The Question

The Man in the Street

“I think it’s all a trick,” said Jake Belasco, smirking into the TV camera. “There ain’t no aliens and there never was.”

The blonde interviewer had gathered enough of a crowd around her and her cameraman that she was glad the station had sent a couple of uniformed security lugs along. The shopping mall was fairly busy at this time of the afternoon and the crowd was building up fast. Too bad the first “man in the street” she picked to interview turned out to be this beersmelling yahoo.

“So you don’t believe the aliens actually exist,” replied the blonde interviewer, struggling to keep her smile in place. “But the government seems to be taking the alien spacecraft seriously.”

“Ahhh, it’s all a lotta baloney to pump more money into NASA. You wait, you’ll see. There ain’t no aliens and there never was.”

“Well, thank you for your opinion,” the interviewer said. She turned slightly and stuck her microphone under the nose of a sweet-faced young woman with startling blue eyes.

“And do you think the aliens are nothing more than a figment of NASA’s public relations efforts?”

“Oh no,” the young woman replied, in a soft voice. “No, the aliens are very real.”

“You believe the government, then.”

“I know the aliens exist. They took me aboard their spacecraft when I was nine years old.”

The interviewer closed her eyes and silently counted to ten as the young woman began to explain in intimate detail the medical procedures that the aliens subjected her to.

“I’m carrying their seed now,” she said, still as sweetly as a mother crooning a lullaby. “My babies will all be half aliens.”

The interviewer wanted to move on to somebody reasonably sane, but the sweet young woman was gripping her microphone with both hands and would not let go.