This is an opinion column.

I’m afraid to joke about UFOs now.

UFOs seem like the only thing that can bring Republicans and Democrats across the aisle these days. Other than befuddlement over how Tommy Tuberville was ever elected to the United States Senate, much less from a state he didn’t live in.

Why not believe? How else do you explain an Elon Musk or an Alex Jones? Or Rudy Guiliani, for Pete’s sake? Or school board meetings just about anywhere? It’s got to be aliens? The truth is out there. Isn’t it?

I said I couldn’t joke about UFO anymore. I lied.

A Congressional hearing on UFOs – I suppose we’re supposed to call them UAPs these days, or unidentified aerial phenomena, because terms people know and understand are out of vogue – captivated a certain subset of the population this week. Pilots and a believable whistleblower insisted they had seen strange things in the sky, that the military was in possession of crashed UAPs and “biologics,” which presumably translates as spacecraft and alien body parts. Which really is a game changer if true.

Witnesses and Congresscreatures seemed to want a transparent reporting process and a way to remove the “stigma” from those who claim to have seen UFOs. Information is scarce when witnesses are thought of as bat-poop bonkers.

Point.

Why not believe in UFOs? If it’s ok for people to believe conspiracy theories that cause them to commit other crimes, to storm America’s seat of power, to believe disproven voter fraud claims, to think the world is flat, to believe without proof whatever they happen to want, then why make the UFOers out as the nutty ones?

It would make a pretty good explanation for all those parasitic people who dream only of acquiring all they can no matter the consequence, even if it leaves their offspring on the husk of a dying planet.

Better to think them as ETs rather than us. Restores some faith in humanity.

It’s hard, here in Alabama, to think of UFOs without thinking of past sightings, which have led to both laughs and regrets, as laughs can sometimes do.

In 1976, cops in Fort Payne and Mentone and Fyffe in northeast Alabama reported “huge, gigantic” flying objects that emitted a yellow-orange light.

Thirteen years later, in 1989, Fyffe again made international news when a police chief described a craft bigger than an airliner hovering overhead. The whole story caught fire after the AP reported the sightings stretched from Grove Oak all the way to Lickskillet.

Nobody can resist a Lickskillet.

But Fyffe, a town of 963 people in DeKalb County, which abuts the Georgia line and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district, was weird-sighting central. In the mid ‘90s a series of mysterious cattle deaths was reported there.

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A then-Fyffe police officer – a former TV producer who had claimed his own brush with ETs in Michigan – said then he investigated 30 such cattle deaths, in which “phantom surgeons” neatly removed the cows’ sex organs, eyes and rectums.

He was heralded by some, poo-pooed by many, and has reportedly now sadly passed on.

We never really got a good explanation, but Fyffe later embraced the UFO mania, hoping to become a sort of B-List Area 51. In 2005 the town launched a UFO festival, but even then it was scared – no doubt because of the stigma – to embrace it too vigorously.

“We are more sophisticated now,’’ the co-chair of the UFO Days festival said then. ‘’We’re able to laugh at ourselves and turn that UFO history into a tourist event that everybody can enjoy.’’

The stigma is out there.

The truth? Well that’s even harder to spot than a UFO.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner for AL.com.