Food For Thought

   It’s getting late on a school night, but I’m not letting my son go to bed yet, because there’s serious work to be done.
   “Robert!” I’m saying, in a firm voice. “Come to the kitchen right now and blow-dry the ant!”
   We have a large ant, about the size of a mature raccoon, standing on our kitchen counter. In fact, it looks kind of like a raccoon, or possibly even a mutant lobster. We made the ant out of papier-mach, a substance you create by mixing flour and water and newspapers together into a slimy goop that drips down and gets licked up by your dogs, who operate on the wise survival principle that you should immediately eat everything that falls onto the kitchen floor, because if it turns out not to be food, you can always throw it up later.
   The ant, needless to say, is part of a Science Fair project. We need a big ant to illustrate an important scientific concept, the same concept that is illustrated by all Science Fair projects, namely: “Look! I did a Science Fair project!”
   (I know how we can solve our national crisis in educational funding: Whenever the schools needed money, they could send a letter to all the parents saying: “Give us a contribution right now, or we’re going to hold a Science Fair.” They’d raise billions.)
   Our Science Fair project is due tomorrow, but the ant is still wet, so we’re using a hair dryer on it. Science Fair judges hate a wet ant. Another problem is that our ant is starting to sag, both in the front (or, in entomological terms, the “prognosis”) and in the rear (or “butt”). It doesn’t look like one of those alert, businesslike, “can-do” ants that you see striding briskly around. It looks depressed, like an ant that has just been informed that all 86,932 members of its immediate family were crushed while attempting to lift a Tootsie Roll.
   While Robert is drying the ant, I get a flashlight and go outside to examine the experiment portion of our project, which is entitled “Ants and junk Food.” On our back fence we put up a banner that says, in eight-inch-high letters, WELCOME ANTS. Under this is a piece of cardboard with the following snack substances scientifically arranged on it: potato chips, a spicy beef stick, a doughnut, a Snickers candy bar, chocolate-filled cookies, Cheez Doodles, Cocoa Krispies, and Screaming Yellow Zonkers. If you were to eat this entire experiment, you would turn into a giant pimple and explode.
   We figured this experiment would attract ants from as far away as Indonesia, and we’d note which junk foods they preferred, and this would prove our basic scientific point (“Look! I did a Science Fair project!”). Of course you veteran parents know what actually happened: The ants didn’t show up. Nature has a strict rule against cooperating with Science Fair projects. This is why, when you go to a Science Fair, you see 200 projects designed to show you how an electrical circuit works, and not one of them can actually make the little bulb light up. If you had a project that was supposed to demonstrate the law of gravity using heavy lead weights, they would fall up. So when the ants saw our banner, they said: “Ah-hah! A Science Fair project! Time for us to act in a totally unnatural manner and stay away from the food!”
   The irony is, I knew where some ants were: in my office. They live in one of the electrical outlets. I see them going in there all day long. I think maybe they’re eating electrons, which makes me nervous. I seriously considered capturing one of the office ants and carrying it out to the science experiment, and if necessary giving it broad hints about what to do (“Yum! Snickers! “). But I was concerned that if I did this, the ants might become dependent on me, and every time they got hungry they’d crawl onto my desk and threaten to give me electrical stings if I didn’t carry them to a snack.
   Fortunately, some real outdoor ants finally discovered our experiment, and we were able to observe their behavior at close range. I had been led to believe, by countless public-television nature shows, that ants are very organized, with the colony divided into specialized jobs such as drones, workers, fighters, bakers, consultants, etc., all working together with high-efficiency precision. But the ants that showed up at our experiment were total morons. You’d watch one, and it would sprint up to a Cocoa Krispie, then stop suddenly, as if saying: “Yikes! Compared with me, this Cocoa Krispie is the size of a Buick!” Then it would sprint off in a random direction. Sometimes it would sprint back; sometimes it would sprint to another Cocoa Krispie and act surprised again. But it never seemed to do anything. There were thousands of ants behaving this way, and every single time two of them met, they’d both stop and exchange “high-fives” with their antennas, along with, I assume, some kind of ant pleasantries (“Hi Bob!” “No, I’m Bill!” “Sorry! You look just like Bob!”). This was repeated millions of times. I watched these ants for two days, and they accomplished nothing. It was exactly like highway construction. It wouldn’t have surprised me if some ants started waving orange flags to direct other insects around the area.
   But at least there were ants, which meant we could do our project and get our results. I’d tell you what they were, but I really think you should do your own work. That’s the whole point of a Science Fair, as I keep telling my son, who has gone to bed, leaving me to finish blow-drying the ant.

