Hold on tight -- it's a close encounter of the snickering kind. Satirist Rick Horowitz gazes at...

The Objects of His Affection

By Rick Horowitz

So I'm out in the shed recalibrating the tripod when the wife comes running across the yard waving something and yelling.

"Warren!" she's yelling, and then just in case I haven't heard her, she yells it again: "Warren!"

She knows she's not supposed to disturb me while I'm recalibrating -- I mess up by even half a degree, I tell her, we'll never get the rest of the evidence. Sometimes, though, she just gets so excited she can't help herself. This is one of her excited times.

What she's waving is the morning paper, and what she's pointing at with her other hand is an article on the front page of the morning paper.

"Panel Urges Study of UFO Reports," the headline says, and then right below that, "Unexplained Phenomena Need Scrutiny, Science Group Says." The wife's got a smile on her face as big as all outdoors.

"We did it!" she's shouting. "We finally convinced them!" She means I finally convinced them. After all, most of the really good pictures came after I decided to cut the hole in the roof so we had line-of-sight coverage all night long. Not that she wasn't in total agreement -- she even held the ladder steady, she and Roswell, my oldest -- but credit where credit is due, that's how I figure it.

She hands me the paper so I can see for myself. What it is, the article says, is some international panel of scientists. They met in New York last year and then they met in California last year and they looked at some of the best UFO data our investigators could provide. Now they've come out with a 50-page report, and the report says --

I toss the paper right on the ground. The wife is watching me like I've lost my mind. She goes scurrying around picking up the pages.

"What's wrong?" she asks. "They're saying the scientific community should look into it. Or somebody." I just stare right through her -- you figure she'd have learned by now.

"That's what they want you to think."

See, the story's got this big list of all the different kinds of evidence people like us have collected over the years -- strange lights in the sky, radar going haywire, damage to vegetation, people with radiation burns after they've had contact, cars acting funny for no reason. (You tell me why my windshield wipers keep going on and off all by themselves -- and I don't even want to talk about the crabgrass!)

They're not "unexplained phenomena" at all, I don't care what the headline says. But instead of just admitting there's something out there much bigger than we are, the only thing these scientists can say is: Let's study it some more.

"It's the Big Kiss-Off," I tell the wife. "It'll never happen. If they ever find `convincing' evidence of UFOs, they'll bury it -- and then they'll bury the people who found it."

"But what about hearings?" the wife says. "This other story says maybe the report could at least make them hold congressional hearings. That would be something at least, wouldn't it?" She sounds so hopeful, I hate to do it to her. It's time for the quiz.

"When was the last time Congress looked into UFOs?" I ask her.

"In 1966?"

"Right. And were they willing to admit back in 1966 that UFOs were real?"

"Of course not."

"Right. And who chaired that congressional hearing back in 1966 that refused to admit that UFOs were real?"

That one's got her stumped. Then I spring it on her.

"Congressman Gerald Ford!" I say. "And eight years later, who became the only person in American history to be made president of the United States without ever being elected either president or vice president?"

"Coincidence?" says the wife.

Some people are so naive.

Posted 6/30/98. Fresh stuff right here twice weekly!

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