Any Objections if a UFO Actually Did Identify Itself?

In Lake Forest, residents grill a county supervisor about jails and airports.

In Irvine, presidential candidate Bob Dole talks to local Republicans.

In Santa Ana, county planners try to decide whether to recommend a housing development.

Meanwhile, if what was discussed at another meeting this week in Costa Mesa is true, would any of these other weighty, worldly issues really matter?

In short, who cares about politics if extraterrestrials exist? Wouldn’t life as we know it be irrelevant if we proved alien visitation?

Not at all, according to some of those at the Costa Mesa meeting, including the guest speaker, William McDonald, a 34-year-old Monarch Beach private eye and forensic artist.

“If anything, the knowledge and the proof that we are not alone in this universe is something that should encourage us to take a lot of pride and reverence for those small individual aspects of our own culture that so uniquely define us,” he says.

McDonald says he’s applied standard detective practices to all the available information regarding the famous 1947 discovery of a mystery craft near Roswell, N.M. The discovery has inspired one movie, “Roswell,” available on home video, and was depicted extensively in the current hit, “Independence Day.”

I asked McDonald if he thinks the UFO question will be resolved in his lifetime. “We believe the Roswell case is the only one so far that has a prayer of being proven beyond a shadow of a doubt,” he says. “Within 50 years, that case will have been blown wide open, and if we prove that one case, we have proven the existence of a phenomenon. Proving the existence of a phenomenon means that other cases will fall into line with official standards of evidence.”

Count me as “undecided” on UFOs, even though an old, reliable friend swears he saw one years ago. That aside, what interests me most is how the public would react to verification of UFOs.

Art Stolins, a Huntington Beach resident and retired Northrop engineer who listened to McDonald’s presentation Wednesday night, says, “The world won’t stop if we find it out. I don’t think it would be any great deal to most people. People are getting an education to be ready to accept something like this, anyway, starting as long ago as the ‘50s. The movie I liked was ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’ Politicians may be more upset than the general population, because they hold the power and that would be threatened, in a way.”

Tom Keller, a software developer who lives in Orange, is closer to my thinking. “If any aspect of what [McDonald] presented is true, my feeling is that it would make just about everything else inconsequential.”

Yes, life would go on, Keller acknowledges, but the impact of intergalactic travel could have reverberations on economic and religious life in America. One of the more obvious examples, he says, would be the propulsion systems of spacecraft and the predictable rush of earthlings to understand and use such technology.

Talk like that is beyond my ken. At this stage, I’m more interested in how average people would react to news that space aliens exist. In that vein, I ask Keller, 53, if he’s obsessed with the topic.

“I’ll throw this back at you,” he replies. “You said you felt that if that were true, it would have earth-shaking impact. That’s why I’ve thrown myself into it so much, because I believe it would have earth-shaking impact. I’d like to have all the latest information as to what the latest evidence is. I’d like to know before most other people do. . . . I don’t really care which way it goes. I only want to know what is real and what is not. I believe some small part of this is true. I’m going after what the truth is. I don’t want to be lied to and fobbed off.”

I’m being partly facetious about suggesting life will change if UFOs are confirmed. On the other hand, wouldn’t knowing that space beings can fly self-propelling vehicles have some impact on daily life? Would we merely say ho-hum and resume normal operations?

Or, as McDonald says, wouldn’t people ask, “Why would I want to purchase another Ford Taurus if I could find cars that would fly?”

Beyond that, he argues, there’s no reason why believing in extraterrestrials should throw societal convention into a cocked hat.

“Personally,” McDonald says, “I would cling to those things that are more familiar to me and the patterns of social behavior that are more familiar to me, as a source of retaining my own personal identity.”

Maybe he’s right.

But if you showed me a spaceship hovering over Lake Forest, I suspect the question of whether to expand the Musick jail would suddenly fall way, way down on my list of things to think about.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.