Father Faces Life: A Long-Overdue Attack on Natural Childbirth

   Let’s take just a quick look at the history of baby-having. For thousands of years, only women had babies. Primitive women would go off into primitive huts and groan and wail and sweat while other women hovered around. The primitive men stayed outside doing manly things, such as lifting heavy objects and spitting.
   When the baby was born, the women would clean it up as best they could and show it to the men, who would spit appreciatively and head off to the forest to throw sharp sticks at small animals. If you had suggested to primitive men that they should actually watch women have babies, they would have laughed at you and probably tortured you for three or four days. They were real men.
   At the beginning of the 20th century, women started having babies in hospital rooms. Often males were present, but they were professional doctors who were paid large sums of money and wore masks. Normal civilian males continued to stay out of the baby-having area; they remained in waiting rooms reading old copies of Field and Stream, an activity that is less manly than lifting heavy objects but still reasonably manly.
   What I’m getting at is that, for most of history, baby-having was mainly in the hands (so to speak) of women. Many fine people were born under this system. Charles Lindbergh, for example.
   Things changed, though, in the 1970s. The birth rate dropped sharply. Women started going to college and driving bulldozers and carrying briefcases and freely using such words as “debenture.” They just didn’t have time to have babies. For a while there, the only people having babies were unwed teenage girls, who are very fertile and can get pregnant merely by standing downwind from teenage boys.
   Then, young professional couples began to realize their lives were missing something: a sense of stability, of companionship, of responsibility for another life. So they got Labrador retrievers. A little later, they started having babies again, mainly because of the tax advantages. These days you can’t open your car door without hitting a pregnant woman. But there’s a catch: Women now expect men to watch them have babies. This is called “natural childbirth,” which is one of those terms that sounds terrific but that nobody really understands. Another one is “ph balanced.”
   At first, natural childbirth was popular only with hippie-type, granola-oriented couples who lived in geodesic domes and named their babies things like Peace Love World Understanding Harrington-Schwartz. The males, their brains badly corroded by drugs and organic food, wrote smarmy articles about what a Meaningful Experience it is to see a New Life Come Into the World. None of these articles mentioned the various other fluids and solids that come into the world with the New Life, so people got the impression that watching somebody have a baby was just a peck of meaningful fun. At cocktail parties, you’d run into natural-childbirth converts who would drone on for hours, giving you a contraction-by-contraction account of what went on in the delivery room. They were worse than Moonies or people who tell you how much they bought their houses for in 1973 and how much they’re worth today.
   Before long, natural childbirth was everywhere, like salad bars; and now, perfectly innocent civilian males all over the country are required by federal law to watch females have babies. I recently had to watch my wife have a baby.
   First, we had to go to 10 evening childbirth classes at the hospital. Before the classes, the hospital told us, mysteriously, to bring two pillows. This was the first humiliation, because no two of our pillowcases match and many have beer or cranberry-juice stains. It may be possible to walk down the streets of Kuala Lumpur with stained, unmatched pillowcases and still feel dignified, but this is not possible in American hospitals.
   Anyway, we showed up for the first class, along with about 15 other couples consisting of women who were going to have babies and men who were going to have to watch them. They all had matching pillowcases. In fact, some couples had obviously purchased tasteful pillowcases especially for childbirth class; these were the trendy couples, wearing golf and tennis apparel, who were planning to have wealthy babies. They sat together through all the classes, and eventually agreed to get together for brunch.
   The classes consisted of sitting in a brightly lit room and openly discussing, among other things, the uterus. Now I can remember a time, in high school, when I would have killed for reliable information on the uterus. But having discussed it at length, having seen actual full-color diagrams, I must say in all honesty that although I respect it a great deal as an organ, it has lost much of its charm.
   Our instructor was very big on the uterus because that’s where babies generally spend their time before birth. She also spent some time on the ovum, which is near the ovaries. What happens is the ovum hangs around reading novels and eating chocolates until along comes this big crowd of spermatozoa, which are very tiny, very stupid one-celled organisms. They’re looking for the ovum, but most of them wouldn’t know it if they fell over it. They swim around for days, trying to mate with the pancreas and whatever other organs they bump into. But eventually one stumbles into the ovum, and the happy couple parades down the Fallopian tubes to the uterus.
   In the uterus, the Miracle of Life begins, unless you believe the Miracle of Life does not begin there, and if you think I’m going to get into that, you’re crazy. Anyway, the ovum starts growing rapidly and dividing into lots of little specialized parts, not unlike the federal government. Within six weeks, it has developed all the organs it needs to drool; by 10 weeks, it has the ability to cry in restaurants. In childbirth class, they showed us actual pictures of a fetus developing inside a uterus. They didn’t tell us how these pictures were taken, but I suspect it involved a great deal of drinking.
   We saw lots of pictures. One evening, we saw a movie of a woman we didn’t even know having a baby. I am serious. Some woman actually let movie-makers film the whole thing. In color. She was from California. Another time, the instructor announced, in the tone of voice you might use to tell people they had just won free trips to Hawaii, that we were going to see color slides of a cesarean section. The first slides showed a pregnant woman cheerfully entering the hospital. The last slides showed her cheerfully holding a baby. The middle slides showed how they got the baby out of the cheerful woman, but I can’t give you a lot of detail here because I had to go out for 15 or 20 drinks of water. I do remember that at one point our instructor cheerfully observed that there was “surprisingly little blood, really.” She evidently felt this was a real selling point.
   When we weren’t looking at pictures or discussing the uterus, we practiced breathing. This is where the pillows came in. What happens is that when the baby gets ready to leave the uterus, the woman goes through a series of what the medical community laughingly refers to as “contractions.” If it referred to them as “horrible pains that make you wonder why the hell you ever decided to get pregnant,” people might stop having babies and the medical community would have to go into the major-appliance business.
   In the old days, under President Eisenhower, doctors avoided the contraction problem by giving lots of drugs to women who were having babies. They’d knock them out during the delivery, and the women would wake up when their kids were entering the fourth grade. But the idea with natural childbirth is to try to avoid giving the woman a lot of drugs, so she can share the first, intimate moments after birth with the baby and the father and the obstetrician and the pediatrician and the stand-by anesthesiologist and several nurses and the person who cleans the delivery room.
   The key to avoiding drugs, according to the natural childbirth people, is for the woman to breathe deeply. Really. The theory is that if she breathes deeply, she’ll get all relaxed and won’t notice that she’s in a hospital delivery room wearing a truly perverted garment and having a baby. I’m not sure who came up with this theory. Whoever it was evidently believed that women have very small brains. So, in childbirth classes, we spent a lot of time sprawled on these little mats with our pillows while the women pretended to have contractions and the men squatted around with stopwatches and pretended to time them. The trendy couples didn’t care for this part. They were not into squatting. After a couple of classes, they started bringing little backgammon sets and playing backgammon when they were supposed to be practicing breathing. I imagine they had a rough time in actual childbirth, unless they got the servants to have contractions for them.
   Anyway, my wife and I traipsed along for months, breathing and timing, respectively. We had no problems whatsoever. We were a terrific team. We had a swell time. Really.
   The actual delivery was slightly more difficult. I don’t want to name names, but I held up my end. I had my stopwatch in good working order and I told my wife to breathe. “Don’t forget to breathe,” I’d say, or, “You should breathe, you know.” She, on the other hand, was unusually cranky. For example, she didn’t want me to use my stopwatch. Can you imagine All that practice, all that squatting on the natural-childbirth classroom floor, and she suddenly gets into this big snit about stopwatches. Also, she almost completely lost her sense of humor. At one point, I made an especially amusing remark, and she tried to hit me. She usually has an excellent sense of humor.
   Nonetheless, the baby came out all right, or at least all right for newborn babies, which is actually pretty awful unless you’re a fan of slime. I thought I had held up well when the doctor, who up to then had behaved like a perfectly rational person, said, “Would you like to see the placenta?” Now let’s face it: That is like asking, “Would you like me to pour hot tar into your nostrils?” Nobody would like to see a placenta. If anything, it would be a form of punishment:
   JURY: We find the defendant guilty of stealing from the old and the crippled. JUDGE: I sentence the defendant to look at three placentas.
   But without waiting for an answer, the doctor held up the placenta, not unlike the way you might hold up a bowling trophy. I bet he wouldn’t have tried that with people who have matching pillowcases.
   The placenta aside, everything worked out fine. We ended up with an extremely healthy, organic, natural baby, who immediately demanded to be put back into the uterus.
   All in all, I’d say it’s not a bad way to reproduce, although I understand that some members of the flatworm family simply divide into two.

