They came in peace to start trend

This summer marks several significant cultural anniversaries:
• 30 years since the arrival of Star Wars

• 40 years since the Summer of Love

• the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

And there's another milestone of note: Sixty years ago, on July 2, 1947, a UFO did (or did not) crash in the countryside near Roswell, N.M., where the bodies of several aliens were spirited away by the U.S. government.

Why does this matter in pop culture? Because without Roswell we wouldn't have the fascination with aliens that has manifested itself in hundreds of films and TV shows over the years and enough books to replant a rain forest.

Our very concept of "little green men" comes from eyewitness accounts of what they say they saw in Roswell. So does much of our penchant for conspiracy theories.

Naturally, the government denies the crash happened. After first issuing a press release about a "flying disc," the Air Force amended the release to say it was a downed research balloon. Skeptics have been trying to disprove this retraction since.

I don't know what I believe about UFOs, except that I'd like to see one. If a ship landed in my backyard, I'd hope its occupants were more like the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, not War of the Worlds. There's even a Taco Bell across the street; we could have the first interstellar Thanksgiving with chalupas as the main course.

UFOs are always a conversation starter. Go to any drab cocktail party and say you saw mysterious lights in the sky and people will gather around as if you've had 10 drinks and begun French-kissing the host's dog.

It used to be that if you claimed to have seen a UFO, people automatically thought you were crazy. Now, governors, celebrities and other respectable types willingly confess to sightings.

When I was in college, famed astronomer and UFOlogist J. Allen Hynek came to speak, and I got to talk to him on the way back to the airport. His passion about space travel was infectious. He told me it was wrong to assume that any alien coming to Earth meant us harm.

I have a friend in New Hampshire who was friends with Betty and Barney Hill, the couple who claimed to have been abducted by aliens in 1961 and gained fame as one of the first cases of time distortion. When they regained consciousness after seeing those bright lights in the sky, several hours of their lives were missing. (Under hypnosis they claimed to have been experimented on.)

My buddy said the Hills were the nicest people, but they didn't like to talk about their experience. They had survived people thinking they were crazy, only to see a time when young believers wanted to camp on their doorstep and "chat" endlessly about the extraterrestrial visitors.

The Hills seemed embarrassed by their notoriety.

Today, of course, the Hills would be at the center of a media feeding frenzy. Swarms of paparazzi would hire helicopters and chase the UFO across the sky. Tom Cruise would be enlisted as our ambassador of peace. Unless, of course, the aliens land in Berlin.

Skeptics have at least one valid point: If all these people are seeing UFOs or being abducted, why is there no concrete proof? You'd think that Project Blue Book, SETI and crop-circle investigations would have come up with some tangible evidence. And, no, the pyramids don't count.

Maybe there is proof and our government doesn't think we can handle it. Maybe it's afraid we'll all rush to mountaintops and demand to be beamed up.

Even the French, with whom we've had our share of differences, are ahead of the U.S. when it comes to UFO disclosures. In March, the French space agency released more than 6,000 files on UFO sightings in that country - a quarter of the sightings were unexplainable.

Given all the years of bad TV shows we've beamed into space, why wouldn't an alien civilization come to investigate? Not to conquer, perhaps, but to meet the "leader" who seems to dominate our airwaves. Yep, Paris Hilton.