September 1st, 2005

Good Cop/Weird Cop

Hi everyone. I’m back from my writing hiatus, and today I’m going to get right back into the updating with a little proof that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

This really, truly happened to Steph and I a few weeks ago:

We met for lunch on Hillsborough St. at Sadlack’s. We faced the window as we ate. During the course of our meal, we saw that two cops were setting up a barricade to stop traffic in the street. Another car drove up and two more cops got out and they all started talking. A little later two more walked up. It was teeming with police outside.

I never figured out exactly what was going on. It’s not important to the story. Whatever it was, a lot of cops were hanging around. Steph and I finished our lunch, and, as we were walking through copland, heading back to the library, we were stopped by two police detectives. Honest-to-God police detectives. (Have you ever seen a police detective walking around on the street before? They actually look like the guys on TV. They were wearing suits and long coats with their badges and guns on their belts.)

The first detective walked past us on the sidewalk. But the second one stopped us and said: “Excuse me, me and my partner where just discussing something. Can I get your opinion on it?” I figured this was his street-wise detective way to lead into questions about where I was headed and what I’d been doing the night before. After which he would search me for drugs, as all cops do to me.

Then he asked us — I swear this is true — “You’ve heard of Area 51, right? Do you believe in it?”

We all stood there for a minute. I was thinking: “His wise-ass detective banter seems a little off. Where could he be going with this? Is it like a ’potheads always believe in aliens’ kind of thing? Or….”

He asked again: “Do you believe in Area 51?” And this time it honestly just sounded like he and his partner had been walking around debating the existence of aliens, and he wanted a third-party’s opinion…. Has the crime-rate in Raleigh hit some kind of crazy low recently?

Still I was wary. I did not want to answer the question wrong. You can’t lie to a detective, right? It’s against the law. You could get arrested. And they have all that psychology training, so they’re going to know if you’re not telling the truth. I’ve seen Law & Order, I know. So I thought for a second: “Do I believe in it? Do I believe the government suspected that aliens might attack us, and that they wanted to gather information about them in a high-tech, top-secret, underground testing facility? Do I believe the higher-ups in this country’s military were that paranoid and idiotic? Do I believe that they spent billions of dollars of tax-payer’s money on this?…Yeah, I could see that.”

So I said, “Yeah. I believe in Area 51.”

He then turned to Steph and asked her the same question. She answered with an “Um…I…I don’t really know,” which is actually the appropriate response when someone stops you, out of nowhere, and asks you if you believe in Area 51.

“So we’ve got one ‘Yes’ and one ‘I don’t know.’,” the detective said, looking at us. Then there was a pause.

All of the sudden, he turned to his partner (who had been shaking his head with embarrassment this entire time), pointed at me, and exclaimed “Well, he believes in it, anyway! I mean, how would you explain the crop-circles and pyramids and….”

At that point they had resumed walking down the street. That was all they needed from us. No further questions.

Can you believe that? You can’t make stuff like that up. Why would you want to?

Looking back, I guess when Agent Mulder stopped us, what he wanted to know was if I thought there were extraterrestrials that visited the earth. I don’t know why he didn’t just come out and ask me that. Then again, he’s the detective. I’m really glad he didn’t too, because if he had phrased the question differently — if he had asked if I thought little green men were flying UFOs around in our atmosphere and abducting people from America’s trailer parks, for example — I would have said “No way.”

And then he would have thrown my ass in jail.

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