Pumped Up

   You want to know what’s wrong with America? I’ll tell you what’s wrong: too many kinds of sneakers.
   This problem was driven home to me dramatically when my 10-year-old son decided to join a track club. At first I was in favor of this, because I was a track man myself back at Pleasantville High School, where in 1965—and I hope I do not sound too boastful here—I set a New York State record for Shortest Time on a Track Team Before Quitting.
   My original goal was to obtain a varsity letter. I needed one because at the time I was madly in love with Ann Weinberg, who would have been the ideal woman except for one serious flaw: She was an excellent athlete. On an average afternoon she would win the state championship in about nine sports. When we had the annual school awards assembly, various teams would troop on and off the auditorium stage, but Ann would just remain up there, getting honored, until all you could see was a large, Ann-shaped mound of trophies. This caused painful feelings of inadequacy in me, a small, chestless, insecure male whose only recognized high-school athletic achievement was the time when, through an amazing physical effort, I managed to avoid ralphing directly onto the shoes of the principal as he was throwing me out of a pep-rally dance for attempting to sleep under the refreshments table. Unfortunately this is not the kind of achievement for which you get a varsity letter.
   So in a desperation effort to impress Ann, I joined the track team. This meant I had to go into the locker room with large, hairy jocks who appeared way too old for high school. I bet you knew guys like that. At the time I thought that they had simply matured faster than I had, but I now realize that they were actually 40-year-old guys who chose to remain in high school for an extra couple of decades because they enjoyed snapping towels at guys like me. They are probably still there.
   I was under the impression that all you had to do, to obtain your varsity letter, was spend a certain amount of time in the locker room, but it turned out that they had a picky rule under which you also had to run or jump or hurl certain objects in an athletic manner, which in my case was out of the question, so I quit.
   However, during my brief time on the team I did learn some important lessons that have stayed with me throughout life, the main one being that if you are on the track-team bus, and the coach comes striding down the aisle and demands to know which team member hurled the “moon”—which is NOT one of the approved objects that you hurl in track—out the bus window at the police officer who is now threatening to arrest the entire team, you should deny that you saw anything, because it’s better to go to jail than to betray the sacred trust of your teammates and consequently be forced to eat a discus.
   So I was glad that my son became interested in this character-building sport, until he announced that he needed new sneakers. This troubled me, because he already HAD new sneakers, which cost approximately as much as an assault helicopter but are more technologically advanced. They are the heavily advertised sneakers that have little air pumps inside. This feature provides an important orthopedic benefit: It allows the manufacturer to jack the price way up. Also it turns the act of walking around into a highly complex process. “Wait!” my son will say, as we’re rushing off to school, late as usual. “I have to pump more air into my sneakers!” Because God forbid you should go to school underinflated.
   So I figured that high-powered sneakers like these would be fine for track, but both my wife and my son gently informed me that I am a total idiot. It turns out you don’t run in pump sneakers. What you do, in pump sneakers, is PUMP your sneakers. For running, you need a comPletely different kind of sneakers, for which you have to pay a completely different set of U.S. dollars.
   Not only that, but the sneaker salesperson informed me that, depending on the kind of running my son was going to do, he might need several kinds of sneakers. The salesperson’s tone of voice carried the clear implication that he was going to call the Child Abuse Hotline if I didn’t care enough, as a parent, to take out a second mortgage so I could purchase sufficient sneakerage for my son.
   I have done a detailed scientific survey of several other parents, and my current estimate is that sneakers now absorb 83 percent of the average U.S. family income. This has to stop. We need Congress to pass a law requiring the sneaker industry to return to the system we had when I was growing up, under which there was only one kind of sneakers, namely U.S. Keds, which were made from Army surplus tents and which cost about $10, or roughly $1 per pound. This simple act would make our nation strong again. Slow, but strong. Probably your reaction is, “Dave, that’s an excellent idea, and you should receive, at minimum, the Nobel Prize.” Thank you, but as an American, I am not in this because I seek fame and glory. All I seek, as an American, is a varsity letter.

Dirty Dancing

   My son, who is 11, has started going to dance parties. Only minutes ago he was this little boy whose idea of looking really sharp was to have all the Kool-Aid stains on his He-Man T-shirt be the same flavor; now, suddenly, he’s spending more time per day on his hair than it took to paint the Sistine Chapel.
   And he’s going to parties where the boys dance with actual girls. This was unheard of when I was 11, during the Eisenhower administration. Oh, sure, our parents sent us to ballroom-dancing class, but it would have been equally cost-effective for them to simply set fire to their money.
   The ballroom in my case was actually the Harold C. Crittenden junior High School cafeteria. We boys would huddle defensively in one corner, punching each other for moral support and eyeing the girls suspiciously, as though we expected them at any moment to be overcome by passion and assault us. In fact this was unlikely. We were not a fatally attractive collection of stud muffins. We had outgrown our sport coats, and we each had at least one shirttail elegantly sticking out, and the skinny ends of our neckties hung down longer than the fat ends because our dads had tied them in the only way that a person can tie a necktie on a short, fidgety person, which is by standing behind that person and attempting several abortive knots and then saying the hell with it. Many of us had smeared our hair with the hair-smear of choice in those days, Brylcreem, a chemical substance with the natural look and feel of industrial pump lubricant.
   When the dance class started, the enemy genders were lined up on opposite sides of the cafeteria, and the instructor, an unfortunate middle-aged man who I hope was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, would attempt to teach us the Fox Trot.
   “ONE two THREE four ONE two THREE four,” he’d say, demonstrating the steps. “Boys start with your LEFT foot forward, girls start with your RIGHT foot back, and begin now ONE ...”
   The girls, moving in one graceful line, would all take a step back with their right foot. At the same time, on the boys’ side, Joseph DiGiacinto, who is now an attorney, would bring his left foot down firmly on the right toe of Tommy Longworth.
   “TWO,” the instructor would say, and the girls would all bring their left foot back, while Tommy would punch Joe sideways into Dennis Johnson.
   “THREE,” the instructor would say, and the girls would shift their weight to the left, while on the other side the chain reaction of retaliation had spread to all 40 boys, who were punching and stomping on each other, so that our line looked like a giant centipede having a Brylcreem-induced seizure.
   This was also how we learned the Waltz, the Cha Cha, and—this was the instructor’s “hep cat” dance step—the Lindy Hop. After we boys had thoroughly failed to master these dances, the instructor would bring the two lines together and order the boys to dance directly with the girls, which we did by sticking our arms straight out to maintain maximum separation, lunging around the cafeteria like miniature sport-coat-wearing versions of Frankenstein’s monster.
   We never danced with girls outside of that class. At social events, girls danced the Hop with other girls; boys made hilarious intestinal noises with their armpits. It was the natural order of things.
   But times have changed. I found this out the night of Robby’s first dance party, when, 15 minutes before it was time to leave for the party, he strode impatiently up to me, wearing new duds, looking perfect in the hair department, and smelling vaguely of—Can it be? Yes, it’s Right Guard!—and told me that we had to go immediately or we’d be late. This from a person who has never, ever shown the slightest interest in being on time for anything, a person who was three weeks late to his own birth.
   We arrived at the dance-party home at the same time as Robby’s friend T.J., who strode up to us, eyes eager, hair slicked.
   “T.J.!” I remarked. “You’re wearing cologne!” About two gallons, I estimated. He was emitting fragrance rays visible to the naked eye.
   We followed the boys into the house, where kids were dancing. Actually, I first thought they were jumping up and down, but I have since learned that they were doing a dance called the jump. We tried to watch Robby, but he gestured violently at us to leave, which I can understand. If God had wanted your parents to watch you do the Jump, He wouldn’t have made them so old.
   Two hours later, when we came back to pick him up, the kids were slow-dancing. Of course the parents weren’t allowed to watch this, either, but by peering through a window from another room, we could catch glimpses of couples swaying together, occasionally illuminated by spontaneous fireballs of raw hormonal energy shooting around the room. My son was in there somewhere. But not my little boy.

