Mantis in Your Pantis

Why did I do it? Why, why, why? I could have just turned the TV off, or switched the channel. But no, I had to watch an episode and half of a dim-witted new cable TV UFO show, and my brain still hurts.

I guess it was educational, in a sense. Here's what I learned on this show last night:

• If a UFO witness gives you a piece of strange metal that he claims to have shot off of a UFO in his driveway, and if you take that piece of strange metal to a "scientific lab" that looks like someone's house, and if the scientists at the "scientific lab" that looks like someone's house declare that the strange piece of metal did not come from anywhere on earth, what do you do? You give the piece of strange not-of-this-earth metal back to the UFO witness and you drive away. That's it.
• If a UFO witness says he's been abducted, look amazed, but don't ask him for details.
• When you use a Geiger counter to detect radioactivity in someone's yard under the point at which a UFO passed overhead, you can tell from the clicking of the Geiger counter which direction the UFO was going.
• When you have four hosts of a show, chances are at least two of them are mostly useless for anything other than nodding gravely and saying, "Let's go check it out!"
• When aliens invade your home, they leave behind a "sweat-like substance" on the walls that can be detected with an ultraviolet flashlight. Unless there's actually nothing on the walls, in which case you still get to show off your ultraviolet flashlight, so it's not a total loss.
• When a witness describes an entity that was in his or her house, you immediately tell the witness that it was an "alien" or an "E.T."
• When you hypnotize a UFO witness, you should only ask him or her things that you've already asked him or her before hypnotizing him. Or her. And, what the hell, why not ask only one question while you're at it?

  

  Can you spot the secret UFO base?

• "Mantis" aliens are a thing now, and the Mantis aliens have a secret underwater base somewhere in Lake Michigan. This concerns me because I live close to Lake Michigan.
• If you try to locate a secret Mantis alien base under Lake Michigan by randomly scuba diving in one spot out of the entire 22,300 square mile lake, you just wasted a perfectly good afternoon.

That's what I learned. I should have known something was fishy because this UFO program was being shown on Animal Planet, which is like The Puppy Bowl being shown on the Science Channel. I also should have known something was fishy because, after the scientists declared that the piece of strange metal was absolutely not from this earth, the narrator started to hedge a bit, saying it was "possibly not of this earth," and it "could be extraterrestrial." I also should have known something was fishy because one of the hosts of the show -- the ex-CIA operative with the Geiger counter, the ultraviolet flashlight, the hypnosis skills and the scuba gear -- is someone I heard give a talk at a UFO conference once, and whom I overheard telling someone the following: that his son is married to a human-alien hybrid, that she is on the run from alien greys who want her back, that she is hiding out somewhere in Mexico, and that his son is going crazy trying to find her before the aliens do.

The thing is, when I was watching the show last night, I swore to myself that I would not blog about it, because, well... it's just too easy. But here I am. I can't stand by and watch this kind of material being presented as serious, mainstream UFO investigation and not say anything. It's crap.

The really sad part about it is, there could have been something to these UFO reports, but the "investigations" were so biased, so shoddy, and so utterly harebrained that we'll never know...