UFO

No, seriously. I may be a little nutty, but I'm nowhere near completely mad. I am not suggesting that a flying saucer landed on LKP and offloaded its full complement of little green men armed with laser blasters and poised to take over the world.

I'm just saying it passed overhead on a reconaissance trip.

I saw it on Saturday night, when a friend and I were walking back to our dorm from dinner at Curries. I grant that we were high on chocolate, and possibly not entirely cogent, but both of us saw five orange lights hovering in a straight line, too low to be stars and too high to be street lights. And I mean, come on, how likely is it that two people, however questionable their normalcy, have the same hallucination?

There, in a nutshell, are the facts of the case. Five orange lights.

In our defence, we did consider all possible explanations before we arrived at our conclusion. They could have been weather balloons. They could have been lights strung between two reasonably tall buildings. They could have been a college physics project. They could have been bits of a meteorite. They could have been stealth fighters from Never-Never Land. Or they could have been strobes on an alien spaceship.

As to the first option... Who ever heard of such a simple answer to such a complicated question? It's absurd. It's laughable. Nope. Not weather balloons.

Lights strung between two buildings... We really had to think to figure out why that was impossible. Given wind velocity, drag, and friction due to the earth's rotation, and taking into account the speed of light in air and the relativistic effect of acceleration due to gravity on the space-time continuum, the lights could not exist.

A college physics project? But both of us did physics in college, and neither of us ever considered it necessary to have weird orange lights hovering on the horizon to puzzle, worry and bewilder innocent passers-by. That just about ruled out that idea.

Meteorites we rejected out of hand. Shooting stars do not hover. They shoot.

That left us with Captain Hook's minions and spies from E.T. When you have two options equal in all respects (the chief criterion here being viability) you can trust your fate to the fall of a coin, or you can choose the more interesting explanation. We did the latter.

And thus it became our bounden duty to warn the world that the Martians are coming.

Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!

The title is an exaggeration. Let me say that right at the outset. It is true that fever pitch (excuse the truly dreadful pun, but it was too much to resist) has been reached, with all the candidates for the SAC elections campaigning with everyone in sight. It is true that at any time, day or night, you might be pounced on and your vote canvassed in the name of dorm loyalty/section loyalty/forget-loyalty-and-read-my-manifesto-because-I-am-the best. But nobody has yet sworn to storm the Bastille.

Having established that - and a reputation for frivolity along with it - let me move on to other things. Important things. Things that are going to shape human thought in ways beyond our wildest imaginings.

Or, in other words, I simply put in the title and started typing without the faintest idea what I was going to say.

It's rather odd; in the end there isn't that much of a difference between the Bourbon lily and Napoleon's bee. You rather get the feeling that if you took one of them and let the ink run a bit, you'd end up with the other. There should be Orwellian philosophy somewhere in that. Or at the very least a hint that Lear should have kept his head and not put so much faith in the filial devotion of Goneril and Regan.

The question of whether they really were to blame is not something I shall torture myself by attempting to answer. There was fault on both sides; serpent's teeth grow in serpents and serpents come from serpent eggs.

All I need to do now is find an excuse to mention Caligula and equine parliamentarians. There is the excuse, there the mention; now I may put myself out of my misery. What can the rest be but silence?