Tass, the Soviet press agency, has reported the landing of an extraterrestrial vehicle in the Russian city of
Voronezh. The creatures who emerged were nine feet tall, with little knobby heads and three eyes. They had a small
robot in tow and went for a short promenade about the park,
Tass reports.
While some Americans have harbored reservations about Tass reports in past years, this is one they can embrace with more enthusiasm. The United States has its own share of U.F.O. watchers, but the extraterrestrials they describe have been decidedly uncouth. The aliens who visit America tend to kidnap their hosts, in some cases erasing from memory many salient details of an otherwise unforgettable experience.
The Voronezh visitors, in welcome contrast, were peaceable. They didn't interfere in current political arrangements.
They didn't lecture, proselytize, or find fault with local mores. One can overlook their failure to seek an
introduction to the Mayor. Behaving in a perfectly normal manner for sightseers on strange planets, they just walked
around the park, leaving behind two pieces of deep-red rock of a kind that, according to a geologist quoted by Tass,
cannot be found on earth.
There are any number of solemn explanations for Tass's remarkable report. Some argue that the long suppression of religion in the Soviet Union has given Russians a particular fondness for the supernatural.
Others suggest that Soviet reporters and editors have only recently begun to develop the skeptical armor that Western journalists acquire after being fooled a few dozen times. That may also explain why even the hard-boiled Government officials who oversee Tass found the Voronezh report sufficiently plausible to print.
These explanations miss the point. If extraterrestrial visitors have to land somewhere, why not in Voronezh?
Skepticism can be taken too far. These very columns, in 1920, poured scorn on the idea of a certain Robert Goddard
that rockets could fly in the vacuum of space. Mr. Goddard, the editorial regretted, only seems to lack the
knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
As surely as rockets can never fly in space, Tass has broken the story of the century.