Congress holds its first hearing on UFO sightings in 50 years. Now all the politicians will spend a couple days arguing over the search for intelligent life on other planets, and I’m not surprised, because it’s getting harder and harder to find it on our own planet, so we’d better look off-world. There may be living organisms out there that have not yet been contaminated by the woke virus pandemic.

There is always a serious problem when it actually comes to defining what a UFO is. That happens because politicians are not familiar with them. A UFO is any of the things you can find under my bed after a month without cleaning. And an alien is what appears in the fridge if you unplug it for a few hours. I have seen chicks hatch from rotten eggs.

I know there are people who have their reservations about this type of intelligence program. As a citizen who thinks that the government is like a pebble in his shoe, I enjoy it when it focuses its efforts on acting on things that are a long way away, even if it costs us money. It’s like that annoying guy who latches on to you at a wedding and just won’t let go, and gives you his full life story, and won’t shut up even when drunk, and whom you would certainly pay just to leave you alone.

I feel the same about the government: I would pay anything if they would promise to do their jobs far away from our planet. You know, establish speed limits for all the highways on the moon, curb climate change on stormy Jupiter, and tax the Martians. I bet an antenna tax would be a fundraising success on Mars.

Senior officials say they have no explanation for the bright green triangles filmed by a military pilot. Nor can it surprise you if no one has been able to find an explanation for the contents of Hunter Biden’s missing computer, which really is from another planet.

For the most part, I don’t like science fiction, not in film, nor in novels, nor in the form of a presidential executive order. I firmly believe that we are the galaxy’s and the entire cosmos’ only inhabitants, because as a poet, I find the prospect of a universe void of life, filled only with the darkest loneliness, tremendously inspiring. And God is a great poet. So I’m sure he already thought of that. (READ MORE: What’s Most Plausible About UFOs?)

It is also true that the image we have forged of aliens does not help us to sympathize with them. All those green and slimy things in nature are terribly disgusting, and whenever we think of aliens, because of the movies, we tend to think of something along those lines. There’s only one alien I like out of all of the ones that have appeared on the big screen, and it’s not E.T., whose crabby calloused toes gave me terrible nightmares as a kid, even though he wasn’t as bad as he looked. My favorite alien is ALF. Who can hate an alien who likes beer, girls, and loves to chase cats to eat them? I love ALF. When Elon Musk finishes building his space highways, I plan to spend all my savings on a trip to Melmac.

Besides, almost everything that has to do with extraterrestrial phenomena ends up being funny. A few years ago, doing a television comedy show in Spain, I called NASA live. A meteorite the size of a chestnut had fallen in an orchard in a small town in the northwest of Spain, and I wanted to ask the operator at the agency’s European headquarters if we should be recommending Spaniards only leave the house wearing helmets. The person at NASA cracked up and, at my insistence, she ended up admitting that maybe it was a good idea. I was about to invite her to dinner on the air, but I think she was a little offended when I asked her, “As a Martian yourself, what is your opinion of people who wear socks with sandals?”

Obviously, that was part of a comedy program, only a joke, but social networks worked their magic with the helmet, and so the best bit of this story happened the next day, when the video appeared all over Facebook, and some intern at a well-known newspaper decided it would be a brilliant idea to open a full page with this headline: “NASA recommends not leaving the house in northwestern Spain without wearing a helmet.”

I work in journalism just so I can enjoy moments like this.