almost like somebody planned it that way...

By the way, I once had a phone interview with this guy. But that's a story for another day...

 

Where the 2016 presidential candidates stand on UFOs

George W. Bush secures an important endorsement.

The 2016 US presidential election process has people talking about all sorts of issues, such as immigration, inequality, and international affairs. And those are just the ones that start with the letter "i."

These and other concerns may seem important, but when considered relative to the infinite vastness of the universe, they don't really matter that much.

Far more important, however, is where these presidential candidates stand on perhaps the most important question mankind can ask: Are we alone in the universe? It is a question that I, among millions of others, often ask (including once in the Hillsdale Collegian). And it is question that, if rumors are to be believed (and why shouldn't they be?), our next president might become equipped to answer upon entering the White House in 2017.

Unless the aliens blow it up before then.

So, for the benefit of voters, and for all interested parties, in America and out, on Earth and off, I have prepared this helpful guide of where the candidates stand on UFOs. For extra helpfulness, I have ordered the candidates by their likeliness to pursue the truth about UFOs if elected president.

Barack Obama. I know President Obama isn't running for a third term, but he is a useful benchmark. As The Man, there is no way that the current President would pursue the truth about UFOs. In fact, if his facetious (?) comments on The Jimmy Kimmel show are to believed, the aliens wouldn't let him:


I won't grade Obama, since he's not running, but his failure on this front (he even denied participation in a secret CIA Mars teleportation experiment!) should disappoint his supporters. N/A

Sadly, no.

Jeb Bush. The Florida governor is no longer running, and good riddance: He is just as unlikely as Obama to have pursued the truth about UFOs. For Jeb is the son of George H.W. Bush, who as director of the CIA probably helped cover up evidence of extraterrestrials, and as president did not reveal any UFO secrets (despite once claiming, when asked about UFOs while campaigning, that "I know some, I know a lot"), and brother of George W. Bush, who as president also did not reveal any UFO secrets. Another Bush would have been no better. F

Bernie Sanders. Although the Vermont senator appeals to many young voters, he is not a friend of UFO disclosure enthusiasts. A reporter who asked Sanders about UFOs claims that Sanders "had no interest in the UFO question and gave me a flippant response." Sanders is no friend to those interested in extraterrestrial life. F

Marco Rubio. The Florida senator is a bit harder to discern. When a reporter asked him (14 seconds into this video, also posted below) if aliens are real, he simply laughed and said "I don't know." Agnosticism and humility on this question are better than outright denial or active cover-up, but Rubio could do better. C 



Ben Carson. Although he seems to have no opinion on the record about UFOs, he has expressed unorthodox theories about the pyramids (that they were used to store grain), much as Ancient Astronaut Theorists suspect the pyramids were built by/with the help of aliens (note: the two theories are not mutually exclusive). C+

Donald Trump. Trump is not himself interested in UFOs. They are, however, interested in him (do they know something we don't?). And one suspects that he would throw his lot in with UFO enthusiasts if he thinks he could gain more support by doing so. C+

Ted Cruz. Based on his public speeches, the Texas senator is, in all likelihood, a robot. And although this robot has not personally indicated any interest in UFOs, he did listen to his constituents' concerns the Jade Helm military exercise, and briefly employed a UFO enthusiast as part of his campaign. He could be secretly signaling an interest while wanting to keep the aliens confused. There is hope. B-

John Kasich. The Ohio governor is by far the best hope on the Republican side for UFO enthusiasts. He once devoted a segment of his TV show on Fox News to the UFO phenomenon:



He also promised to reunite the space rock band Pink Floyd, even though Richard Wright, its keyboardist, is dead. (Kasich will probably revive Wright with alien technology.)  B+

Hillary Clinton: Hillary is by far the best hope for UFO enthusiasts on either side of the aisle. When her husband, Bill, was president, he tried to find out everything he could; John Podesta, one of her closest advisers, is a notable UFO disclosure advocate. And Hillary herself has promised to do whatever she could to reveal the truth about UFOs if elected president. A+

So there you have it, folks: Where the candidates stand on by far the most important issue of 2016: extraterrestrial life. I hope this helps you make your decision. In a UFO enthusiast's ideal world, we'd have a Clinton-Kasich contest this fall, but alas, a world in which we still don't know the truth about extraterrestrial life is far, far, from ideal. It's a two-party system; we have to vote for one of them:



But somewhere in the clear night sky, hidden in the tapestry of stars and planets, lies the truth. And it can't hide forever.*

*Note, this post may or may not be entirely in jest.

