If I were an E.T.

Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. This quote from The Sign of the Broken Sword by G.K. Chesterton has a myriad of applications. Strange as it may seem, one of these is a grand plan of Earth conquest by the extraterrestrials.

Many a wise S.F. writer created a narrative where a glut of fake sightings of and acts by E.T.s serves as a cover for a real invasion and conquest of Earth.

Some people even suspect that there exists a government conspiracy (of course, the fashion is to ascribe the whole dirty deed to Bushes who also exterminated the dinosaurs and helped Hitler to rise to power, not to speak about 911 atrocity - with Mossad/CIA helpful hand, for sure). The purpose of this conspiracy is to hide some shady dealings with real E.T.s behind the smokescreen of patently and semi-transparently fake sightings of UFOs, alien contacts and whatnot.

Here we have something entirely different: a person who does UFOs for fun.

Around here, he is equal parts rebel, nerd and celebrity – a man who has spiked Orange County's unidentified flying object sightings for the past three years with a foam toy 3 feet in diameter. A man who has emptied bars, distracted football games and brought cars to a halt. A man who has generated hundreds, if not thousands, of calls to police and dozens of videos on UFO Web sites.

“All the police know me,” he likes to say of his nightly obsession – flying radio-control planes shaped like saucers with lights. “It's never boring. Every night is different.”

It is interesting to review the completely contradictory stories by different eyewitnesses. It tells a lot about validity of a good percentage of the UFO sightings.

But of course, some people have seen through his game:

You know what this really is, of course… The government is paying this guy to fly his fake super-double-secret gyroscopic UFO around to distract attention from the real mega-triple-classified überscopic UFOs.

Yep. "mega-triple-classified überscopic UFOs". For me it has settled the issue.

The only thought that bothers me (slightly) is that behind the barrage of the sightings, proof, counter-proof, name calling, conspiracy theories and all the flow of inanities similar to the one (a joke really) quoted, there is a small dedicated group of E.T.s that orchestrates all this, faintly smiling at this here post.

I bet they have a time of their life laughing at our stupidity over their equivalent of evening beer...

Alerting my favorite ufologists.

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