As far as aliens, UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, God and the NBA draft lottery are concerned, the poster says it all: I want to believe. I want to credit The Conspiracy with Patrick Ewing's 15 brilliant years as a New York Knick. But Mulder had it right: be lief and doubt are so closely intertwined that true belief is better left to the crackpots.

By such conventional standards, Josie is a crackpot. I spotted her handing out pink quartersheets near the entrance to Lerner; because of her slight build, youngish appearance and thrift store, hipster asceticism I mistook her for a musician promoting a concert. Not a bad guess--but in fact she was a member of the Society of the Ancients promoting the notion that aliens deserve an assist on everything from the pyramids to iPods.

I was immediately interested--not in aliens, of course, but in why someone would suffer the comparative humiliation of publicly pleading the case for their existence. I began chatting with her, and learned that her group has been canvassing all over the city (making her presence at Columbia somewhat arbitrary). After hearing about how humans had "obviously had help" in their seemingly "sporadic" development of new technologies, she explained to me that her group had plenty of confidence in the technological capabilities of the human race--it's just that she and her co-ancients felt "drawn to this kind of thing." Which means her belief is less about conspiratorial hokum than coming together in the presence of some inaccessible, external power; to, as she put it, feel like "we're not alone."

Josie strolled freely among passerby outside of Lerner, making the case for this unique and seemingly crackpotted brand of non-aloneness to whoever was willing to take a handbill. This blogger predicts she grew frustrated with the grizzled, academic agnosticism that discounts such fanciful human-alien cooperation, and curled up with a box set of "X-Files" season 3 DVDs--known to nerds and aficionados as the season before Mulder becomes convinced that the aliens don't actually exist and that the government is just fucking with him.

On an impending destruction-related note: this notice appeared in the front window of the Mac yesterday, suggesting that the building's last few traces of asbestos are being removed in preparation of its upcoming demolition. As for the demolition itself, workers informed Bwog that they are currently constructing a wooden barrier to keep the curious out and the soon-to-be-former building's dust and debris in.

- ARR