Above: A Mayan space traveller as suggested by Erich von Daniken in his Chariots of the Gods

STARLOG PALINDROME 230623: Was getting worried there for a bit. No signs of intelligent life trying to make contact with Earth for quite some time.

Makes you wonder what kind of future our kids might have without someone somewhere out there looking out for them.

But then an email came out of the ether from my mates at Close Encounters Australia. An Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena update. They’re UAPs, not UFOs these days if you didn’t realise. And there’s a seminar coming up on all things extra-terrestrial – whistleblowers, recovered craft, bodies …

Plenty going on once again, it seems. Thank Buddha. I was mightily pleased also by website thedebrief.org assuring me: ‘Intelligence officials say US has retrieved craft of non-human origin.’ And that this important news is being illegally withheld from the US Congress.

Curious, however, that NASA’s meant to be on the job with a 16-member taskforce of astronomers, technologists, astrobiologists, physicists, and astronaut Scott Kelly, trying to nut out just what UAPs are. But coming up empty-handed.

What the? Something’s going on, my conspiracy antenna tells me.

They reckon the UAPs/UFOs are just commercial aircraft, balloons, even radiation from microwave ovens. Nothing extra-terrestrial. What would they know? Their astronauts have been driving across the US in nappies and getting thrown in the slammer.

And the brightly-lit UFO in Las Vegas recently? Nothing doing, says NASA. Clearly they didn’t see the same eight-foot-tall alien on video in a back yard that I saw online?

All right, all right, it might have been an LA Laker in a onesie on a lost weekend but why are they so quiet about it?  Something fishy going on, I reckon.

I’d hate to lose our fascination, imagination and trepidation about aliens, extraterrestrial oddities and sub-orbital flights of fancy to the subjugating forces of common sense. Worse still, to science. Look what it’s done to religion.

Where would we be without Min Min lights stalking people? Without aliens living inside the hollow Moon? Or Antarctica’s alien crystal city, the US Navy Tic Tac UFO sightings, Roswell, the Bermuda Triangle, ancient astronauts among the Mayans and Incas?

What about our own Freddie Valentich’s disappearance after reporting a UFO while flying off the Otways in 1978?

Fishermen earlier spotted strange lights in the sky off Apollo Bay. A South Aussie farmer reckons he saw a plane stuck to a UFO next morning. A Manifold Heights clairvoyant even told me she’d seen Fred on the other side with other pilots dressed in WW2 outfits.

I once had a North Geelong bloke told me he’d been visited by aliens. He’d seen spaceships over Shell multiple times. Swore it black and blue. Wouldn’t talk about probes, that tells you something.

If you can have frogfalls and poltergeists, and curses and pointing the bone, if you can have spontaneous human combustion, yetis and impossible subconscious memories from hundreds of years ago, then why can’t you have a few UFO sightings over the Belmont Common?

Incidentally, I’ve heard old Granny Clats from the Sawyers Arms used to do a bit of barnstorming there back in the day. So much fake news and AI about these days but try telling me that isn’t true.

By the way, NASA says it didn’t conduct any testing or manufacturing of the Titan submersible that went woomph last week, in contrast to reported comments by OceanGate boss Stockton Rush that it was a co-designer.

I wouldn’t be putting my hand up for that crock, either. It’s hardly got me itching to head off into space in any Bezos or Musk rocket. I’ll stick with little green men, thanks, they seem much better drivers.

And in the meantime, like Eric Idle sings, I’ll “pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space. 
‘Cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth!”