Of shattered dreams and Area 51

Damn it. Another cool legend bites the dust, and this time, it's dragging a lot of believers into the abyss.

Most of us have heard or read about the legend of Area 51: An alien spacecraft crashes in the southern Nevada desert. People see and photograph the event. Dark government figures confiscate film, pay off witnesses and deny everything. Alien beings are whisked to secret locations, examined, probed and dissected. An entire movement is born out of the seeds of conspiracy and a new-found public obsession with UFOs.

After nearly 50 years, according to a front-page feature in The Seattle Times, a few of the shadowy characters have come out of the woodwork to discuss the true goings-on at Area 51. Apparently, this remote area was a testing site for state-of-the-art reconnaissance aircraft, or spy planes. Prior to satellites and other high tech surveillance devices, the United States employed high-altitude, ultra-fast jets to spy on the Soviet Union. One such aircraft, the SR-71, could fly at altitudes of 90,000 feet and achieve a speed of Mach 3.29, or 2,200 miles per hour, and its predecessor, the A-12, ended up being the "alien" craft which crash landed in the desert that fateful day in 1963.

Due to the extreme secrecy of the project, government operatives descended upon the crash site, cleaned up all the debris and confiscated the film from the camera of a vacationing family who happened upon the scene. No aliens. No space-age technology to be harvested from the discovery.

I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed by these revelations. I really wanted to believe that our government possessed proof that living beings visited our primitive planet in the 1950s and 60s. I yearned to buy into the whole conspiracy theory, just like I'd like to think that Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, Crop Circles, that rumor about Jamie Lee Curtis and the Bermuda Triangle are factual phenomena.

I'll tell you one thing—if I were ever elected President, and there's still time, I'd ask some tough questions about what our government has on aliens and the Kennedy assassination. I'd also ask for a hot fudge sundae every Thursday night, and for all the White House's carpets and upholstery to be replaced in any room that Bill Clinton spent a "significant" amount of time.

Time to get back to my National Enquirer.

Raised on urban myths

"Hey, Dad. I'll bet if you stare at those lights long enough, you'll go blind," my nine-year-old proclaimed.

I've stopped arguing with her. It doesn't do any good, and she'll just dig in further and further.

Last night, as we drove back from an early Christmas celebration with my daughters' grandma, we passed under a large bank of landing lights leading to the runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

"Those are probably almost as bright as the sun. And you definitely will go blind staring at the sun. It doesn't take very long."

I quietly retorted to my wife, "Yeah. Just like you'll die from tetanus if you don't get that shot every time you go to the doctor, because you can never remember the last time you got a tetanus shot."

As our family continued on in silence, I pondered all of the untruths, all of the myths we're inundated with throughout our lives. It starts when we're young, and it originates from our parents:
"Don't cross your eyes like that. They'll stick."

And our peers:
"If you eat Pop Rocks and drink Coke, your stomach will explode."
"If you swallow gum, it stays in your body for seven years."

It continues on to more outlandish tales, especially during junior high and high school:
"Did you hear what Richard Gere did (please research this on your own)?"
"Be really careful if you go to Las Vegas, because people are waking up in tubs of ice without a kidney."

I believed each and every one of these at some point. Fear seems to usurp logic, and only when you really examine these do they seem completely absurd. Okay, my eyes have sort of stuck in a cross-eyed position and that Richard Gere thing—well, maybe. But how does gum magically leave your body after seven years? Through a large, time-generated pore in the epidermis? How do you wake up at all if someone rips a kidney from your torso? I'm sure some of our best criminals are accomplished surgeons.

As we rolled into the driveway, I still couldn't make up my mind on the last of the nagging legends, the one which seemed utterly plausible, yet outlandish nonetheless:

Was Mister Rogers really a Navy Seal?