Jan 7, 2019 4 min read

Like so many others who grew up in the 1950s, I’ve seen more than my share of science fiction films with extraterrestrials as their center point. Among my favorites is “The Thing,” with James Arness – later to gain fame as Marshal Matt Dillon on TV’s “Gunsmoke” – playing a rampaging ET who one character describes as a “super carrot.”

I was also partial to “Invaders from Mars” (young boy observes a flying saucer landing in a sandpit near his home – or was it a dream?); “War of the Worlds” (invading saucers trash Earth cities, only to be defeated by bacteria in our atmosphere).

My favorite, though, is “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” one of the few films of that era where an arriving ET (Michael Rennie, as Klaatu) is a good guy. Of course, when Klaatu’s saucer lands in Washington, D.C., bearing the gift of a device “to study life on the other planets,” a soldier shoots and wounds him. Later, Klaatu is shot dead. At film’s end, Klaatu – resurrected after being placed in a machine on his saucer by his robot sidekick, Gort – departs Earth, leaving behind a somewhat contradictory message: “Join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.”

Current citizens of Earth may recognize that Democrats delivered a similar message in last years’ remake: “The Day the Government Stood Still.”

Although agencies which track such things claim that UFO sightings are down about 55 percent from their height five years ago, 2018 provided ample evidence that humans really, really want to believe that we are not alone. Take, for example, “Oumuamua.”

This cigar-shaped interstellar object was first spotted in 2017 by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii, which explains its name -“a messenger that reaches out from the distant past” in Hawaiian.

Baloney!

I have cable TV, so I can see messengers from the distant past daily: Andy Griffith; Gomer Pyle; Perry Mason. If atmospheric conditions are perfect, I may also see Erik Estrada in “CHiPs,” – perhaps the most terrifying sci-fi series ever produced.

But apparently researchers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics don’t have cable.

In a paper submitted to the “Astrophysical Journal Letters,” they suggested that Oumuamua may be “a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”

I know what you’re thinking: Where is Space Force when you need it? Intrepid Earth CHiPs (Combative Human Interstellar Patrol) officers might at least have pulled the craft over and, if its occupants lacked the proper papers, put them in the cages that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin secretly set up on the moon.

No matter, because Oumuamua passed through our solar system without slowing down. Why? We can only speculate:

• Long-range probing of Earth proved its inhabitants uninteresting.
• Oumuamua’s driver was arguing with his wife about needing directions and missed Earth.
• Traveling at 196,000 mph, Oumuamua’s Alpha Centauri’s Best brakes pads overheated and failed to stop the craft in time.
• The next rest stop is on Venus.
• The occupants couldn’t find the lawn chair that reserved their parking space.

What will 2019 bring as far as unidentified object sighting? Antonio Brown still in a Steelers uniform?

All I can offer is the advice that reporter Ned “Scotty” Scott offers at the end of “The Thing”:

“Every one of you listening to my voice, tell the world, tell this to everybody, wherever they are. Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.”

Anything you see up there is bound to be more interesting than CNN.