If you wear red tonight ...

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Children in Canada and United States know all about the North American Aerospace Defence Command. They refer to it as NORAD every Christmas Eve, when Santa’s sleigh is tracked on its journey around the globe.

Now everyone around the globe is learning about NORAD shooting down Unidentified Flying Objects above North America. As with everything else, there is now a politically correct term for UFO, which is Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAP. After shooting down the Chinese balloon into the ocean off South Carolina, the political leadership in Ottawa and Washington became a tad trigger-happy, and three more UAPs were targeted by NORAD. They were deposited either on to frozen Tundra in Alaska and the Yukon, or into the choppy waters of Lake Huron. We, The Great Unwashed are now told that they were most likely harmless commercial research or scientific balloons. Our esteemed leadership seemed to be heavily under the influence of CRAP, which stands for Completely Ridiculous Alien Piffle.

Had the Chinese balloon appeared a few weeks earlier, December 24 would have been very hazardous for that jolly old man in the bulky red suit and his trusty reindeer. Then, on Superbowl Sunday, there was a young lady in a bulky red suit who had the eyes of millions of television viewers fixated to her every move as she floated in space on a platform for about 14 minutes. Of course, it was Rihanna, accompanied by a host of diminutive dancers in white hoodies, performing some kind of hip-hop ritual on other platforms.

The young Barbadian lady was very enthusiastically received, but I have to admit that my musical preference is for The Beatles. Can only guess that both Santa and Rihanna were spared from the NORAD/CRAP madness because of a song written by John Lennon about 60 years ago titled, Yes It Is ... the opening line goes “If you wear red tonight”.

BERNIE SMITH

Parksville, BC

Canada