Billy Cox: Maybe it’s the Indians …

Last week, CNN’s Jake Tapper set up flatline mannequin Wolf Blitzer for one of the easiest assists in the history of televised presidential debates. Tapper asked Hillary Clinton’s campaign director John Podesta about you-know-what; Podesta not only dug it, he reiterated his promise to make sure HRC follows through on her pledge to declassify federal UFO records if elected. So of course Blitzer, a Mister Magoo who couldn’t find the ocean if he woke up on the beach, dribbled the other way during Thursday night’s Democratic debate. The Wolfman brought his reliable slow-break half-court game to Wall Street and gun control and Iraq and super PACs and income inequality and the minimum wage and all those other wrung-out talking points stifling this dreadfully repetitive election-year ritual. Maybe next time CNN should assemble celebrity moderators who aren’t afraid of UFOs, like Jimmy Kimmel and Tom DeLonge, and see what happens to those ratings.

So yeah, another chance to transfer UFOs into political language, where they’ve really been all along — wasted without so much as a constipated grunt. But wait. Hang on. Maybe Syracuse New Times columnist Cheryl Costa has a workable angle. Costa writes about UFOs for her New York readership. She number-crunches sighting reports into charts. Maybe, she reasoned, patterns would emerge, something overlooked. And maybe by quantifying anomalous activity, residents might get curious enough to query their representatives about what’s going on. So Costa decided to use unfiltered data from the National UFO Reporting Center, even though trends indicate only a small percentage would stand up to scrutiny as true unknowns. And numbers, of course, can be arranged to do and mean a lot of different things.