UFOs? THERE'S A CLUE HIDDEN IN THIS STORY

James Westwood of Centreville, Va., is, by all appearances, serious about his inquiries into strange occurrences possibly involving UFOs that are usually the butt of jokes and the subject of bizarre TV specials. Westwood recently spent a few days in Cape Girardeau looking into a 1941 incident that has all the trappings of a UFO crash near here as well as a subsequent government coverup.

One of the witnesses of the crash apparently was the pastor of Red Star Baptist Church, according to Westwood, who got his information from the pastor's granddaughter in Texas. The minister was asked to go to the crash site where he saw three bodies with no hair, ears or noses and large, oval eyes. And he was instructed by military officials not to tell anyone what he saw. But, as with most such unusual occurrences, the good minister did tell someone: his wife and their two sons.

It is easy to scoff at efforts to uncover UFOs and complicated plots by the government. But dozens of residents of Piedmont, a small town in the Ozarks about 80 miles west of here, swear they saw strange lights a few years ago that could only have been produced by UFOs.

What's interesting about the incident near Cape Girardeau, as with many other similar strange reports, is how quickly the "government" in the form of secret agents and military officials show up at these sites. This is a clue. When was the last time anyone outside the realm of extraterrestrial crashes got such a quick response from the federal government?