We could use a break tonight. Tensions are running high; they’re going to run even higher the closer we get to Election Day.

Let’s talk about something outside of the usual he-said-she-said political stuff, something completely off the beaten path.

And maybe something so far off road it’s not of this planet.

This past week former military personnel came forward at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. to discuss what they believe were close encounters with UFOs in 1967. Media reports about these disclosures mentioned the specific case of a nuclear weapon site at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, at which the missiles were disabled or deactivated at the same time unidentified objects were reported flying over the facility.

What this week’s scattered media reports didn’t say was that another nuclear weapon site shared the same experience within a week of the first event: multiple missiles each at two sites, shut down by some unexplained force while unidentified objects were reported flying around the silos.

If you poke around the internet, you’re going to find all kinds of crazy stuff written by folks who appear to have parted ways with reality. But you’ll also find the same folks who spoke to the National Press Club have been trying to reach the public’s attention for years with little success. In some ways these very credible people — just listen to the former USAF officer in the video here — have been treated like liberals and progressives. They’ve been blown off as nutjobs in spite of their lucid arguments and the facts they’ve produced.

In the case of the Malmstrom incident, the government didn’t send out a military team to investigate why multiple nuclear missiles shut down. They allowed a well-known government contractor to handle the investigation. It bought the government the opportunity to discount any findings by the contractor while offering plausible deniability.

It sounds so very familiar, doesn’t it? Corporate contractors, doing the work of the government, to keep the government’s fingerprints off the subject matter at hand.  . . .

The more one pokes around the internet, the more similar stories one finds like the Malmstrom event. Like these U.S. Air Force bases which have also reported events going as far back as 1963: Minot, F.E. Warren, Ellsworth, Loring, Vandenberg, Walker, Wurtsmith. And that’s just U.S. bases with nuclear missiles or equipment used for nuclear weapon deployment; there are many other events which have been documented across the country which might be related to military facilities.

Doesn’t it seem like we need to reassess what it is we are really spending our time and money on in terms of our national security? So far all these events seem really benign; they may have been investigated by the government, but the details are completely out of our reach.

But if anything remotely like these reported events had involved a person of middle eastern heritage, you can bet it would be all over Fox News and leaked to Bob Woodward for his next book.

I’ve been stewing about our grossly disproportionate and ineffective response to terrorism over the last two weeks. We’re “droning” civilians to death in foreign lands when we aren’t allowing contractors to treat civilians like targets for shooting practice. And at the same time, we have what could be far more important issues to face — real threats to our existence like climate change and the resulting changes to our ecosystem, our food and water supply.

Not to mention we might have much larger concerns that impact all humanity, like these unidentified objects, or the ones seen over China, or over Iran, or over so many other places on earth.

Until we find a way to remove the stranglehold on our national conversation, real threats are going to go unaddressed, unanswered and those of us with legitimate concerns will continue to be minimized.

And until we manage to shift the attention of our country from the latest crazy meathead of the day and re-prioritize our attention and resources — like spending real money instead of chump change on science education and NASA — we’ll completely miss what could really be the answer to mankind’s biggest mystery.

Are we alone here? Or do we have company?

What do you think? Have you ever had a close encounter? Do tell.