This story brings up one of my favorite themes in interesting news stories. It’s one thing for someone to say or do something a little crazy, but where it gets interesting is when that spurs on another crazy reaction from some other party. And then things just take off, where the momentum of accumulated kookiness picks up with every new participant until it turns into an almost unstoppable Möbius strip of nutjobbery. If each unhinged reaction were a piece of debris, this story would be a massive ball from Katamari Damacy.
The Russian governor, bottom right.
So what happened is that Russian governor Kirsan Ilyumzhinov had an experience where he claims he was abducted by aliens. That’s kind of interesting because it’s kind of rare for these claimants to not be inbred hillbillies. But it gets better:
Now a Russian parliamentarian wants Ilyumzhinov questioned, fearing he may have given the aliens “secret information,” according to the Echo of Moscow radio station.
And not just interrogated by anybody, but by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Maybe I’m just a victim of stereotyping by the media here, but I always thought the Russians had it together a little more than this. I can see the claim of alien abduction by a government official in a large bureaucracy of the biggest country in the world. But to get the president to investigate? That’s fucking crazy.
So maybe we should take advantage of this tendency the new administration seems to have towards investigating this stuff. Someone please call up Medvedev and ask him if his refrigerator is running or if he has the whereabouts of Prince Albert, who was last reported being forced into a can.
