"Portez-moi à votre chef!"

PARIS - On an August day in 1967, two children tending a herd of cows outside a village in central France reported seeing "four small black beings" fly from the ground and slip headfirst into a sphere that shot skyward in a flash of light and trail of sulfuric odors.

--MSNBC, March 23, 2007

So begins today's news story on MSNBC. You see, the French government apparently decided to throw open all its files regarding investigions of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO's), from the 1950's all the way to the present. The story above, describing a sighting by a 13 year old boy, while tending his folks' cows, and by his 9 year old sister, in the little village of Cussac, is called a "very credible" sighting.

"'No rational explanation has been given to date of this exceptional meeting,' the investigation concluded."

Yikes!

The proud civilization that brought us the three musketeers, Versailles, Monet and Renoir, good eats, great wines, and, as the Republicans would add, "cheese eating surrender monkeys," now brings us an even more other-worldly set of experiences. Meanwhile, the United States continues to classify all UFO investigations as top secret matters of national security. How strange. Will the battle for Iraq be threatened if we discover that, to those in a broader Universe, we are as insignificant as the African pygmies were to European civilizations of the 19th Century?

(I visualize leaders of a 50-person forest tribe suppressing rumors of strange palefaced traders seen a hundred miles down river. "A matter of tribal security," the chief whispers to his top advisers. "Bad juju!")

Well, we're part of a big universe. It shouldn't surprise us if other so-called intelligent life exists somewhere besides here on our insignificant and rapidly warming planet. I believe that God, however you wish to conceive him, was ultimately responsible for all of creation. But he seemed to waste an extraordinary amount of material, and used up an awful lot of space, if his only concern was getting men and women up and moving on our little spherical rock.

On the other hand, I can't even figure out how my next door neighbor thinks. So, it may be a bit presumptious for me to try to read God's mind? "For my thoughts are not your thoughts; nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord." Isaiah 55:8. Ok, ok, fair enough. I'm not going to argue with Isaiah. Still -- if I'd been creating the Universe in my own workshop, and all I'd been interested in doing was cobbling together a home for the human race -- I think I would have put together an altogether tidier and more compact universe, one you could vacation around in a bit and still return home in time not to be fired by your boss. And I would have left a helluva lot less lumber lying around when I was finished.

So I'm willing to accept that "small black beings" may actually live out there, and may even have visited Earth on occasion. And, certainly, if they are intelligent small black beings, you would expect them to land in France rather than, say, Fargo, North Dakota. But, over the centuries, there have been enough mistaken, if not actually fraudulent, reports of miracles, wonders, ghosts, witchcraft, sea monsters, hidden continents, Martian canals, and Stanford football victories, to make me suspicious of alien sightings that are verified only by a couple of French country kids bored out of their skulls from watching cows all day.

So, let's keep an open mind, certainly, but a healthy skepticism as well. Be trusting, as the saying goes, but keep one hand on your wallet.