The prediction of Dr. Richard Boylan, who’d been magically tipped off by some extragalactic Star People about an impending cataclysm, seems to have failed. On November 15th – as we’d expected – no asteroid hit the Earth, though Mogens Winther informs us that one named “2008 UL3” missed us by 7,452,000 miles, but that had been calculated many years ago by real astronomers.

A self-styled “author and physics researcher” named James A. Conrad, in a discussion of the “Columbus Poltergeist” case of 1984 that involved a 14-year-old girl named Tina Resch, inserted this hilarious “proof” that certain skeptics were – and are – scallywags:

As for hoaxers and jokesters retaining their reputations...

In Operation Fortitude in World War II, the U.S. military set up inflatable tanks, trucks, and artillery units in Kent, England and faked radio traffic in an attempt to mislead the Germans about the size and location of Allied forces. We do not then dismiss the real tanks, trucks, artillery units, and radio traffic of World War II because the U.S. was also engaging in some self-serving hoaxing, for which the U.S. side probably had a good laugh.

Last Friday, a Laurinburg, North Carolina, clergyman reported a UFO sighting in the area. The un-named man said he had an experience that he might have ascribed to an active imagination – if it had happened to someone else – and said that he hesitates to talk about the incident lest someone call him a "nut."

On Sunday, November 8^th, at about 6:15 p.m., the pastor and his wife were driving when they saw a startlingly bright light on the horizon. His wife suggested that it was the Moon behind the clouds, but then she saw the Moon in another corner of the sky. What they both described as a rectangular-shaped UFO continued to float slowly, giving off a bright yellowish color, then it began to change.