Sir: I seldom venture outside these days on account of the danger of alien abduction; in fact, the last time I remember being out of the house was in January of 1986, and I made sure to do it in the middle of the night, staying under awnings as much as possible so that the aliens would not be likely to see me. Believe it or not, some of my friends (I only have the Facebook kind, but they’re good enough for my purposes) tell me I’m crazy. They say there’s no proof aliens are coming here and abducting people to make them love slaves for lonely fiendish alien princesses. Then I send them the 150,000-word informational email I keep ready for occasions like that, and pretty soon they stop talking to me and I know they’ve been abducted by aliens. Guess they’ve got their proof now.

But anyway, yesterday I ran out of aerosol cheese, and when I called the Food Festival they said they didn’t have any delivery slots available, but the guy I talked to said there had hardly been any alien abductions at all this week, and I could probably make it six blocks to the store without running into a tractor beam of any sort. So I risked opening the curtains a little, and I saw that it was a cloudy day, and the cloud cover might be some protection against aliens, so I decided to risk it.

Well, I got about halfway there when I noticed that the clouds were breaking up. Somebody ought to do something about defective cloud cover, by the way. What are we paying taxes for? And in one more block, the clouds had moved aside, and suddenly there it was: a huge extraterrestrial object in the sky. I could feel the heat of the radiation it was giving off, and it was glowing so brightly I couldn’t bear to look directly at it. But I took this picture of it with my phone, just to show those doubting Thomases that the alien menace is real.

Then I ran back home, and I ordered a whole case of spray cheese from Amazon, and believe you me it’s going to be a long time before I make the mistake of leaving the house again. But what I want you to do is warn your readers. Tell them not to go out of the house, because there’s some giant extraterrestrial object in the sky that’s giving off who knows how much radiation. Stay inside, pull down the blinds, close the curtains, and eat your cheese. —Sincerely, Walter Walterson Walters, Blandville.