Last week, former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington told the world for the first time that he had seen a UFO with his own eyes 10 years ago this month.

On that particularly strange March night, dozens of unexplained lights buzzed over Phoenix. What Symington saw appeared to be a huge triangle-shaped craft that was as large as several city blocks.

This after he initially made fun of the incident by having an assistant come out in a plastic alien suit at a news conference immediately held after the event.

To be sure, for folks who want the rest of us to believe that there is something to the UFO phenomena, this is highly significant. After all, even though he has some question marks around him (show me a politician who doesn’t), Symington is a former U.S. Air Force pilot, graduated from Harvard University and is the great-grandson of New York coal magnate Henry Clay Frick.

In other words, he ain’t just another drunk seeing little green spacemen through his liquor.

Don’t forget, too, former President Jimmy Carter reported seeing a UFO when he was still governor of Georgia, and then apparently as president he asked the CIA for information regarding UFOs.

Again, that’s pretty impressive. I might have some problems with Jimmy Carter’s politics sometimes, but I’ll never question the man’s integrity or his honesty.

Now if it had been Billy…

Then you have former Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer, who is demanding that world governments disclose secret alien technology from UFO crashes to solve the problem of global warming.

The 83 year old reasons that aliens visiting Earth would have needed far more advanced propulsion techniques than burning fossil fuels, and that such technology could replace carbon-creating energy techniques. He says we need to contact them and ask them in a nice way if they’d come help us.

Dang, now there’s an idea. I bet Al Gore wishes he’d thought of that.

I think too many folks give aliens way too much credit. Remember Orson Welles’ radio production of “War of the Worlds?” That radio show about Martians invading Earth was enough to send some folks to the brink of suicide in 1938.

And after they nearly destroyed the Earth and laughed at every bomb mankind could throw at them, what was it that finally did in the aliens? The common cold virus, which their immune systems just could not handle.

So where am I going with this? Patience, grasshopper.

All this talk of UFOs has got me wondering – have aliens ever visited Thomasville?

(Note: just as a clarification, I am not referring to the aliens you regularly see hanging out in our stores speaking in languages you don’t understand which make you think they’re talking about you and that fear the words “green card.”)

If UFOs have visited us, springtime would seem to be a good time to do it. After all, Thomasville is as beautiful as any place on Earth this time of the year. In fact, if you want to just feel good about the place you call home, just get in your vehicle and ride around.

But, in the end, knowing what we know about aliens from “War of the Worlds,” I’d bet my PU-36 explosive space modulator that even though the lure of pool room hot dogs is intergalactic in scale, they’d avoid coming around here in the spring like Dan Quayle avoids spelling bees.

Why? Too much dadgummed pollen.

I don’t care if the aliens in question come from the planet Pollen, there ain’t no way they could be ready for the potpourri of the yellow stuff we have in our backyard. Heck, we Earth natives can’t hardly handle it, and some of us have been infiltrated by it (or filtering it actually) since we born.

ET can’t phone home or anywhere else with the allergy laryngitis half of us have. If the common cold killed the Martians, our pollen would work like a yellow alien bug light.

Makes sense to me.

Back to UFOs, there are some people who claim to have made contact with aliens, as either willing or unwilling participants.

I’ve made contact with people I am sure are from Uranus (I sometimes wonder if they are actually more like Klingons, but I’d really rather not go there), so I guess it’s a fair assumption to make that people have probably made contact with natives from Uranus, too.

I just am not so sure that aliens can help us out as much as, say, that fellow from Canada believes. While it’s true they apparently can go from here to there in no time flat, I don’t know that the risk of something bad happening is worth trying to ask them for help.

Who knows what kind of havoc they could wreak on us? Who’s to say they aren’t behind global warming to begin with?

You know what? Now that I think about it, that yellow stuff that covers our cars and clogs our lungs comes from the sky, doesn’t it?

You don’t reckon…



Randy Young is a Thomas County educator.