Mysterious air

I know what happened to the mysteriously missing Malaysian Flight 370.

Space aliens.

No, really. And my theory is not based on evidence, but rather on the lack of evidence, which apparently — and ironically — is the strongest evidence we have.

From what I understand, there is absolutely no trace of this 220-foot, 660 thousand pound aircraft. No debris fields. No oil slicks. No cell phone calls from any of the 239 passengers and crew. Nothing.

Soooo, it has to be space aliens.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist in any sense of those words, and when I first heard "space aliens" suggested several days ago as a possible answer to the mystery, I chuckled to myself, just as you are now.

But as the days of newscasts lumbered by, with more and more speculation (with each new tidbit seemingly cancelling out a previous tidbit) as to what might have happened (A politically daft pilot? A random meteor strike? A cargo of lithium batteries burning through the hull of the aircraft?), space aliens began to sound no less absurd an explanation as anything else I've heard.

Besides, a conspiracy doesn't explain the disappearance of the plane. A conspiracy, rather, would suggest that the government(s) involved already know where the plane is and simply aren't telling us as in some kind of Edward Snowden scenario.

As humans, we search for answers to things we don't know. It's no doubt a deep-seated genetic trait of ours. It's why we invented news services and it goes a long way to explain why this story is getting the coverage that it is, including all the speculation from "experts."

So think of the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" not as a science fiction epic but rather as a documentary. It'll help explain a lot.

In my theory, extra terrestrials come to earth to abduct human samples for study (or, in a more optimistic vein, to solicit humans as intergalactic voyagers). They arrive in space ships made invisible through Klingon-like cloaking devices. They traditionally abduct/solicit us in hot spots like Area 51, the Bermuda Triangle and Philadelphia.

And now, with USS Enterprise-like tractor beams, they can carry off entire airplanes without a trace and take them to the mothership.

Hmmm, not so crazy now after all, is it?