I’m about done reading Little Green Men, Christopher Buckley’s satiric romp through an imaginary government bureaucracy established in 1947 to promulgate UFO hysteria in America.

MJ-12’s mission: keep the Russians off-balance during the Cold War & boost support for Defense spending against unknown threats by means of increasingly intrusive forms of alien-related phenomena. What begins as mere sightings of unnatural lights and shapes in the sky grows to include bovine mutilation, human abduction and, eventually, ‘probing’.

The book’s a lot of fun, and though beyond the scope of what I normally review here (Buckley is hardly an Indie writer in need of my chump-change publicity), I do plan to post something about it in the near future.

Meanwhile, a report in today’s Washington Post (as well as the New York Times and Politico) caught my eye: a little-known DOD agency established to investigate ‘anomalous aerial vehicles’ has found its way from the Pentagon’s bowels into the light. “The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program,” according to these reports, “was confirmed officially for the first time Saturday by a Pentagon spokesman.”

The article includes purportedly original video in confirmed chain of custody from an A/F-18 Super Hornet, including transcribed immediate reaction from the pilots observing an unidentified flying object.

Does this signal back to the future in countering Red threats with a resurgent Vladimir Putin? A fanciful attack on our young nemesis in North Korea, the so-called Little Rocket Man? Or has Buckley’s John O. Banion stepped from the pages of Little Green Men to entertain us in real life?