Thirty-nine cult followers “shed” their “containment units” a few weeks ago to meet up with an alien spacecraft traveling in the shadow of the Hale-Bopp Comet.
It should come as no surprise that they were from California.
We’ve got some good old boys here in Alabama that may see UFOs from time to time. We Southerners occasionally even go on Jenny Jones or Maury Povitch to talk about how visitors from outer space abducted us “right in the middle of COPS! Them dern aliens took a pack of Budweiser too!” But I doubt many Alabamians have thought about hitching a ride on the Hale-Bopp UFO. Our crazies tend to stick to more conventional lunacy, ie, shooting their neighbor over a tomato plant, going to church in flip-flops and a fur coat, moving to New York City, et cetera.
I’ve never really wanted to go to outer space. My friends all did when we were little. They built cardboard rocket ships, slept on Battlestar Galactica bed sheets, and jumped around in Darth Vader Underoos. I, on the other hand, wanted to be General Omar Bradley–a guy who could whoop up on the aliens should they ever decide to land here and take over Andalusia.
So while my buddies were stumbling around the yard in Radio-Flyer “Space Probe” wagons with fishbowls over their heads, I was performing ultra-ultra top-secret military intellegence missions for the Corps. First, I had to check all of Andalusia’s vital resources that an Alien Empire might want to take over. Naturally, the courthouse and the dam were important. But sneaky aliens? They might go for the flower shop! Sniff a petunia and drop dead! Or what about the Methodist church–swig down a Co-Cola at intermission between Sunday school and the 11 o’clock service, and whammo! A whole room full of alien Methodists.
So at the ripe old age of 8, I came up with THE OFFICIAL GENERAL OMAR BRADLEY ILLEGAL ANDALUSIA ALIEN TEST to figure out if someone was actually a martian designed to look human. First, look the alien/Andalusian straight in the eye. Second, yell “Bulldogs stink!” Finally, kick ‘em real hard in the shins. If the subject doesn’t immediatly laugh at your little joke, and pat you, the charming youngster on the head, you know they’re a being from another planet.
You’d be surprised how many people in Andalusia are from outer space.
‘Course, a lot of these people were pretty important and most of them were adults. So how did an 8-year-old rid Andalusia of the invaders? Simple. I fed them my Aunt Pat’s potato salad. They’d literally gag the alien right out.
But I’ve been gone for a while, and sadly, there isn’t enough potato salad to combat the alien problem in New York.
—Morgan Murphy