People have been predicting the end of the world for nearly as long as there have been people to do any predicting. Most of them have turned out to be, as you might have guessed, very wrong. Of course this does not stop people from predicting the end of the world. At the very least, one of these days, one of them is going to be right. I figured I would at least add my discourse on the end of the world and my prediction is that it will happen about this time next Thursday. This is just a rough estimate but it helps to at least put a date on the prediction.

On Nov. 7 apparently a bunch of employees at O’Hare International Airport reported seeing some kid of UFO floating over the airport. This was reported by several people reported to be very reputable. These were not folks who staggered from the bar in the terminal out onto the tarmac and thought they saw a disk. On the other had I once had a friend who was a baggage handler at O’Hare and he was constantly assuring us he had talked to supermodels like Paulina Poriskova when it was pretty much impossible for him to have done so unless she had decided to help him load her bags into the belly of the plane. I state this just because I think the sanity of some airport employees needs to be called into question.

Apparently this thing hovered over a gate for a while and everyone down below ran about like ants after their hill has been knocked over and made strange calls about it. How no one managed to take a picture of this thing is what mystifies me. You mean to tell me no one had a camera phone? Doesn’t everyone have a camera phone? I mean, I don’t have a camera phone, but that’s because I like to zig when the rest of the world is zagging, but that’s just me. Anyway eventually this thing supposedly just shot up through the clouds so fast it left a strange hold in the clouds through which it had vanished.

So, the question has to be, was it a UFO or some military plane? Was it a weather balloon? Was it some kind of strange light phenomenon or weather event like some people are claiming?

My theory is that O’Hare has now gotten so busy that even intergalactic travel has to go through it. More than likely it was stuck in a holding pattern like half of the air traffic up there probably is right now as I write this. If you wonder why it’s taking so long for you to get through security or to get to your terminal at O’Hare it probably has to do with an alien carrying too much intergalactic hair gel.

However, this has not been the only sighting over the past few weeks. Not long ago there were more reports of UFOs. In fact just this week I heard that there were reports of UFOs over Grovers Mills in New Jersey. For those of you unaware of your broadcasting history a guy named Orson Welles once did a radio play version of “War of the Worlds” that made it seem like the invasion was happening live on the radio. The first of these aliens landed in Grovers Mills in the radio play version.

My guess? Same UFO. I am betting this is a family of aliens looking to visit important UFO-related sites to us in the U. S. of A. You know what that can be like. There are probably two or three screaming alien children all wondering if they were there yet and the alien parents were probably yelling at them to be quiet. I have a feeling this is why they killed all of those bird in Texas.

Austin Texas is apparently having problems with birds being found dead all around town. This can be somewhat upsetting what with the fear of bird flu that people have. The problem is that they’ve done a bunch of tests on these birds and they haven’t found any reason for the deaths. They don’t have any diseases that they can find. These birds seemed to have just fallen out of the sky and died right there on the sidewalks. My guess is that the vacationing alien father was driving and finally turned around to smack his kids and flew into a whole flock of birds.

Meanwhile, across the country, Colorado is nearly buried in snow. There was an avalanche there just this past week and it killed a few people. This snow could be very useful in Malibu which seems to be doing its very best to burn itself down over in California. Meanwhile the polar bears also wouldn’t mind some more of that snow since their snow seems to be melting so fast that the polar bears may be in some trouble.

Somehow I think this is all connected to the aliens. I think they are poised to invade. More than likely they have heard our radio and television broadcasts about all of the problems with undocumented aliens and they just wanted to see what the big deal was. Needless to say I don’t think the Minutemen or the wall that G.W. wants to build would do much to keep these guys out. I am willing to bet they don’t want to do menial jobs for low pay either.

Meanwhile Rosie and Trump are still screaming at each other long past the time when the rest of us even care. I am starting to think both of them are aliens. That would certainly explain Rosie’s abnormally large head and Donald’s hair and constantly pursed lips. Only aliens could get human anatomy that wrong while trying to imitate us. I think their assignment is to distract us from the coming invasion.

All of this added up I think paints a clear picture of the world coming to an end. I would bring up the fact that some volcanoes needed to erupt but with my luck as soon as I published this a volcano would erupt and then I would feel bad. On the other hand that might open up a whole new career as a psychic for me.

By the way, did you know that Old Faithful is essentially a volcano? Also that it hasn’t had a major eruption in a while? Yeah, just wanted to leave that comforting thought in your head as I wound this column about disasters and the end of the world down.

Of course, every time you look at any point in history it sure looks like you could make a case for it being the end of the world. People are always at war. People are always fighting. There are always disasters. It always looks like the world will just vanish in a puff of gas at any moment.

Still, I am sticking by my prediction of next Thursday. I think an alien station wagon will crash into the planet causing volcanoes to erupt, ice caps to melt and tornadoes will wipe out everything else. Then again, that’s just me.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is now available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.