Satire/Rosie Sorenson

The Big O’s Drive-By

The world lit up in 2017 when the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope atop Mt. Haleakala in Hawaii spotted a mysterious cigar-shaped object whizzing through our solar system. It was quickly named Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “messenger from afar arriving first.” Cue the spooky music.

According to www.NASA.gov, Oct. 16, 2017, “Rob Weryk, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), was first to identify it. Weryk immediately realized this was an unusual object. ‘Its motion could not be explained using either a normal solar system asteroid or comet orbit,’ he said. “‘… This object came from outside our solar system.’” Its speed was estimated at 196,000 miles per hour, fast enough to make even Elon Musk’s head spin.

In other words, a cosmic drive-by.

Questions arose. Was this odd cylindrical object just an asteroid, as some would like to believe, or was it a fantastical spacecraft stalking us and performing an alien do-si-do? Perhaps we were being punked. Maybe it was just a big doobie headed for Colorado. Or a humongous cigar headed for Cuba. No one knows for sure, but the scientific community got its knickers in a twist over a recent report from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In addition to all the scientific equations found in the report, which no lay person could understand, the document ended with something everyone could understand: “Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization,” they posited in the report submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Since the paper was not published on April 1, a joke could not be assumed.

I have it on tight-lipped authority from a NASA space scientist, that the Big O was sent here from the far edge of our Milky Way. NASA had already set up a back channel to the planet Έκπληξη, MOFO due to the suspicious humanoid broadcasts they had been picking up on their radio satellites. Apparently, when the aliens heard their spacecraft had been named Oumuamua, they emitted a high squeaky chuckle. The elder tribesalien said, “Who can pronounce that? We just call him Bob. Good thing we still teach phonics to our newbies. I’ve heard that these EarthPeeps gave up on phonics long ago, and that’s why millions can’t properly speak or write their own language. Pity these fools who do not have computers in their brains. Remember when Elon came for a secret visit? He predicted that earthlings would soon adapt to BrainPuters. But then he got stoned and drunk during a TV interview and the company forced him out. He was too smart for those EarthFools.”

The NASA scientist explained that “Bob” had been contracted by PlanetSkyZillow to assess the habitability of Earth for future development—it’s air quality, its water quality, its ability to support their life forms. Bob’s report was discouraging. “Planet Earth and its peoples are on the brink of extinction. Perhaps after the passing of another millennium, we can pick it up at a fire sale.”

We’ll never know whether or not the scientists at Harvard or NASA were having us on with their talk of aliens, since Oumumua left the solar system soon after its cursory visit. He/she/it/they did not leave us a note.

But one has to wonder if behind closed doors the scientists are guffawing over our gullibility and snorting, “People should remember that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Rosie Sorenson is a humor writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can contact her at: RosieSorenson29@yahoo.com

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2018

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