Greetings

Dear aliens, You may have been amused by a recent news story about the latest chapter in America’s long, futile, semi-secret, widely mocked efforts to unmask you, to prove that your spaceships have been hovering, darting and befuddling fighter pilots with impossible aerobatics for decades.

The latest episode, revealed in the New York Times: The Pentagon spent millions over several years on a topsecret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to investigate UFOs.

The Pentagon says the program was shut down in 2012. Ha ha! Who believes that?

Seriously, we know you are here. How else to explain all those alleged sightings, including the video from a 2004 encounter between a Navy F/A18 Super Hornet and a UFO. “There’s a whole fleet of them . . . they’re all going against the wind,” an awestruck pilot radios to a comrade. “The wind’s 120 knots to the west. Look at that thing, dude.” Gives us chills just listening to that exchange and watching that video of a darting space-crafty blip on the radar screen.

In October, a group called Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or METI International, beamed a message at a star a dozen light-years away with a possibly inhabitable planet.

Yes, we know that famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has warned against sending such messages, lest space invaders find us to be easily vanquishable.

Hawking also predicts that humans have about 1,000 years to master space travel and populate a new planet if the species is to survive. He believes that climate change, asteroid strikes, epidemics and population growth make a long-term future on Earth problematic at best.

Is that your strategy, aliens? Wait us out for the next 10 centuries, then claim this splendid blue orb?

We hope not. That would be a terrible anticlimax for those of us eager for first contact sooner than, say, 3018.

Come on, extraterrestrials, let’s cut out the chase. We’re here. You’re here. Let’s meet.