March 20 is Extraterrestrial Abduction Day

artwork – happyworker.com

Today is Extraterrestrial Abduction Day. While we have been unable to identify the creator of this holiday, we can report the widespread belief that it was inspired by an Alien Abduction Day festival held on March 20, 2008, in Toronto, Canada. (It was never repeated. Could a mass abduction have caused the festival’s mysterious disappearance?)

Here are a few ways to celebrate Extraterrestrial Abduction Day:

1. Host a Close Encounters of the Third Kind themed mashed potato sculpture contest.
2. Hold a chili-cookoff after screening To Serve Man.
3. Share: Tom Cruise’s $200 jeans, which his character couldn’t have afforded on a longshoreman’s salary, destroyed the believability of the War of the Worlds remake.
4. Discuss: Aliens allergic to water, à la Signs, would never be dumb enough to try to take over a planet covered in, duh, water.
5. Debate: J.J. Abrams—genius or jackwagon?

If one day is just not enough, don’t worry: you haven’t missed the (space) boat. The annual UFO Festival is held in McMinnville, Oregon, on a weekend in May. Lecturers in 2017 include Melanie Young, who quit her job as a nurse to prove that an unknown species had once existed peacefully with humans, a hypothesis she’d reached after someone gave her a weird-looking skull in 1998.

The keynote speaker in 2016 was Dr. Lynne Kitei, one of many witnesses to the “Phoenix Lights,” a mass sighting of five lights in the sky over Phoenix, Arizona on March 13, 1997. After seven years of silence, Kitei came forward, writing a book about her experience. She left her medical practice to tour the globe. It’s probably for the best: After sharing her own close encounter, how could she order a colonoscopy without her patients hearing “anal probe” and running for the door?