Object Lesson

The next time a UFO appears, Aunt Thelma is ready with her crop duster.

Well I’ll be damned— Congress-gal Majorie Taylor Greene’s furry white balloon coat at the State of the Union Address scared everybody so much that another white balloon got itself shot down over Alaska the very next day.

America was left for weeks with no idea what it was that we shot down, which brought up the tantalizing possibility that it was her coat. Surely it wasn’t. Or was it?

“We’re calling this an ‘object’ because that’s the best description we have right now,” said an Air Force official. “We don’t know who owns it—whether it’s state-owned or corporate-owned or privately owned. We just don’t know.”

So here’s one thing I do know: I’m not in the habit of shooting at things I can’t identify. The least you should do is rule out some stuff. Like, well, it’s not a 1964 Oldsmobile. Probably not the church’s collection plate. It might be an angel, but it didn’t look like a real friendly one. Maybe it was a Rocket Club project from Our Lady of Perpetual Virginity Middle School. Or a gift-wrapped toaster oven hurled out of a perfectly lovely wedding. Honestly, there’s probably a hundred more things you could rule out.

And is the term “object” the best we can do? Why not a thingy, a doohickey, a whatchamacallit, a what-not, or a gizmo? I mean, really— an “object”?

Think about it: you could rent yourself out as an expert-witness in the courtroom. The district attorney would ask, “Hey, you’re the expert, so please tell the jury what you see here in this picture.” And you could smugly answer, “It’s an object!” The odds would be about 95 percent that you’d be right.

Just don’t tell me it was a Boy Scout project gone haywire.

A government official said the military waited to shoot the balloon down during daylight hours to make it easier for the pilots to spot it. They said the mission was “supported with aerial assets from the Alaska Air National Guard.”

Wait a minute. Wait just a damn minute. Are you telling me that an F-22, which probably costs a billion dollars, doesn’t have radar or even night-vision goggles? So we can only fight an alien invasion during the daytime? Look, for a billion dollars, I expect that F-22 to be able to sniff out the aliens. Surely the F-22 has room inside for a few beagles or something.

Hell, they even told us that this “object” was not “purposely guided.” So they needed all that firepower to take down a big ol’ sitting duck? I’ve seen my Aunt Thelma hit a rattlesnake from 30 yards away, and that damn thing was moving! They need my Aunt Thelma—she can even get snakes in the dark by listening to their rattle. When I told her the “object” was the size of a small car, she was willing to bet that she could take it out from a crop duster—while she was flying it.

Let’s make this even crazier...

The Alaska National Guard, and units under the US Northern Command, along with an HC-130 Hercules, an HH-60 Pave Hawk, and a CH-47 Chinook all participated in the ocean recovery effort, according to General Ryder.

I guess we should be thrilled that all those fancy planes didn’t fly into each other. General Ryder said that recovery teams have “mapped the debris field” and are “in the process of searching for and identifying debris on the ocean floor.”

Y’all, I’m not real sure I want these guys messing around on the ocean floor. They are liable to pull out the drain plug down there or something.

Now, I need to add one more thing here. A day later, another one of these “objects” appeared over the Great Lakes. We took aim to shoot that one down, too, except this time we missed the whole damn thing. Fired that missile right past it like a Hail Mary pass that skipped the Hail part.

Okay, we have a phrase in Texas for people who are a bad shot. Mostly, we just say they are “hunting Dick Cheney style,” where you shoot a friend in the face with buckshot. Or for variety, we might say, “Honey, he couldn’t hit the side of a barn even if he was standing inside it.”

Here we have an airplane that cost about $30 million dollars to build and $85,325 an hour to operate. Each Sidewinder missile costs $400,000. (Nope, no 2-for-1 deals on this stuff, either.)

They miss this stationary target after waiting hours for damn daylight. I’m telling you that Aunt Thelma has a crop duster all gassed up in Needville, Texas, and she’ll do the whole job for $1,000 and a dinner date with one of those real cute female pilots.

I know a deal when I see it.

Susan Bankston lives in Richmond, Texas, where she writes about her hairdresser at The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc., at juanitajean.com.

MONEY SMART

By GRACE YUNG, CFP