Cow Abductions and The Space Elevator

You would almost certainly laugh if someone told you they saw a video of a cow floating up to a UFO in the sky. If it sounds like the stuff of fiction, maybe that’s because it once was:
 
“In 1979, Arthur C. Clarke's novel ‘The Fountains of Paradise’ first brought the idea of a space elevator to a mass audience. Charles Sheffield's ‘The Web Between the Worlds’ also featured the building of a space elevator. But, jump out of the storybooks, fast-forward nearly three decades and Japanese scientists at the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA) are working seriously on the space-elevator project.” (Mike Steere, “Space elevator would take humans into orbit,” CNN, October 3, 2008)