A Left-Handed Compliment

   I was feeling good that morning. I woke up to the happy discovery that not a single one of our major home appliances had broken during the night and we still had running water, which is highly unusual in our household. Then I got both dogs all the way outside without getting the Wee-wee of joy on my feet. It looked like it was going to be a great day.
   Then, like a fool, I picked up the newspaper. You should never pick up a newspaper when you’re feeling good, because every newspaper has a special department, called the Bummer Desk, which is responsible for digging up depressing front-page stories with headlines like DOORBELL USE LINKED TO LEUKEMIA and OZONE LAYER COMPLETELY GONE DIRECTLY OVER YOUR HOUSE.
   On this particular morning the story that punched me right in the eyeballs was headlined: LEFTIES’ LIVES SHORTER STUDY SAYS SO. YOU probably read about this. Researchers did a study showing that left-handed people live an average of nine years less than right-handed people. This was very alarming to me because I’m left-handed, along with 10 percent of the population, as well as many famous historical figures such as Napoleon, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandy Koufax, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, and Flipper. President Bush is also left-handed, which has raised a troublesome constitutional issue because every time he signs a bill into law he drags his hand through his signature and messes it up. Nobody knows whether this is legal. “This doesn’t look like a signature,” observed the Supreme Court, in one recent case. “This looks like somebody killed a spider on the Federal Highway Authorization Act.”
   Because of the way we write, most of us lefties go through life with big ink smears on the edges of our left hands. In fact, when I first saw the newspaper article about lefties dying sooner, I thought maybe the cause would be ink absorption. Or maybe it would be related to the fact that we spent our entire academic careers sitting with our bodies twisted clockwise so we could write on those stupid right-hand-only desks. I have this daydream wherein the inventor of those desks is shipwrecked on a remote island, and some natives come out of the jungle, and he waves at them in what he thinks is a friendly manner, unaware that this is the fierce Wagoondi tribe, and if you wave at them with your left hand, they treat you like a god, but if you wave with your right hand, they play the Happy Snake Game with your intestines. Not that I am bitter. Nor am I bitter about the fact that I always got bad grades in art class because I couldn’t work scissors designed for right-handed people. On Parents’ Night, when all the children’s art projects were put up for display, mine was the one that looked as though the paper had been chewed to pieces by shrews.
   Nor am I bitter about gravy ladles. And if you don’t understand why I’m not bitter about gravy ladles, just try using one with your left hand.
   But I have to admit that I AM a little bitter about this business of dying nine years early. According to the researchers, a major reason for this is that left-handers have a lot more accidents than right-handers. I know why this is: We read books backward. Really. When left-handers pick up books, they tend to start reading from the last page. This saves us a lot of time with murder mysteries, but it’s a bad habit when we’re reading, say, the instructions for operating a barbecue grill, and we begin with “STEP 147: IGNITE GAS.”
   I myself have always been accident-prone, especially when I attempt to use tools designed for right-handed people, the extreme example being chain saws, which should not even be legal to sell to left-handers. I had one back during the Energy Crisis, when I had installed a wood-burning stove in our fireplace in an effort to reduce our energy consumption by covering the entire household with a thick, insulating layer of soot. Near our house was a large tree, which I realized could supply our soot needs for the better part of the winter. So one day I strode out and, drawing on my skills as an English major, started making strategic cuts designed to cause the tree to fall away from the house. I even called my wife out to watch the tree fall, and of course those of you who are familiar with situation comedies have already figured out what happened: The tree, which was clearly right-handed, fell in the exact wrong direction, chuckling audibly all the way down and missing the living room by maybe six inches.
   My wife, who thought I had planned to have the tree do this, said, “That was great!” And I replied, “Wurg,” or words to that effect, because my brain was busy trying to get my heart going again. Speaking of which: Some scientists think that left-handed people’s brains work completely differently from right-handed people’s brains. I read an article once that theorized that left-handers are a different species from right-handers. Isn’t that silly? As if we were aliens or something. What nonsense! Planet foolish this over take will we day one.

Reader Alert

   What follows is a story I wrote in 1988 about a spate of UFO sightings in the town of Gulf Breeze, Florida. The sightings eventually gained national attention, and there are still a lot of people in the UFOlogy community who believe that Gulf Breeze is frequented by extraterrestrials. The guy I identified only as “Ed” in this story is Ed Walters; he became a big name on the UFO circuit and wrote a book. A number of people have claimed that Walters perpetrated a hoax; in 1990, a man living in Walters’s former house said he found a model of a UFO—which looked like the one in Walters’s photos—in the attic.

A Space Odyssey

   OK, there is definitely something strange going on in Gulf Breeze, Florida. The two most likely explanations are:
   1. Somebody is perpetrating a hoax and a bunch of other people, through inexperience, imagination, or ignorance, are falling for it.
   2. Intelligent beings from elsewhere in the universe, driving craft with fantastic capabilities, have come to Earth, and they are observing us, and they have a Paralysis Ray and—this is going to make some South Floridians nervous—they apparently speak Spanish.
   After spending a few days in Gulf Breeze checking things out, I’ve decided for myself which of these two possible explanations is closest to the truth. Here’s the story as far as I know it; see what you think.
   THE WIRE STORY
   On December 3, the Herald published this item in a roundup of wire-service stories from around the state:
   GULF BREEZE—Pictures of what was labeled as a glowing unidentified flying object published in the November 18 edition of the Sentinel of Gulf Breeze have prompted a half-dozen residents to report similar sightings.
   Duane B. Cook, editor and publisher of the weekly, said the object looks like the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, but he hopes it’s an alien spacecraft. He said the state’s Mutual UFO Network will examine the three photos taken November 11 near the town that appeared with a letter written by the anonymous photographer.
   Here at Tropic we are always on the lookout for stories of potentially intergalactic significance, so I immediately checked the Herald files to see if any other strange unexplained phenomena had been reported in the Gulf Breeze area. You can imagine how my pulse quickened when I discovered that:
   On December 5, at The Zoo, a privately operated zoo in Gulf Breeze, a wedding ceremony was held for giraffes. This really happened. Their names are Gus and Gigi.
   On August 19, a Gulf Breeze man was bitten by a pygmy rattlesnake as he
   (the man) examined a potted plant in the garden shop of the Wal-Mart store in nearby Fort Walton Beach. Just two days later, at a Wal-Mart in North Fort Myers, a woman examining a potted hibiscus was bitten by another pygmy rattlesnake. Wal-Mart officials were unable to explain this rash of pygmy-rattler attacks and described it as “unusual.”
   Well, of course, I needed no further convincing. I grabbed my camera—you have to be ready—hopped on a plane and was off to conduct my investigation.
   THE TOWN OF GULF BREEZE
   Gulf Breeze is a small residential community just across a bridge from Pensacola, way at the far western end of Florida, almost in Alabama. It is the opposite of Miami, geographically and in many other ways. It is not even in the same time zone as Miami. Miami is in the Eastern Time Zone and Gulf Breeze is in about 1958. In Gulf Breeze, when you buy something at a store, the counterperson usually smiles and says, “Y’all come back ‘n’ see us now, n’kay?” Whereas in Miami, the counterperson doesn’t usually say anything because he or she is having a very important personal telephone conversation that cannot be interrupted just for some idiot customer.
   I begin my investigation by driving through downtown Gulf Breeze. Even at slow speed, this takes less than five minutes. It appears to be a normal beach-oriented town, very quiet in the off-season. There are a lot of things in the sky, because this is an area of extremely heavy air traffic: Nearby, besides the commercial airport in Pensacola, are the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Eglin Air Force Base, and several other airfields. Almost any time you look up, you see a plane or a helicopter. In looking around, however, the only phenomenon I notice that does not seem to have an obvious earthly explanation is a bumper sticker that sayS BUSH 88.
   But you never can tell. As you know if you ever watched “The Twilight Zone,” there are times when everything seems to be perfectly normal, and then suddenly, without warning, something happens, something that you know is somehow ... wrong, and you start to hear that piercing high-pitched electronic-sounding “Twilight Zone” music—deedeedeedee deedeedeedee—and the hairs on the back of your neck, even if you use extra-hold styling mousse, stand on end.
   Little do I realize, as I drive through the quiet town of Gulf Breeze, that before I leave, I am going to experience that very feeling. More than once.

