Soon birds had spread to the four corners of the earth, which is where they are today. And wherever there are birds, there are also bird watchers, in case the birds decide to try something. Bird watchers are known technically as bird watchers, which comes from the Latin word for ornithologist.

Bird watchers divide birds into four main groups:

Boring little brown birds that are all over the place: Wrens, chickadees, sparrows, nutcrackers, spanners, catcalls, dogbirds, hamsterbirds, flinches. Birds that can lift really heavy things, such as your car: Albatrosses, winches, pterodactyls, unusually large chickadees, elephant birds, emus. Birds with names that you are going to think I made up but I didn’t: Boobies, frigate birds, night jars, frogmouths, oilbirds. Birds that make those jungle noises you always hear during night scenes in jungle movies: Parrots, cockatoos, pomegranates, macadams, cashews, bats.

Your avid bird watchers spend lots of time creeping around with binoculars, trying to identify new and unusual birds. The trouble is that most birds are of the little-and-brownish variety, all of which look exactly alike, and all of which are boring. So what bird watchers do is make things up. If you’ve ever spent any time at all with bird watchers, you’ve probably noticed that every now and then they’ll whirl around, for no apparent reason, and claim they’ve just seen some obscure, tiny bird roughly 6,500 feet away. They’ll even claim they can tell whether it was male or female, which in fact you can’t tell about birds even when they’re very close, what with all the feathers and everything.

I advise you to do what most people do when confronted with bird watchers, which is just humor them. If their lives are so dull and drab that they want to fill them with imaginary birds, why stand in the way? Here’s how you should handle it:

BIRD WATCHER: Did you see that?

YOU: What?

BIRD WATCHER: Over there, by that mountain (he gestures to a mountain in the next state). It’s a male Malaysian sand-dredging coronet. Very, very rare in these parts.

YOU: Ah, yes, I see it.

BIRD WATCHER: You do?

YOU: Certainly. It’s just to the left of that female European furloughed pumpkinbird. See it?

BIRD WATCHER: Uh, yes, of course I see it.

YOU: Look, they’re playing backgammon.

BIRD WATCHER: Um, so they are.

If you have a good imagination, you may come to really enjoy the bird watching game, in which case you should join a bird-watching group. These groups meet regularly, and usually after a few minutes they’re detecting obscure birds on the surface of Saturn. It’s a peck of fun.

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but there is an excellent chance that the Earth will be destroyed in the next several days. Congress is thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists broadcast Signals to alien beings. This would be a large mistake. Alien beings have atomic blaster death cannons. You cannot cut off their federal programs as if they were merely poor people.

I realize that some of you may not believe that alien beings exist. But how else can you explain the many unexplained phenomena that people are always sighting, such as lightning and flying saucers? Oh, I know the authorities claim these sightings are actually caused by “weather balloons,” but that is a bucket of manure if I ever heard one. (That’S just a figure of speech, of course. I realize that manure is silent.)

Answer this question honestly: Have you, or has any member of your immediate family, ever seen a weather balloon? Of course not. Nobody has. Yet if these so-called authorities were telling the truth, the skies over America would be dark with weather balloons. Commercial aviation would be impossible. Nevertheless, the authorities trot out this tired old explanation, or an even stupider one, every time a flying saucer is sighted:

NEW YORK—Authorities say that the gigantic luminous Object flying at tremendous speeds in the skies of Manhattan last night, which was reported by more than seven million people, including the mayor, a Supreme Court justice, several bishops, thousands of airline pilots, brain surgeons, and certified public accountants, was simply an unusual air-mass inversion. “That’s all it was, an air-mass inversion,” said the authorities, in unison. Asked why the people also reported seeing the words, “WE ARE ALIEN BEINGS WHO COME IN PEACE WITH CURES FOR ALL YOUR MAJOR DISEASES AND A CARBURETOR THAT GETS 450 MILES PER GALLON HIGHWAY ESTIMATED” written on the side of the object in letters over three hundred feet tall, the authorities replied, “Well, it could also have been a weather balloon.”

Wake up, America! There are no weather balloons! Those are alien beings! They are all around us! I’m sure most of you have seen the movie E.T., which is the story of an alien who almost dies when he falls into the clutches of the American medical-care establishment, but is saved by preadolescent boys. Everybody believes that the alien is a fake, a triumph of special effects. But watch the movie closely next time. The alien is real! The boys are fakes! Real preadolescent boys would have beaten the alien to death with rocks.

Yes, aliens do exist. And high government officials know they exist but have been keeping this knowledge top secret. Here is the Untold Story:

Years ago, when the alien-broadcast program began, government scientists decided to broadcast a message that would be simple, yet would convey a sense of love, universal peace, and brotherhood: “Have a nice day.” They broadcast this message over and over, day after day, year after year, until one day they got an answer:

DEAR EARTH PERSONS:

OKAY. WE ARE HAVING A NICE DAY. WE ALSO HAVE A NUMBER OF EXTREMELY SOPHISTICATED WEAPONS, AND UNLESS YOU START BROADCASTING SOMETHING MORE INTERESTING, WE WILL REDUCE YOUR PLANET TO A VERY WARM OBJECT THE SIZE OF A CHILD’S BOWLING BALL.

REGARDS,

THE ALIENS

So the scientists, desperate for something that would interest the aliens, broadcast an episode of “I Love Lucy,” and the aliens loved it. They demanded more, and soon they were getting all three major networks, and the Earth was saved. There is only one problem: the aliens have terrible taste. They love game shows, soap operas, Howard Cosell, and

“Dallas.” Whenever a network tries to take one of these shows off the air, the aliens threaten to vaporize the planet. This is why you and all your friends think television is so awful. It isn’t designed to please you: it’s designed to please creatures from another galaxy. You know the Wisk commercial, the one with the ring around the collar, the one that is so spectacularly stupid that it makes you wonder why anybody would dream of buying the product? Well, the aliens love that commercial. We all owe a great debt of gratitude to the people who make Wisk. They have not sold a single bottle of Wisk in fourteen years, but they have saved the Earth.

Very few people know any of this. Needless to say, the Congress has no idea what is going on. Most congressmen are incapable of eating breakfast without the help of several aides, so we can hardly expect them to understand a serious threat from outer space. But if they go ahead with their plan to cancel the alien-broadcast program, and the aliens miss the next episode of “General Hospital,” what do you think will happen? Think about it. And have a nice day.