Close Encounters With Conspiracies on Elvis and Cigar-Shaped UFOs

In an age when Jerry Brown is a serious presidential contender, and congressmen are passing off rubber checks as acts of charity, can any form of logic be said to be without merit?

Hence I am at the second annual National New Age & Truth About UFOs Conference at the Mission Valley Hilton (which ends today with some seminars).

These are the crystal people, the triangle-power people, the UFOs-are-a-Nazi-trick people, the Harmonic Convergence people, the Bermuda Triangle people, etc.

Michael Orrell of Pacific Beach, dressed as Indiana Jones, is here. In the past he’s seen UFOs in the deep woods near Santa Ysabel.

Recently he’s spotted strange face carvings in the cliffs of La Jolla Cove. Check it out.

Frank and Julie Stranges of Van Nuys are here. He’s a nondenominational minister and UFO spotter (author of “Stranger At The Pentagon: Who Was The Mysterious Visitor With Amazing Powers?”). She’s his wife and UFO helpmate.

She’s never seen a verified UFO but her sons saw a yellow cigar-shaped object in 1979. Now they’re teen-agers and less interested in strange encounters.

“You know how teen-agers are about anything that’s outside their normal crowd,” she said. “Unless their friends mention UFOs, they don’t mention what their parents do.”

There is much talk in the air of Roswell, N.M., where UFO believers insist a craft landed in 1947 and the Air Force has been covering up ever since.

When it comes to conspiracy theories, UFO believers make Oliver Stone look naive and accepting.

UFO theories are at the heart of their cosmological view to explain the unexplainable.

Elvis? Captured by a UFO. Teen pregnancies ? UFOs are airdropping sperm. Breakup of the Soviet Union? UFOs are zooming in for the kill.

Not for nothing is tonight’s finale a four-hour seminar: The Kennedy Assassination and the Secret Government, in which UFOs and the CIA figure prominently.

It’s hard to know for sure, but my hunch is that next year’s convention will reveal a UFO theory behind the rise of Pat Buchanan.

Groovin’ to Johann

Different things.

* You may have read that a 7-Eleven in East San Diego is trying to keep troublemakers from congregating by playing classical music over a loudspeaker.

Scott Paulson agrees that Brahms and Beethoven might spur miscreants to move along but never Bach: Bach would only make them think higher thoughts and cause great crowds to gather.

Paulson can be forgiven his Bach bias.

He’s president of the San Diego Bach Society, which plans a Bach birthday bash this Saturday in La Jolla.

* Sheriff’s Sgt. Al Courtney was returning to work after a lunch in his honor to hail his rotation from duty at the downtown jail to patrol (in Lemon Grove).

As he was walking back to work, Courtney ran smack into a fleeing inmate who had just broken lose.

Courtney hauled him back to jail. It was Courtney’s last day there.

Not so the fleeing fellow: He’s charged with three counts of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon and, soon, with attempted escape.

* Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Coronado), caught in the congressional check scandal: “I wish we’d never seen the House bank. I wish it had been there when the British burned Washington” in 1814.

* New world (dis) order.

Department heads in the county government spent all day Friday in a meeting desperately trying to find ways to cope with a $30-million budget deficit: layoffs, service cutbacks, closing offices, etc.

Where was County Administrative Officer Norman Hickey?

On a federal government-sponsored trip to Moscow to teach the newly liberated Soviet republics the joys of local government. Such joys.

* Classified ad in the Fallbrook Enterprise:

(Tom) Metzger is out of the slammer & ready to take care of your TV-VCR, satellite antenna problems. Free estimates. Free autograph to each customer. . . .

Highway Humor

San Diego bumper sticker on an aged Cadillac:

“Help Reduce The People Population: Have Your Spouse Spayed or Neutered.”