The Newspaper

   My first stop is the Gulf Breeze Sentinel. The Sentinel is a weekly newspaper with a circulation of 3,500, soaring to 4,500 in the summer. It is not the kind of paper that practices the kind of snide, cynical, city-slicker style of journalism exemplified by this article. It’s the kind of newspaper where many stories consist mostly of local people’s names. You can get into the Sentinel merely by having your birthday. Also there are many photographs of local boards, clubs, civic groups, etc., engaging in planning activities. In the November 19 issue, there’s a front-page photograph of a man smiling and holding up, for no apparent reason, bags of Hershey’s Kisses, accompanied by the caption:
   Dave Bozeman, manager of the Piggly Wiggly, is planning now for the Annual Gulf Breeze Christmas Parade. Piggly Wiggly plans to have several entries, including the Folgers Race Cars and, of course, the Pig!
   In short, the Sentinel seems to be your basic small hometown paper doing hometown stories about hometown people. Except that in the same November 19 issue, right above the Piggly-Wiggly manager, is a story headlined:
   UFO SIGHTED OVER GULF BREEZE
   Below this are three photographs of this thing, shaped roughly like a fat disk with a glowing, tapered bottom and a small, glowing protrusion on top. There are regularly spaced dark marks going around the side. The thing is in fairly clear focus. It appears to be hovering in the evening sky; you can see the dark blurred shapes of trees in the foreground.
   The “story” accompanying the photographs consists entirely of the text of an anonymous letter to the newspaper, allegedly written by the photographer, who says he took five Polaroid pictures of the thing from his yard on the night of November 11.
   “I was reluctant at first to show [the photographs] to any one, says the letter, but my wife convinced me to show them to Ed. Ed in turn said that the photos should be shown to the press. ... I am a prominent citizen of the community, however, and need anonymity at this time. I know what I saw and would feel much better if I knew I was not alone.
   “Let me reassure you that this is not a hoax.”
   It was “Ed” who brought the photographs to the Sentinel, according to Duane Cook, the editor and publisher. Cook, 43, is a former computer salesman who took over the paper from his stepfather in 1980. Cook thought the pictures looked convincing, and “Ed,” whom Cook knows, said the photographer was responsible. So Cook decided to go ahead with the story, but he was still “nervous a little” about it until the morning of November 19, when the paper was just about to go to press. On that day Cook’s stepfather and predecessor as editor, Charles Somerby, and his wife (Cook’s mother), Doris Somerby, stopped by the paper. Cook showed them the Polaroids.
   They did not act surprised. They said they had seen the same object. On the same night.
   Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee
   “I lost all fear of going to press with it,” Cook says.

The Witnesses

   If you called up Central Casting and asked for two people to play the parts of the Reliable Witnesses, they would send you Charlie and Doris Somerby. He’s 69 and, before his newspaper career, served as a naval communications officer in World War II and Korea. She’s 67 and holds the world indoor record for grandmotherliness (when I visit their home to interview them, she has an actual apple pie cooling on the kitchen table).
   The Somerbys say that on November 11, while taking a walk at sundown, they saw an object out over the bay headed toward Gulf Breeze. It made no sound, they say, and it did not look like any kind of aircraft they had ever seen. They watched for some mention of it on the evening TV news, but there was none. Until Cook showed them the photographs, they had not planned to say anything about it.
   I ask them, several times and in several ways, if they’re sure that the thing they saw over the bay looks the same as the object in the photographs. They say they’re sure. Driving away, I am convinced they’re telling the truth.

The Story Spreads

   When the Sentinel published the UFO pictures, people started calling. “We got a half a dozen calls from people who saw something that night,” says Cook. His staff started collecting these reports, and ran them as a front-page story in the November 25 issue. A local TV station did a story about the UFO, showing one of the Polaroids blown way up. “That was impressive,” says Cook.
   Then another local TV station did a story about it.
   Then United Press International did a story about it.
   And then it happened, the event that distinguishes an interesting but basically local story from a story with potentially shocking Worldwide Implications: The National Enquirer called.
   Yes. The paper that is frequently way ahead of the media pack on major Hollywood divorces; the paper that obtained and published the now-historic photograph showing Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap because he was too much of a gentleman to push her off; the paper that once offered a reward of $1 million for “positive proof” that extraterrestrial spacecraft are visiting the Earth; this paper was now calling Duane Cook of the Breeze Sentinel.
   The Enquirer sent a reporter, who wanted to take the photographs back to the paper’s home base in Lantana, Florida, for further analysis. But by that point Cook had been in touch with the state director of the Mutual UFO Network (more on this later), who had advised Cook that these photographs could be very valuable and he should not let them out of his sight. So the Enquirer flew Cook down to Lantana, where, Cook says, “They gave [the photographs] the most thorough going-over, and they couldn’t find any flaws.” They made Cook an offer: $5,000 for the right to publish the photographs before anybody else—if the Enquirer decided to use them. But before they made that decision, they wanted a second opinion. So they flew Cook and his photographs all the way to the world-famous NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory at Cal Tech in Pasadena, California. There, Cook says, “they took a series of photographs of the photographs,” the idea being that they would analyze them further and give the results to the Enquirer.
   Five thousand dollars. NASA. This was getting very exciting. And there was more to come.

The New Evidence

   Two more photographs arrived at the Sentinel. These were taken with a 35mm camera, and although the quality is worse than that of the Polaroids, they appear to show the same object. An anonymous letter claims the photographs were taken in June of 1986—over a year before the Polaroids were allegedly taken.
   Then somebody stuffed a manila envelope into the Sentinel mailbox containing nine more photographs; again the quality is poor, but they appear to show the same object. The accompanying letter is signed “Believer Bill,” who claims he took the pictures with a toy camera—which also was stuffed into the envelope—that his children had left in his car.
   Then “Ed”—remember “Ed”? The one who brought in the original photographs—gave the Sentinel a very clear Polaroid that he says he took in his backyard; it shows, very clearly, three of the objects.
   At this point the Sentinel was turning into the Galactic Clearing House for UFO Evidence. The photographs had become so common that the last two sets, which seemed to suggest that a regular alien invasion was going on right there in Gulf Breeze, ran on page four of the December 24 issue. The page-one story was the Christmas parade.
   But Duane Cook, the editor, is hoping that the UFO story isn’t over.
   “I would be delighted if, whoever they are, they have decided to communicate, because they’ve been watching us for some time now,” he tells me. “My main fear is that we won’t be adult enough to welcome them. My contribution would be to condition people’s minds to the possibility that they do exist, so that we can learn from them. In fact, maybe ...”—Cook pauses, then shakes his head. “No, that sounds grandiose.”
   “What?” I ask.
   “Well,” he says, looking at me carefully, “maybe that’s why I’m here.”
   Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee

