Updated: June 29, 2024

A reader reminded me that it's nearly the 75th Anniversary of the so called Roswell UFO Incident. Even if you know nothing else about the UFO phenomenon, you certainly have heard about what supposedly happened in Roswell, New Mexico in July, 1947? A crashed flying saucer, autopsies on alien bodies, Government cover-ups. It ushered in the 1950's kitsch of bubble-headed little green space jockeys inside silvery saucers flitting across our skies.

This space age mythology, embellished over the years, tells of an alien interstellar vehicle simply falling out of the sky near a desert town. The only tangible evidence is scraps of wood and metal foil and other mundane debris that suspiciously look like they came from a crashed U.S. military balloon. That is, unless you believe the Government has been hiding all the goodies including alien corpses inside an Indiana Jones style warehouse all these decades.

This leads me to wonder that if flying saucers are supposedly real, why haven't we learned where the visitors come from among the stars? Didn't the Roswell aliens leave a driving map in their glovebox?

If someone who claimed to be in contact with space aliens could give us just a few simple numbers they d unequivocally prove their case to skeptics. Simply send me ( 1 ) the celestial coordinates of the home star, ( 2 ) the number of planets orbiting it, ( 3 ) their distances from the parent star, ( 4 ) and their relative masses. Then all we d have to do is look at the star and see if the planets were there. Viola!