No, not really. Cities apparently are as anxious to get people to like them as any small child or eager puppy, and often just as clumsy in their attempts to win that attention. That's why you see them doing things like...

Sad attention grabs are something you expect from reality show characters or self-important activists, people who don't really have any dignity to lose. Surely our civic institutions are above all that.

6 Pandering to UFO Nuts

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Fyffe, Alabama, population 971, was allegedly visited twice by aliens in 1989 and that's apparently all that ever happened in that town. The Alabama legislature almost immediately proclaimed Fyffe the official "UFO Capital of Alabama" and gave the town a $10,000 tourism grant. Fyffe eventually established the annual "UFO (Unforgettable Family Outing) Festival," which is apparently an ordinary small-town fair that stretches to relate every attraction to UFOs somehow.

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For some reason, that is enough to draw 10,000 visitors. Before the UFO business, Fyffe did not have any kind of civic celebrations at all, so basically the entire town's culture and civic events are based around a few people thinking they saw UFOs in 1989.

Fyffe's mayor says it makes perfect sense - "Ider, Ala., has its Mule Day," he said. "UFOs are what we're famous for."



That looks like a pretty identifiable FO to me.

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Of course this is pretty small-time compared to Roswell, New Mexico, whose official tourism site is designed to evoke a 1950s B-movie poster, thanks to the 1947 event where an alien ship crashed into the ground near that town, and the government covered it all up and did alien autopsies or something, because they were afraid of nerds with beards finding out the truth.

Roswell has a UFO museum as well as an annual UFO festival, and unlike Fyffe's all-in-good-fun festival, this one is for people to talk for serious about real UFOs. This festival is funded by the city itself, which put $150,000 into it in 2010.