The Ufo People

   Duane Cook is not alone. A lot of people are convinced that extraterrestrials are watching us. There are more than 200 UFO-oriented organizations worldwide, according to The UFO Encyclopedia, which bills itself as “a comprehensive A-to-Z guide to the UFO phenomenon” and which cheerfully and uncritically passes along all kinds of fascinating UFO stories. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the entry about a “contactee”—a person who claims to receive regular visits from extraterrestrials—named Howard Menger:
   According to Menger, a rash of sightings around his New Jersey home was followed by regular social visits from the Space People. He performed favors for his alien friends and even acted as their barber, cutting their long blond hair in order that they could pass unnoticed among the earthlings. Menger was rewarded with a trip to the moon, where he breathed easily in a surface atmosphere similar to Earth’s. He brought back some lunar potatoes, which reportedly contained five times the protein found in terrestrial potatoes. Their nutritive value could not be proved, however, because Menger had supposedly handed them over to the U.S. government, which was keeping them a secret.
   Not all the UFO believers, however, are Froot Loops. A lot of people who definitely qualify as Responsible Citizens have claimed they saw something strange in the sky. in 1973, Jimmy Carter, then the governor of Georgia, reported that he had seen a UFO in 1969, just before a Lions Club meeting (although we should bear in mind that, as president, Carter claimed he was attacked by a large swimming rabbit). Other celebrities who, according to The UFO Encyclopedia, have reported UFO sightings include: Jackie Gleason, Muhammad Ali, John Travolta, Elvis Presley, Orson Bean, and, of course, William Shatner.
   Many “sightings” have turned out to be hoaxes. Many others have turned out to be man-made or natural objects—airplanes, weather balloons, satellites, planets, stars, etc. And some remain unexplained. The mainstream scientific community tends to believe these are probably ordinary phenomena that could, with sufficient information, be identified. The UFOlogists tend to believe they are evidence that extraterrestrials are here. The debate rages on.
   The federal government has, reluctantly, played a major role in the UFO controversy. The Air Force, in an operation called Project Blue Book, collected and investigated UFO reports from 1948 until 1969, when the project was dropped because, the government says, it was a waste of time. Many UFOlogists, however, argue that the government wasn’t really trying to solve the mystery but to discredit the witnesses, and is now engaged in a massive conspiracy to cover up evidence of extraterrestrial visits, just as it has refused to release the lunar potatoes. Some of the conspiracy theories are pretty spooky, as we will see.

The Man From Mufon

   On my second day in Gulf Breeze, I drive out to Fort Walton Beach, about 40 miles east, to visit Donald Ware, the Florida state director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). MUFON describes itself as “an international scientific organization composed of people seriously interested in studying and researching” in an effort to provide “the ultimate answer to the UFO enigma.”
   Ware, who spent 26 years in the Air Force and flew two combat tours as a fighter pilot, appears to be a very straight arrow, a serious man with serious eyes. And he takes the Gulf Breeze sightings very seriously. After a MUFON field investigator—there are more than 50 in the state—examined the Polaroids and interviewed some of the witnesses, MUFON released a “preliminary evaluation” stating that the Polaroids show “an unknown of great significance.”
   Ware tells me that this is going to be “an important case that will be discussed by UFOlogists all over the world.” As he talks, he backs up various points by pulling papers from his files, which he began amassing back in 1952, when he saw lights over Washington, D.C., in what turned out to be a famous UFO incident.
   “After 12 years of study,” he says, “I decided that somebody was watching us. After 10 more years of study, I concluded that someone in our government has known this since 1947.”
   Solemnly, Ware hands me a book containing a reproduction of what are alleged to be Top Secret U.S. government documents. These documents state that in 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, the U.S. government secretly recovered a crashed flying saucer and four alien bodies.
   And President Harry Truman set up a secret group of top scientists, called “Majestic 12,” to study the aliens and their craft.
   And this whole thing has been kept secret ever since.
   Ware is looking at me intently.
   “Well!” I say brightly. “Thanks very much for your help!”

The Key Here

   I’m sitting in my motel room, thinking. The more I think, the more it seems to me that, whatever is going on in Gulf Breeze, the Key Figure is “Ed.” He’s the one who brought the first set of Polaroids to the Sentinel, allegedly on behalf of the photographer. He’s the one, according to Duane Cook, who took the later Polaroid showing three objects. He’s the only photographer who isn’t totally anonymous. I decide I need to talk to him. I call Cook, the Sentinel editor, and ask him to ask “Ed” to please get in touch with me.
   Less than an hour later, I hear a tapping at my motel window.

The Visit

   “Ed” does not introduce himself, except to say: “I’m the guy you’re looking for.” He’s about my age, 40. He’s articulate, mechanically inclined, and very sharp.
   We talk for about an hour. Right away he admits he took the first set of Polaroids. He says he invented the story about being the intermediary because he was afraid that if his name got in the paper, he’d be ridiculed. “I have a family,” he says. “I’m a successful businessman. Everyone in this town knows me.”
   “I know what I saw is real,” he says.
   He becomes more agitated as he talks. He tells me he has seen the UFO six times. He says that what has been published in the Sentinel is only the beginning of the story.
   “There is more,” he says. “But it’s scary.”
   He leans forward.
   “There is this thing,” he says, “and it can shoot a blue beam out of it. I got a picture of it doing it.”
   He shows me the picture. It’s another Polaroid, showing the now-familiar object, with what appears to be a faint bluish ray of light coming out of the hole in the bottom.
   Now the conversation gets weird. “Ed” says he was once trapped in the beam. Frozen. Paralyzed. Couldn’t move a muscle.
   While he was in the beam, “Ed” believes, the UFO beings put some kind of “mental input” into his brain, so they could communicate with him, but something—jets, maybe—scared them off, and now the beings keep coming around because they’re trying to get the mental input back. He knows when they’re nearby. “I can hear a hum,” he says.
   He also hears voices, speaking in Spanish and some kind of strange “consonant language.” He has heard the voices at night, near his house, out by his pool pump. He wishes that, whoever they are, they would hurry up and take their mental input back and leave him alone.
   “This has f-ed up the last two months of my life,” he says.
   I tell him that a lot of people would say he was crazy, or lying.
   He says he knows that, but he has something that will shut everybody up.
   He says he has a videotape.
   Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee

The Videotape

   Later that day, shortly past dusk, a Herald photographer and I go to see “Ed.” He lives in a comfortable suburban house in a tidy development. His wife is in the kitchen, cooking dinner. She doesn’t come out to greet us. I get the impression she’s not thrilled that we’re there.
   “Ed,” on the other hand, is very cordial. He laughs a lot. He bustles around, showing us a drawing he made of the UFO and getting out more photographs of it. He seems to have a lot more of them. He shows us the camera he uses, an old, battered Polaroid held together with tape.
   Then the three of us sit on his living room floor, and he shows us the videotape, which he shot with his Sony home video camera. The tape was apparently taken in his backyard, from behind some bushes, which can be heard rustling as the photographer moves around. The tape shows the same object, just above the tree line, moving kind of jerkily from right to left, then back again. It lasts only a minute or two.
   “Ed” shows it to us again, then looks at us.
   “That’s incredible,” we say, almost simultaneously.

