EDITORIAL What’s Happening over at the CIA?

2. EDITORIAL What’s Happening over at the CIA? You wouldn’t have seen it unless you were awake and stargazing, but in the wee hours on Sunday a strange craft zipped through the heavens on a course that took it by Tysons Corner, over the CIA’s headquarters at Langley and [up] the Potomac River toward Great Falls. Like all extraterrestrial craft, it was gone in the blink of an eye, but don’t tell the eyewitnesses they didn’t see anything. They did. And they’re scared. Not surprisingly, the news services gave Sunday morning’s alien visitation the token three-line squib for the wrap-ups, but that did not diminish the effect of this alien craft on County residents. The switchboards at police headquarters were jammed with callers, while a special detail of Army Rangers swooped in by Apache helicopter to man The Company’s ramparts at Dolley Madison Boulevard. The description of the UFO is not unfamiliar.

3. “Well, all I know is what I saw,” one newspaper carrier on morning rounds told a reporter. “I was driving up Dolley Madison when I saw this tube-shaped object—you know, sort of like a cigar—sail right over the CIA. It had lots of lights, shot what appeared to be a search light down on the grounds, then was gone. And I mean gone, man. All you could see a second later were the lights heading toward the river.” A hotel worker in Tysons fainted when the UFO stopped to hover near the 20th floor of her hotel. Two lovebirds canoodling at Turkey Run said they not only heard the deafening roar of a jet but also felt an intense, momentary blast of megaheat as the noise faded in the distance. Something, or some being, flew over McLean and Great Falls Sunday morning, that much is for sure. We may never discover the craft’s origin, but we must learn what is going on at CIA that would make an alien ship stop to fix its investigatory ray upon our G-men and their benign reservation. Or is it all that benign? Thirty years ago,

4. newspapers reported the crash of an alien craft in nearby Prince William, after which government agents supposedly took the bodies of its crew to Langley. It was much like the case in Roswell, N.M., where the government has yet to come clean about its fallen “weather balloon.” Maybe the ET’s in Sunday’s UFO wanted to retrieve the remains of their galactic comrade(s), although one wonders what would now be left of the little green men, considering how many years they have been in the hands of the government’s scientists. Many of NASA’s top brains were drawn from the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy after World War II, and three decades was ample time for them to conduct their ghoulish “research” on our alien friends and dispose of their broken, lifeless bodies. Of course, there are those who won’t believe. But they will never believe, for they do not understand what is at stake, as do the victims of unjust ridicule. For them, the story will be the fantastic whopper it really is. --R.C.K.