Hello, Turnor Lake.

I received a Where's Willy hit from there today.  I have to admit I'd never heard of Turnor Lake before today.  It's 503 kilometers north of Saskatoon.  The hamlet has a population of 179,  while Turnor Lake 193B is part of the Birch Narrows Dene Nation, with 419 people.  I suspect there haven't been many, if any, previous Willy hits in Turnor Lake.

CIA In Saskatchewan?

I can't help but wonder if "the Company" will soon have agents running around northern Saskatchewan after today's announcement that a subsidiary of Edmonton's Triple Five Group will be prospecting for uranium. Triple Five, best known as owners of the West Edmonton Mall and Minnesota's Mall of America, was founded and is owned by the Ghermezian family, originally from Iran. The idea of Iranians out looking for uranium is sure to get someone paranoid. But there's one little fact that should hopefully cool things off. The Ghermezians are Jewish. Somehow I doubt they'd have much interest in helping the Islamic Republic expand its nuclear program. Of course it is possible the US keeps some sort of watch, no matter how casual, on the goings on in the uranium business here given that Saskatchewan is the world's largest producer of uranium.

Poor Jimmy.

I had assumed we'd heard the last of Jim Pankiw, former MP for my riding. Wrong! He had a letter in today's Saskatoon Star Phoenix. As per much of his political career it was about those horrible nasty Indians out to get everyone. Pankiw describes as "chilling" a statement by Doug Cuthand in his regular SP column that "All Saskatchewan politicians know that they can't ignore the First Nations vote and expect to get elected." Sounds like common sense to me. Would Pankiw find it "chilling" if Cuthand had said "the agricultural vote?" He's also upset that the current birthrate among Saskatchewan's Indians means we could eventually be "overrun" in the future by people with a "race based agenda." Paranoid much?

Pankiw was first a Reform Party MP, and then a Canadian Alliance MP. But its telling that while other members of the Democratic Representative Caucus, a short lived splinter movement from the CA of which he was a member, were eventually brought back into the party he wasn't. Nor was he accepted when the Alliance and Progressive Conservatives became the Conservative Party of Canada. And this is the party that accepted as members such perceived loose canons as MP Myron Thompson. Pankiw was obviously too much of a risk, and a letter like this is a good example why.

Why Not Me?

There's been talk in the local press over the last few days about UFOs after a Winnipeg based UFO monitoring group announced that the Saskatchewan town of Maidstone had one of the highest number of UFO sightings in Canada last year. This made me wonder why I've never seen a UFO. Because I've had an interest in aviation since I was little I still frequently look up at the skies, especially if an aircraft passes over. But I've never seen anything I'd call a UFO.

The closest I came was a winter night years ago. Going out to eat I spotted a strange light in the sky. It seemed to be revolving as it came closer. However it soon became obvious that it wasn't something inexplicable, although it was something unusual. It was a light aircraft carrying an animated billboard, advertising something that I unfortunately can't remember. No wonder it looked like it was revolving. I would suspect there are at least a couple of people who saw that plane that night who to this day thought they saw something from "out there."

It's fair to say most people automatically think alien spacecraft when they hear the term UFO. But frankly I think this continued association is due to a lack of knowledge, or a lack of imagination. People still imagine aliens visiting Earth in large crewed spacecraft visible to observers on the ground as they pass by. But given the development of our own technology I expect this is unlikely. On Earth we can already produce small remotely operated vehicles that are designed to be hard to observe from the ground. Such vehicles are predicted to be a major tool for first world militaries over the next few years. Beings who can build interstellar spacecraft will presumably be able to build such vehicles that would be undetectable by current Earth technologies, and if they don't have any interest in contacting us at the moment they would all but certainly use such devices to completely conceal their prescense from us.

There's also the fact that, as far as our current knowledge of physics indicates, interstellar travel will neither be cheap nor quick. It will be much easier for aliens to send the equivalent of our space probes to explore our solar system than building a ship to support a crew for the years(in fact it is more likely to be decades, or centuries) it would take to cross the light years that separate our homes. Even if a cheap and quick way of interstellar travel is found using unmanned vehicles will still be cheaper, while not putting the crew at risk, especially if contact is not desired.

People place great faith in eyewitness testimony, which is part of what drives the belief that alien objects of some sort may be visiting Earth. Unfortunately eye witness testimony is the weakest form of evidence, and to date there is no corroboration of stories of encounters with alien spacecraft or aliens. Until physical evidence shows up all we're left with is interesting stories to make us wonder.