The Questions

   As soon as we leave, the photographer tells me that something is wrong. The film “Ed” uses in his Polaroid has an ASA rating of 80, which means it is relatively slow to react to light. This means that the shutter must stay open a relatively long time, especially in low light. And this in turn means that a moving object, even if photographed by a skilled photographer, would look blurred. “Ed” has stated repeatedly that the object moves almost constantly—as it does in the videotape—and yet in almost all of his photographs, the object is in fairly sharp focus.
   “It just doesn’t look right,” says the photographer.
   Neither does the videotape, at least to my eyes. The jerky motion of the object makes it appear small, almost toy-like, and fairly close, although “Ed” insists it is “as big as a house.”
   Some other things are strange. Why, if “Ed” could sense the impending arrival of the object, didn’t he ever call his neighbors to be witnesses? And why, when he realized the object was visiting repeatedly, didn’t he get a better camera? I asked him both of these questions several times; he never really answered.
   But the most troubling evidence is “Ed” himself. He acts agitated, manic. Not to put too fine a point on it, he acts a little crazy. Of course, maybe this is normal behavior if aliens have put a mental input in your head. But still, I am getting skeptical. And I am not alone.

The Skeptic

   Philip Klass is the nation’s, if not the world’s, leading UFO skeptic. The UFOlogists do not like him (MUFON’s Donald Ware suggested to me that Klass has a “mental problem”). Klass retired last year after 35 years as senior electronics editor of Aviation Week magazine, but his involvement with UFOs is through an organization called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, of which he is chairman of the UFO subcommittee. In that capacity, he has spent a lot of time debunking various UFO claims. For example, he recently issued a report charging that the “Majestic 12” documents—the ones that allegedly prove that the government has dead aliens stashed away—are obvious forgeries. I must admit I found that story a tad hard to believe myself. It’s not that I don’t believe the government would try to hide dead aliens; it’s that I don’t think the government would succeed, since every time the government tries to do anything secretly, as in the Iran-contra arms deal, it winds up displaying all the finesse and stealth of an exploding cigar at a state funeral. If there really were dead aliens, I figure, there also would be daily leaks about it from High-Level Officials, and huge arguments among influential congresspersons over whose district the multimillion-dollar Federal Dead Alien Storage Facility would be located in.
   Anyway, Klass, as you might imagine, is very dubious about the claim that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors.
   “I can think of no more exciting story,” he says, “than to say I have investigated a UFO case for which there was no earthly explanation. In the 22
   years I have been investigating, I have never found a single such case.”
   But what about the photographs?
   “Photographs are the easiest things in the world to fake,” says Klass. “Even the UFO believers are very, very skeptical of them.” Klass is especially suspicious of Polaroids, because they have no negatives, which are often useful in the detection of hoaxes. He thinks it’s suspicious that no negatives were included with any of the photographs anonymously submitted to the Sentinel.
   “The odds against those photographs being authentic are jillions to one,” he says.
   But what about the witnesses?
   “Once the report gets out that there are UFOs in the area, you get all kinds of me-tooers,” Klass says. “Ninety-eight percent of all people who report seeing UFOs are trying to be honest. But we’ve been brainwashed by what we’ve read and been told. And eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.”
   That’s also the opinion expressed by astronomer Robert Young in a letter to the newsletter of the Astronomical League. Young says that, having investigated “a couple of hundred UFO reports”—all of which turned out to have prosaic explanations—he has concluded that “no eyewitness report of a UFO can be taken at its face value.” He adds that “waves” of UFO sightings “end when editors tire of them. ... My experience is that when news stories stop, the calls stop too.”

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory

   I call Dr. Robert Nathan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He’s the one the Enquirer flew the Polaroids, Duane Cook and all, out to see. He’s the one who’s supposed to be doing the scientific photographic analysis. Only he’s not. He says he’s suspicious of the photographs, both because of the way they look and because more than one set of them came from the same source.
   “I’m way off in the nonbeliever corner on this one,” says Dr. Nathan. “Unless something changes, I don’t care to use government equipment on this. I have the feeling that somebody is perpetrating a hoax.”

The Ray People

   If it is a hoax, the question is, Why? I am no psychiatrist, but I think the answer is suggested by John Keel, author of several UFO books. Keel argues that the modern era of UFO sightings was launched by a pulp science-fiction magazine called Amazing Stories, edited by a man named Raymond Palmer. In 1947, Palmer published a story about fiendish alien beings controlling life on Earth through the use of rays. Suddenly, Amazing Stories was deluged with mail from readers who insisted that the story was true, because they had been affected by the beings.
   “Palmer had accidentally tapped a huge, previously unrecognized audience,” writes Keel. “Nearly every community has at least one person who complains constantly to the local police that someone—usually a neighbor—is aiming a terrible ray gun at their house or apartment. This ray, they claim, is ruining their health, causing their plants to die, turning their bread moldy, making their hair and teeth fall out and broadcasting voices into their heads. Psychiatrists are very familiar with these ‘ray’ victims and relate the problem with paranoid schizophrenia.
   “In earlier times, [the paranoiacs] thought they were hearing the voice of God and/or the devil. Today they often blame the CIA or space beings for their woes. ... Ray Palmer unintentionally gave thousands of these people focus for their lives.”

The Call

   Back in Miami, I call “Ed” one morning. I tell him my theory, which is that he really does think he’s being hounded by aliens but that he has faked all the photographs, using different cameras, in an effort to get others to believe him.
   “Ed” tells me that since I last saw him, he was attacked by the beam while he was driving alone. “I was blown off the road and had to crawl underneath the truck,” he says. He says he gave a full report on this to the people at MUFON, for their ever-growing data bank.
   He also says that two armed men from the “Special Security Services” of the Air Force (he didn’t get their names) came around with a “material seizure warrant” and demanded his photographs. He says he didn’t want to send them to Duane Cook, so he told them he gave the photographs to me.
   So that’s the situation in Gulf Breeze, as far as I know it. Of course, there are some unanswered questions. For example, if “Ed” is faking the photographs, how is he doing it? And—this one still bothers me—what did the Somerbys see?
   As of this writing, I haven’t seen anything about this in the National Enquirer. I also haven’t heard from the Air Force.
   I expect, however, that I’ll hear from you out there in Readerland. One thing nobody disputes is that stories about UFOs generate reports about UFOS. But listen: If you have anything to report, the place to send it is:
   The Miami UFO Center P.O. Box 313
   Opa-Locka, Fl, 33054
   The important thing is: Don’t call me. OK. It’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s that my life is already filled with bizarre, inexplicable phenomena, such as the way the right rear speaker in my car never works except when they play songs I hate. Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee

Reader Alert

   This next section is mostly columns about Amazing but True things that I found out about thanks to mail from alert readers. One of these readers, as you will see, is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, who alerted me about a ground-breaking new antiflatulence product called Beano. This resulted in a column that some newspapers found too offensive to print, a fact that resulted in another column, which was either about censorship or circumcision, I am still not sure which.
   This section also contains vital information about an issue that everybody needs to think about more, namely, toilet snakes.

