Fly me from the moon

Every now and again, you get to meet one of "those" people - people who believe earth is flat, that there were no moon landings, ET might just be real and come to earth in his flying saucer.

And even though we think of NASA scientists as a button-up bunch, the sort of people who wear short-sleeved dress shirts with clip-on ties and tie clasps that are actually tiny slide rules, it turns out that maybe some of them have a bit of a sense of humor!

Nerd alert! Nerd alert!

What happened was, NASA posted an image of what they called a "crashed flying saucer from out of space"!

And they weren't kidding!

Not at all. They said that the otherwordly object in the Utah desert had been ‘tracked by radar and chased by helicopters’.

They didn't mention "little green men" or alien corpses found among the smashed-up wreck.

Hmmmm. What are they hiding?  Every skeptic knows that little green men hop out of alien spacecraft, chirping, "Take me to your leader."

I just thought of our leader posing for a picture with Sonny Spaceman.

No, what it was, was no space mystery. It was a sort of flying saucer, namely the Genesis sample return spacecraft.

That was a capsule that NASA hurled into the sky in 2001 to study the Sun, and while it did return with samples including solar wind particles and some very nice sunburn ointments, it came to Earth landing with a big bang theory. Its parachutes didn't open, and you know the rest. –

NASA says, "Despite the crash landing, many return samples remained in good enough condition to analyse. So far, Genesis-related discoveries include new details about the composition of the Sun and how the abundance of some types of elements differ across the Solar System."

I remember asking a dude once what was the point of spending a million gazillion bucks to go to distant planets, and he told me that besides the thrill of playing golf on the moon, NASA gave us digital timers, Tang the powdered "orange" drink, and Corningware.

And clever tie clasps, don't forget.