by Jeff Tompkins

Created on: April 21, 2008

I do not wish to alarm you but a leading presidential contender claims to have seen a UFO. And when I say "leading," I mean that he is just a few percentage points ahead of me and I am not even running. I am talking about Democratic presidential hopeful Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

A little backstory: Academy Award winning actress and noted new-age enthusiast Shirley MacClaine wrote in a recent book that Kucinich spotted a UFO over her house in Washington state. She writes that Kucinich found the experience moving and that he said he felt a connection with the silent triangular hovering craft.

At this point in our story I am sure you have a few questions. For instance, what was Kucinich doing at her home in the first place? According to her short bio on Wikipedia, Kucinich is reported to have lived at her home for several months. This does not bode well for his campaign, as it appears that he may have drifter tendencies. Were he to win the White House, we all might wake up one morning, open the newspaper and find out that President Kucinich is crashing at the home of the Mexican president for a few months.

You may also be asking yourself, "How could anyone feel a connection with a silent, triangular hovering craft?" Good question. I have no idea.

In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose now is as good a time as any to confess that I saw a UFO in the late 1990s. It was mid-afternoon and I was driving around Charlotte, N.C., on my way tosomewhere, I can't remember and it's not important because what is important is that when I came over the crest of a hill, there suddenly appeared in the sky a strange object that at first looked to be just a dark line. Then it banked for a turn and it took on the shape of what appeared to be the Bat Signal.

Now, I was pretty confident that it was not the Bat Signal, for three reasons. First, it was daylight, and the signal was never, as far as I can remember, used to summon Batman during the day. Second, I was in Charlotte, not Gotham City, and the mayor of Charlotte would not be calling Batman. Third, I was fairly sure, being in my late twenties and having gained a little more experience in the real world, that Batman did not exist. (I don't know what Congressman Kucinich thinks about this.)

So I had seen a UFO! Or maybe not. As the thing continued to turn, as the shape became more obvious, I realized that I was looking at a Stealth Bomber. OK, so for a minute, I had seen a UFO, in the literal sense. It was unidentified,

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