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Lowcountry Riffs: Beyond the tin foil hat

Published Wednesday, July 14, 2010 9:34 AM

By Jim Tatum
The Gazette

So I was reading this article the other day about UFOs. It was pretty funny – obviously the writer is not a believer in flying saucers and crop circles – and he snarkily derided everything from the Roswell incident to the Hill kidnapping. But what I found truly amusing was the number of comments castigating the writer for expressing such heresy.

Nearly all the faithful believe – with the exact same fervor of the average Jihadist – that aliens walk among us and anyone who believes otherwise should be shackled to a Barco-lounger and forced to watch that great documentary, “Men in Black.”

Judging by the number of comments on that story, there is quite the large flock of foaming nutcases … uh, I mean, fervent believers.

The standard mantras seemed to run the gamut from militant agnosticism – “I don’t know and you don’t, either!” – to “Crop circles are too real! They’re just waiting to see if we destroy our own planet! I bet you’re a Republican! I bet you’re a Democrat! I bet Obama/Bush/DeMint/Clyburn did it! So there! Waaah!”

One of my favorite parts of the movie “Independence Day” was the scene showing all the happy frothing wing nuts dancing on buildings begging the aliens to take them away. The camera does a close up on this one loony chick who looks up with big blue eyes and coos, “Ooh, pretty,” right before the aliens annihilate her group of cavorting uber-dorks with their giant, inferior-species-whompin’ death ray.

It cracks me up every time.

As you may have somehow guessed, I tend to go with a streak of agnosticism – that is, you reject the notion that anyone knows for sure, but if you are to believe anything at all then you pretty much have to believe that anything at all is possible.

I also tend to agree with Stephen B. Hawking, who noted that, if aliens are indeed out there, chances are, we’re going to see more “Independence Day” than “ET” so maybe we should just hope they cruise right on by us and take out the Klingon Empire instead.

That evil little guy sitting on my left shoulder takes another puff of his cigar and snorts, “Look at those dweebs! Do they really think a species so advanced that they could travel billions of light years to come here would want ’em for anything more than samples on an intergalactic butterfly board?”

And yet, the little angel I keep trying to banish from my right shoulder keeps flitting back, reminding me of two examples that, if they don’t reverse my pessimism at least give me pause for thought.

You see, I am well aware that when it comes to talk of UFOs and aliens, we tend to see only tin foil hats and Star Fleet uniforms. But the truth is that the only three people I have personally known who said they saw UFOs in their lifetimes were three of the most believable people I have ever known in my entire life. One was a senior NASA official; the others a Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army and his wife.

Do I believe they saw UFOs? Well, put it this way: the stories were terrific.

One situation apparently occurred in a B-52 bomber testing nukes in the Nevada desert in the ’50s. The other occurred in front of thousands in the skies of Southern Europe. In both cases, the descriptions were fantastic and the stories riveting. And because I knew and trust these people implicitly, they are believable to me.

However, the most basic definition of UFO is simple: Unidentified Flying Object. That means, “I don’t know what the hell that was, Cletus.”

No one said they saw Captain Kirk, Will Robinson, or Snoopy and the Red Baron. They just said they didn’t know what it was they saw.

I can believe that.

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