It was predictable that just as people in the Democratic primary states are starting to notice that of all the candidates running for the party's nomination, it is Dennis Kucinich who stands solidly for everything that they care about--ending the war, impeaching the president and vice president, establishing universal government-funded health care (with the blood-sucking insurance industry out of the picture), ending trade agreements like NAFTA that just ship US jobs overseas, respecting international law, restoring the Constitution, insuring the unfettered right to abortion on demand, etc.--the media would attempt to label him a wacko.

Tim Russert played the hitman, asking Kucinich in the last debate whether he'd ever seen a UFO, and then cutting him off so he could only answer yes without any real explanation.

Well, let me join Dennis and say that I too have seen a UFO. Two actually, though the first one was explained later.

The first, which I saw when I was in high school, appeared as a bright light in the sky, then rapidly expanded into big green circle, which then faded away. There were two more of these events. I was awestruck. So were thousands of people who began calling police departments to report them. It turned out, as we read in the paper the next day, that NASA had fired three rockets from Wallops Island off Virginia, up some 60 miles into space, where they exploded, releasing some kind of green gas. So it was a UFO for a day. Then it was an IFO-- an identified flying object.

The other sighting remains a UFO. It happened back around 1970. I was travelling in the late afternoon, right around sunset, down Route 9 from Middletown, CT to Old Saybrook. As I was driving, I noticed a small shiny object up in the sky flying parallel to the ground at a very high rate of speed. The sun was glinting off of it, making it especially bright. It caught my attention because it was flying much faster than a commercial jet, and was leaving no contrail. There was no apparent shape to it. That is, I couldn't see wings or a tail, but it was pretty far off.

I was just speculating as to whether it might be a supersonic military jet when suddenly the thing made an abrupt right angle turn, way beyond the capabilities of any airplane--and so fast that anyone sitting inside it would have been killed by the G-forces--and then shot straight up into the sky, much faster than before, and just disappeared.

Now that was bizarre!

I still don't know what to make of it.

There may be an explanation somewhere that would make this an IFO, but for me, it remains a UFO.

So does that preclude me from being taken seriously if I write about plans to restore the draft, or about the impeachable crimes of the Bush/Cheney administration?

Of course not.

I'm a major skeptic when it comes to UFO's. It seems to me highly unlikely that any civilization technologically advanced enough to have mastered interstellar flight would have any interest in our pathetically primitive activities here on earth, if they even knew we were here, plus the odds of there being such a highly advanced civilization anywhere within a thousand lightyears of the earth are incredibly small.

Still, some rather credible people--airline pilots and police officers--have reported seeing some very strange things over the years, and the galaxy (not to mention the universe), is a mighty big place.

It would be wacky to simply assert that extraterrestrial life does not exist. And it would be wrong to say that there are not UFOs. Indeed, it seems to me it is far more likely that there are aliens in this universe and even that they visit us occasionally, than that there is some omnipotent god that is running the show, or that, if it exists, would give a rats ass about us here on Earth.

Neither Dennis Kucinich nor I are saying we saw aliens. I don't know what Kucinich saw, but I know what I saw, and it wasn't something that could be easily explained away as a plane or a rocket.

So I'm calling it a UFO.

And I feel much more comfortable voting for someone for president who admits to having seen a UFO like I have, than for someone who says god talks to him, or who says she won't preclude dropping a nuclear weapon on Afghanistan, and who cannot commit to having all US troops out of Iraq five years from now!

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