Along the Way: Visitors from other galaxies would raise our IQ

I don’t know about you, but I was sorely disappointed when the most recent mystery-lights incident in the sky over Phoenix turned out to be a hoax.

What a bummer.

Some clown tied road flares to helium balloons with fishing line, launched them from his backyard and did little more than unhinge the local news media for a while.

Shoot! No ground scorched by flying saucers. No crop circles.

No artist’s conception of little men with large heads and eyes that look like the tail lights on a Honda.

Since I was 12 or 13 and first saw the movie, “The Thing From Another World,” I’ve been hooked on the idea of visitors from outer space.

That movie scared the dickens out of me, but I loved it.

And I never forgot the speech at the end by character actor Douglas Spencer, as Scotty the news reporter. Talking from the North Pole or some such frozen place, Scotty files his “story of a lifetime” by radio, appealing to people everywhere to “keep watching the skies...”

Oooooooo. Just thinking about it, I want to run for the tree house and reach for my Captain Midnight spyglass.

Then there’s the Bigfoot thing. When the famous Patterson film of ol’ Bigfoot hot-footing it through the woods of the Great Northwest somewhere turned out to be bogus, I was about as crestfallen as when Bucky Dent hit that dreadful home run one year and the Yankees beat the Red Sox.

I knew an anthropologist, a really neat guy named Grover Krantz at Washington State University, who believed with all his heart that Bigfoot — or Sasquatch — existed. Dr. Krantz has since died, but he explained to me once that the reason we haven’t caught a Bigfoot yet is approximately the same reason that nobody has ever found a dead bear in the woods.

“We just don’t know where bears go to die,” he said.

Dr. Krantz caused quite a stir when he suggested some hunter shoot and kill a Bigfoot. He said it would prove the thing exists, once and for all, and “we’d have a chance to study it and find out what it is.”

Tree-huggers weren’t the only ones who recoiled in outrage at his suggestion that it might be a good idea if Bigfoot or one of his cousins got croaked by a hunter. Jim Walden, the football coach at Washington State, wanted to recruit Bigfoot.

“He’d make me a helluva linebacker, wouldn’t he?” Walden told me.

Grover thought Sasquatch might be a descendant of Gigantopithicus, a big ol’ sonofagun who existed on Earth maybe a million years ago to as recently as 300,000 years ago in China, India and Vietnam.

He was the largest ape that ever lived, standing up to 10 feet tall and weighing up to 1,200 pounds. He was big and hairy, didn’t smell very good and had very small brains.

Jim Walden was right. He’d have made a perfect linebacker.

Whatever.

I want there to be flying saucers or flying frying pans (in space), and I want there to be visitors from other planets. I want there to be Bigfeet and Yetis and Abominable Snowmen.

But I want to go on record here and now against Chupacabras (“goat suckers”), the alleged unknown critter who has inspired sightings in Puerto Rico, Mexico, the U.S. and outside several bars right after closing time.

I hope this guy is NOT for real. Who wants gargoyles creeping around at night attacking innocent livestock?

The novelist Jonathan Swift imagined Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses described in the last part of “Gulliver’s Travels.” The Houyhnhnms were practical and wise and had no need to lie — nor any word for lying.

They did not believe in using force and they were creatures of very high ideals.

Don’t’cha wish Houyhnhnms were for real?

And surely we could put up with Giganto-Bigfoot-Pithicusses running around in the woods...just leave them the heck alone and

absolutely refuse to allow the NRA to lobby for a hunting season on them.

Yeah, it was a big letdown when the Phoenix lights turned out to be a dumb joke.

But like Linus Van Pelt, Charlie Brown’s best friend, the kid who believed the Great Pumpkin flew over on Halloween night and left presents for boys and girls in the most sincere pumpkin patch, I believe we’ll be visited someday by people driving round spaceships.

Or something like that.

I want there to be life forms somewhere in the cosmos who’ve found a way to live together peacefully and communicate without recorded telemarketing come-ons, cell phones or junk mail.

I want there to be intelligent life somewhere.

Corky Simpson’s column appears Fridays in the Green Valley News.