A test of the newly developed anti missile system is planned later this year. This is part of an exercise designed to test ways and means of destroying Near Earth Asteroids which may be found on a collision course with planet Earth. A consideration has always been that merely exploding a bomb and breaking an asteroid into smaller components, which then continue on to collide with Earth, does not solve the problem, but merely changes the outcome.
The ideal solution is, of course, to divert the asteroid off it's dangerous orbit, into the Sun or Jupiter. Accordingly, a missile carrying a 100 megatonne nuclear device is to be targeted onto an asteroid not currently heading towards our planet, the impact being designed to scatter any residue into Saturn. The selected asteroid is (9984) Gregbryant = 1996 HT and this is appropriate for two reasons:
Firstly, it is about the same size as the one which caused the great Cretaceous extinction, and secondly, computer studies of it's orbital elements for the last 67 million years have established that it is the surviving half of that same asteroid which apparently broke in two, one half colliding with Earth and the other diverted into a new orbit.
This discovery may well confirm the historical records concerning the Philosoraptures' attempt to save our planet, an attempt which reduced the impact sufficiently to ensure the survival of us mammals.
When our reporter suggested that alien civilizations, if any, need not necessarily be our enemies, or even be aware of our very existence, the Senator said that the Bananas Republican's Foreign Affairs Committee could easily attend to both of these objections.
He said that his elderly father, retired Colonel Richard Head (the first) commonly saw UFO's on his way home from Fred's Bar and Grill in Boondocks, Alabama, and feared that he had been probed on several occasions, when he had woken up in his car with only a hazy recollection of the previous night's events, and feeling a little tender.
Such treatment of a much decorated Veteran of the Palm Springs Golf War was intolerable, the Senator said. Colonel Head had received the Purple Heart (with oak leaves) after being run down by a golf buggy while leading an assault by the Republican Old Guard on the 19th hole, then occupied by the Marine Corps Red Eye Platoon.