(Roughly) Daily

Let’s say your house is on fire, or overrun by a gang of psychotic raccoons. You don’t hesitate—you take out your phone, and you call the fire department, or animal control, and then firemen/raccoon-wranglers are promptly dispatched to your home. These are well-established protocols, essential to the maintenance of a mostly not-on-fire, feral-animal-free society.

But what about UFOs? What about extraterrestrial beings? Faced with some six-eyed slime-being rooting through your trash, or a spacecraft idling above your backyard (provided it’s not Elon Musk’s “nuclear alien UFO” again), who exactly would you think to call? And what would whoever you called do, when you called them?…

Find out at: “If You Find Aliens, Who Do You Call?”

[Picture above: source]

* Ray Parker, Jr., theme from Ghostbusters

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As we let our fingers do the walking, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953 that the Air Force declassified and released a file in which Lt. David C. Brigham, the pilot of an F-84 “Thunderjet,” reported that a small, metallic, disc-shaped object made a controlled, sweeping pass at the American jet fighter-bomber over the Sea of Japan.  “It closed rapidly and just before it would have flown into his fuselage, it decelerated to his air-speed almost instantaneously, the pilot reported.  “In doing so it flipped up its edge at approximately a 90-degree bank. Then it fluttered within 20 feet of his fuselage for perhaps two or three seconds, pulled away and around his starboard (right) wing, appearing to flip once as it hit the slipstream behind his wing tip fuel tank…  Then it passed him, crossed in front of him and pulled up abruptly, appearing to accelerate, and shot out of sight in a steep, almost vertical climb.  It did so more sharply than a plane could have done.  Its maneuvering throughout was always clear and precise.”

F-84 “Thunderjet,” ca. 1952

source

HAPPY MOZART’S BIRTHDAY!