So how come they never land in Washington?

UFOs. The Grays. Alien abductions. Roswell. Area 51. They say we're being visited and watched . . .

So how come the little green men from outer space never choose to land in Washington? Or London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing or Tokyo, for that matter? Are we really expected to believe that E.T. would come all this way, just so he could land in the backwoods somewhere and conduct a proctological exam on the first hapless victim who wanders by?

Why do I bring this up, you might ask? In my wanderings through the vast wasteland we call cable TV, I ran across a show on The History Channel about so-called alien abductions (a clear misnomer, to be sure, since we are not abducting them). What caught my eye, and my admittedly momentary interest, was a bit in which a doctor removed a small metallic flake from someone who claimed it was an "alien device" he had been implanted with. The hook for this bit was that this piece of metal could be seen moving, which the narrators claimed it was doing on its own, and thus proof of its alien origins. Except that it was stuck in someone's flesh, and someone else was trying to fish it out with a pair of foreceps . . .

Of course it was moving around. If you've never noticed, a splinter does the same thing when you're trying to yank it out.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do believe that there is other life out there in the universe, intelligent and otherwise. With all the billions of stars in the Milky Way alone, the numbers are against us being the only life present. But they are not here.

Think of it this way. The closest star system to us lies 4.3 light years away. That means if you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you 4.3 years to get there from here, and vice versa. But you can't travel at the speed of light; Einstein was pretty clear about that. The faster you go, the more power you need in order to make yourself go faster until you basically require infinite power when you hit the speed of light. So, physics restricts us to moving at something a lot less than the speed of light.

As it does our friends the E.T.s. Physics isn't just physics here, it's physics everywhere. Without going into such arcane things as M-theory and multiverses, the same physical laws that define us also define the little green men, and what they can and can't do.

So, if our notional journey to, say, Alpha Centauri, at the limited fraction of light speed that we can attain, would take us several thousand years, E.T. is just as SOL as we are. And that problem gets worse the farther away you want to travel . . . It may just be me, but that seems like an awful lot of time and effort just so you can go somehwere and peek up something's rear end.

Ah-ha, some would say, but E.T. is much smarter than we are, and he's figured out how to travel faster-than-light. Well, no, actually, he can't. While a physicist would tell you that Einstein leaves open the possibility that there may be a "short-cut" around the speed of light, the chances of that actually being done are, well . . .

Mass warps space; the more mass an object has, the more it warps space, which is why planets go around stars. Theoretically, then, given a sufficiently massive object, you could warp space enough so that two distant points become close enough that you could reasonably travel between them. But think about that for a moment; where and how do you find enough mass to do that? Le's put it another way: galaxies are pretty massive objects. But the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way is the Andromeda galaxy, and that's 2.3 million light years away . . . so we need more mass than that. Guess I shouldn't be in a hurry to pack my bags.

In most cases, I do indeed believe that those who claim to have seen UFOs and those who claim that E.T. has visited them truly believe that (just as I'm sure that there are some who claim that because a good hoax is a good hoax), but . . . I'll ask again: how come they never land someplace like Washington, march up to Congress or the White House, and announce themselves? I mean, really, if they come all that way, the least they could do is offer the President a fruit basket. The whole point of the exercise is to introduce yourselves and say "Hi! We're the neighbours," isn't it? Just as long as they don't start poking things where they don't belong . . .