Hillary Clinton is out of this world

Hillary's remarks shouldn't have surprised longtime Clinton watchers.

First, an apology to the readers of this nascent blog, as this is my first post in nearly two weeks. Two factors are to blame: 1) The simultaneous busyness and dulling lull of the holiday season; 2) The writer's block I am trying to overcome to pen my review/defense of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Though 2) still looms over me, the end of the holidays has liberated me from 1). So here is a short post to whet the appetites of my readers (if there still are any).

Today, not one but two friends of mine, independently of one another and unprompted by me (I smell a conspiracy), informed me of easily the most important news of the 2016 campaign so far, so important that it forces me (ostensibly) to break my blog's self-imposed prohibition on political posts: Hillary Clinton wants to know the truth about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). As originally reported on December 30, 2015, by Daymond Steer in New Hampshire's Conway Daily Sun:

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton gave UFO enthusiasts a reason to cheer at the close of her recent editorial board meeting with the Conway Daily Sun.
During the meeting, the former first lady, former senator from New York and secretary of state answered serious questions about foreign policy and the economy, and at the end, she chatted with this reporter, who had asked her about UFOs in 2007 while working for the Cabinet Press in Milford, NH. She recalled that 2007 exchange with a smile and seemed to have fun discussing the topic.
"Yes, I'm going to get to the bottom of it," said Clinton with enthusiasm.

Read the whole story to see Clinton speculate that "we may have been visited already... We don't know for sure," credit former Bill Clinton White House chief of staff and current Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chairman John Podesta for maintaining her interest in UFOs, and promise to send a "task force" to Area 51 if elected president. 

As I stated above, I promised not to get political with this blog*. But as someone with a lifelong interest in and fascination with extraterrestrials and UFOs**, I couldn't help myself. Besides, the question of whether we are alone in the universe clearly transcends the political.

Still, since Hillary Clinton is a political figure, one must inevitably comment on the political implications of this announcement. It is definitely smart politics. The numbers vary widely, but surveys that I spent way more than three seconds looking up suggest that anywhere from one-third to one-half  of Americans believe in UFOs***. If Clinton can lock up the UFO-enthusiast vote, it could definitely put her over the top in Iowa and New Hampshire in the Democratic presidential primary contest against Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (and Martin O'Malley too, I guess), and likely help her in the general election as well. It also could help lessen the stigma of "crazy" that tends to attach to those who seek the truth about UFOs. 

Yet the UFO enthusiast in me also wishes that Clinton had stayed quiet. For now that she, a major public figure with significant power and influence even outside the White House, has revealed her interest in extraterrestrial phenomena, one must inevitably wonder if even this revelation is part of the UFO cover-up. 

How could this be? Simple. The powers-that-be (probably aliens), having decided already that Clinton will not be the next president (charitably assuming, of course, that she is not an alien herself), could have forced her to admit (or otherwise contrived to have her admit without seeming to have been forced) publicly to a fascination with UFOs, one's interest in which usually gets one branded some shade of crazy, to guarantee that she will lose. Or, if the public perception of interest in UFOs has become more positive, then these same powers-that-be (again, probably aliens) could be trying to use this to their advantage to guarantee that a presidential candidate they ultimately control will win. Neither possibility bodes well for truth-seekers.

But maybe Clinton is trying to out-fleece our reptilian overlords. Maybe she is not only genuinely and independently in favor of revealing the truth about UFOs, but also confident that she would have the backing of the American people in doing so. Maybe she thinks it's time we Americans not only learned the truth about who controls our politics (reptilian humanoids, obviously), but also that we do something about it.

Or maybe that's just what they want you to think...

*This post is a good example of the extent to which my blog will ever be "political." But for future reference, my blogposts represent only my views, and not those of my employer, the American Enterprise Institute.
**Whether I actually believe that aliens are real and have visited Earth is a different story.
***This terminology has always bothered me. Of course "UFOs" are real; every day, objects appear in the sky that people can't at first identify. The real question is whether these objects are extraterrestrial in nature.