In case you missed it, today was World UFO Day, a good time to pause and reflect on why strange things happen. There’s no dispute that UFOs are real. Pretty much any night of the week – usually around the time that people come stumbling out of bars, according to ground-breaking research in the Economist – people look up in the sky and see flying objects they can’t identify. Not only that, but none of their friends can either. Which leads to only one rational conclusion: it must be a spaceship from another planet.
The only mistake here is to limit the application of what is undeniably perfect, universal logic. UFOs come in many forms. Take unidentified fiber objects. AT&T’s GigaPower service, for example. Like a flying saucer doing loop-the-loops over North Dakota missile silos, there’s an other-worldliness to a service that’s claiming gigabit bragging rights for legacy copper-to-the-home plant. Sure, Bell Labs did it in, well, a lab. And hey, it’s 300 Mbps now so why quibble about what it’s going to be when the fiber goes in? You can trust that it’ll happen real soon now because it’s coming in on the next container ship from Alpha Centauri.
The Economist also uncovered the fact that, by far, the most UFO sightings per capita in the U.S. are in Washington state. That’s where Gigabit Squared kept trolling for megabucks to build an FTTH system, or something like that, for more than a year, until it left town town owing kilobucks. Coincidence? I think not.