Plumber’s Helper

   Here at the Bureau of Animal Alarm we have received a disturbing Associated Press photograph sent in by alert journalist Russ Williams of the Asheville, North Carolina, Citizen-Times (motto: “A Newspaper Whose Staff Has Too Much Spare Time”). This photo shows a goat, looking fairly calm under the circumstances, hanging by its horns from a rope going through a pulley attached to the side of a building. Two men in a window are holding the other end of the rope. Here is the caption, which we are not making up:
   SPAIN—A goat hangs by his horns from the bell tower of the church in Manganeses de la Polvorosa, some 200 miles northwest of Madrid. Villagers, who open the religious festival of St. Vincent by dropping a goat from the church belfry, attacked police who tried to block the tradition. The goat was uninjured as villagers caught the goat with a tarp.
   As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons. We are sure that the people of Manganeses de la Polvorosa would be amused by some common American religious practices.
   “We may drop goats from belfries,” they’d probably say, “but at least we don’t thank the Lord for touchdowns.”
   Nevertheless, we here at the Bureau feel that the Immigration authorities should keep a sharp lookout for Manganeses de la Polvorosa tour groups coming to the United States, particularly New York. Because they might decide to visit the Empire State Building, and while they’re up on the observation deck they might suddenly smack their foreheads and realize that it’s time to open the festival of St. Vincent, and the next day’s New York Post might print the following tragic headline:
   TERRIFIED CROWD FLEES 120 MPH DEATH BUTT
   Another animal menace that we all need to be more concerned about is giant toilet snakes. This is a growing problem, as can be seen by the following statistics:
   Number of Articles About Giant Toilet Snakes We Received Prior to 1992: Zero. Number of Articles About Giant Toilet Snakes We Have Received in 1992: One.
   Statistically, this represents an increase of infinity percent in the number of giant toilet-snake reports. The most recent one, sent by alert reader Jack Sowers, was written by reporter Mike Leggett for the Austin (Texas) American Statesman. It concerns a man named Steve Ashenfelter, who used to manage an Oklahoma hunting and fishing club. One day he went into the clubhouse bathroom, and, in his words, “there was a big snake lying in the toilet. As soon as he saw me he just swirled around and went down the pipes.”
   So Ashenfelter did exactly what you would do; namely, he moved to another continent.
   No, really, he followed standard toilet-snake procedure, which is to go around flushing the three clubhouse toilets in an effort to get the snake to come out.
   “I went in the bathroom upstairs, and there he was, lying in the toilet up there,” Ashenfelter recalled. “So I went and flushed all the toilets, and he came back up in the toilet where I saw him the first time.”
   Eventually, Ashenfelter got the snake, but it took him two days, and he ended up using—we are still not making this up—two fishing poles, chlorine bleach, muskrat traps in all three toilets, an eight-foot piece of lumber, rope, and heavy metal hooks. The snake turned out to be over seven feet long.
   We do not wish to create a nationwide panic, but apparently there is a new breed of large, commode-dwelling snakes that have figured out how to move from toilet to toilet, which means they could easily travel across the country via the Interstate Plumbing System. This has serious ramifications, especially if you’re a parent trying to potty-train a small child. Psychologists agree that the best way to handle this situation is: lie. “Don’t worry!” you should tell the small child many times, “A big snake won’t come out of the toilet!” This is the approach Mister Rogers is taking.
   Meanwhile, however, something must be done. One practical approach would be for the government to require all U.S. citizens to put muskrat traps in their commodes. The only problem here is that if the trap is not removed prior to commode usage, there could be severe consequences for guys of the male gender. On the other hand, many women might view this as a fair punishment for all the billions of times that guys have left the seat up. It’s definitely something to think about as each of us, in his or her own way, prepares to celebrate the festival of St. Vincent.

Watch Your Rear

   As you are aware if you follow international events, over the past year I have written a number (two) of columns about the worldwide epidemic of snakes in toilets. As a result I have received many letters from people who have had personal toilet-snake encounters, to the point where I now consider it newsworthy when somebody reports NOT finding a snake in a toilet.
   But now I am getting nervous. I say this because of a recent alarming incident wherein a woman, attempting to use her commode, was attacked in an intimate place—specifically, Gwinnett County, Georgia—by a squirrel. I have here an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, written by Gail Hagans and sent in by a number of alert readers. The headline—a textbook example of clear journalism—states: Squirrel somehow makes way into commode, scratches Gwinnett woman’s behind. I am not making this headline up.
   The woman is quoted as follows: “I went to the bathroom and lifted the lid and sat down. That’s when I felt something scratching my behind.”
   So, following the recommended “Jump, Slam, Call, and Tell” emergency procedure, she jumped up, slammed the lid down, called her husband at work, and told him to come home immediately, which he of course did. We may live in an age of gender equality, but men have a protective instinct that dates back millions of years, to when they would have had to defend their mates from such vicious predators as the saber-toothed tiger and the mastodon (toilets were much bigger in those days).
   Unfortunately, by the time the husband got home, the squirrel had drowned, forcing us to once again ask WHEN the failed Clinton administration will demand that ALL commodes be equipped with tiny life preservers. But that is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is that the squirrel apparently got into the plumbing system via a roof vent, which means that if you, like so many people, have a roof, your toilet is vulnerable to any organism with a long, narrow body, including (but not limited to) otters, weasels, dachshunds, squids, and international fashion models with only one name, such as Iman.
   But that is by no means the only major toilet development. There is also the Mystery Toilet in Texas that produces ballpoint pens. I am not making this up, either. According to a story in the Wichita Falls (Texas) Times/Record News, written by Steve Clements and sent in by several alert readers, a man named David Garza of Henrietta, Texas, has fished 75 Paper Mate ballpoint pens out of his toilet over the past two years, sometimes as many as five pens per day. Garza has no idea where they’re coming from, and neither do the local sewer authorities.
   The story was accompanied by a photograph of Garza sitting on the bathtub next to the Mystery Toilet, holding a pen, looking like a successful angler. I called him immediately. “What’s the status of the toilet” I asked.
   “It’s still a mystery,” he said. He said he hadn’t found any new pens since the newspaper story, but that he has become something of a celebrity. This is understandable. People naturally gravitate to a man who has a Mystery Toilet.
   “Everywhere I go,” he said, “people say to me, ‘Have you got a pen?’”
   I asked him if the pens still write, and he said they do.
   “Paper Mate ought to make a commercial out of this,” he said. “The slogan could be, ‘We come from all over and write anywhere.’ You know, like Coca-Cola, ‘It’s there when you need it.’”
   Actually, I don’t think that’s Coca-Cola’s slogan. But Garza’s statement got me to thinking about a possible breakthrough TV commercial wherein an athlete is standing in the locker room, sweating, thirsty as heck, and the toilet gurgles, and up pops a nice refreshing can of Coke. Yum! A commercial like that might be exactly what Coca-Cola needs to counteract all the free media attention Pepsi got recently with the syringe thing.
   But the question is: Why are Paper Mate pens showing up in this toilet? There’s only one logical explanation—I’m sure you thought of it—alien beings. David Garza’s toilet is apparently connected to some kind of intergalactic sewage warp, through which aliens are trying to establish communication by sending Paper Mate pens (which are for sale everywhere). Probably they want us to write down our phone number on a piece of Charmin and flush it back to them.
   Speaking of toilets and communication, you need to know about a TV-review column from the Daily Yomiuru, an English-language newspaper published in Japan. The column, sent in by alert reader Chris Graillat, states that there’s a children’s TV show in Japan called “Ugo Ugo Ruga,” which features—I am still not making this up—an animated character with heavy eyebrows called Dr. Purl Purl (Dr. Stinky), a piece of talking excrement that keeps popping up from the toilet bowl to express strange platitudes only an adult can fathom.
   You’re thinking: “Hey! Sounds like Henry Kissinger!”
   No, seriously, you’re thinking that there are indeed some scary worldwide developments occurring in toilets, and the international authorities had better do something about it. And then they’d better wash their hands.