UFO is a UF-No

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s nothing – just look away

By Julie Skinner

I have a group of girlfriends that I’ve known since junior high and they admittedly have a few quirks – but who doesn’t? In high school, for instance, a few of the girls would regularly cruise the streets in their parents’ cars to go creep.

Yes, I’m talking a literal creep – the kind that predates Facebook – on friends and classmates to get the scoop on what everyone was doing and who they were doing it with. So it wasn’t uncommon to look out of your living room window and see a familiar car slowly roll by in the night.

Undoubtedly, this was a Mean Girls-esque tactic to crosscheck which friends lied to the other ones about their evening plans.

“Is Sarah really babysitting her little brother all night or did she end up going to that party without us?”

Most of the time it just verified information that we already knew: “Leanne said she’s hanging out with Chad tonight and we know it’s true because his car is parked outside her house.”

Creepy and weird? Absolutely. But that’s high school for you. I remember being shocked when I first heard about these routine stakeouts. Surely my friends never did that to boring ol’ me.

I asked the ringleader once, a close friend of mine, what she would do if anyone ever positively identified her mid-creep. Her response was an easy one: Deny, deny, deny. I found that answer to be ridiculously absurd and hilarious. “But Carmen, I saw you in front of my house last night.”

“No, you didn’t.”

What can you possibly say to that? Well it turns out that Carmen had it right all along. Through persistent deflection and denial, people will eventually just drop the issue.

As of late, our politicians, public officials, and media commentators have been doing just that – deflecting and denying when it comes to addressing an unidentified object that was seen flying over Harbour Mille last month.

Residents of the town on Newfoundland’s south coast have spoken out on the sighting, providing photographic evidence of what they and many others believe to be an airborne missile.

“First thing I thought was: ‘My God, it has to be a missile of some sort,’ because it looked like an oversized bullet,” said Emmy Pardy to CBC News.

Pardy watched through a pair of binoculars as the object passed by overhead.

“We knew it wasn’t a plane and it definitely wasn’t any kind of UFO thing,” she laughed. Pardy, and many others who report having seen the bullet-shaped object, say that the alleged missile appeared to have come out of the ocean.

“It was like it was in the middle of the bay.”

Some reports have suggested that the object was indeed a missile, having been launched from submarines located off of the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon – some of these islands lie as close as 10 kilometres away from Newfoundland.

The French Embassy has released a statement in response to these allegations, however, stating that although they do participate in routine missile launches, there was no military activity that would coincide with the sighting in Harbour Mille.

If the object was in fact a missile, the French say that it most certainly does not belong to them.

In a broadcast on CTV News, television journalist Tom Clark reported that there is no indication that any sort of rocket launch took place as both the Canadian and French governments are denying any responsibility.

NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command, has also gone on record, stating that they too are unaffiliated with the mysterious sighting in Harbour Mille. Tom Clark jokingly concluded his segment by saying that as no country is taking ownership for the alleged missile, we must now look to extraterrestrials.

Despite the fact that little to nothing has been said regarding what the object was, and who it belonged to, it is apparent that it’s not a threat to our national security. Our politicians also don’t seem to be concerned with the prospect of a missile, foreign or otherwise, flying over Canadian territory.

Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, certainly did not seem concerned about the issue as he responded with a witty “Holy smoke!” retort when asked about the alleged missile sighting.

Is that Ignatieff’s lame attempt at deflection, perhaps? The crowd of onlookers and journalists simply laughed. Oh yes, Michael, it’s hilarious.

What’s really irritating me about this entire incident is the blatant disregard our public officials have for the citizens of Newfoundland and Labrador.

It seems to me as though our government as well as our National Defence are in on some sort of secret that we are not privy to – why else would they be so casual about this?

Granted, it’s understandable that the public is not aware of all issues of national security, but aren’t we as citizens entitled to some sort of reassuring explanation?

The government’s cavalier attitude concerning this incident is both condescending and insulting to our intelligence. The fact that no one has come out to address the matter formally goes to show that it’s up to us, the public, to demand answers to the questions they continually attempt to evade.

So, let’s not drop it.

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