In what could have been a landmark event, extraterrestrials landed in St. Bernard earlier this week, only to leave without fanfare after blending in so effortlessly with the locals that no one gave them a second look. The aliens, with their distinctive grey skin and large, black eyes, wandered through the streets of St. Bernard Parish for hours, completely ignored by everyone they encountered.
“I thought it was just Frank from Poydras, dressing up for a joke again,” shrugged local Jerry “T-Boy” LeBlanc. “I’ve seen stranger things around here, especially after a few drinks, so honestly, nothing surprises me anymore.”
Eyewitnesses, if you can call them that, reported that the extraterrestrials tried to make contact several times, hovering around the local daiquiri shops and trying to understand why no one found their presence odd. But locals simply waved and moved along, figuring the beings were either out-of-town visitors or someone who had started tying one on before noon.
“We thought they were just drunks with some fishing gear trying to be funny,” said Bernadette Rodriguez, 33, who happened to be walking her dog during the supposed “first contact.” “I mean, I waved back, so I guess that counts as diplomacy, right?”
Even more bizarre, their hovering spacecraft parked at the corner of Judge Perez and Paris Road, drawing as much attention as an abandoned shopping cart. One man reportedly mistook the hovering ship for a food truck.
“I ain’t gonna lie, I thought they were selling tacos,” said Ricky Hebert, a resident who happened to pass by. “I walked up to see what they had, but there was no menu. I figured they just ran out.”
After several hours of wandering the streets, receiving no reaction other than casual indifference, the extraterrestrials reportedly returned to their ship, baffled by their complete failure to make ‘first contact’ and perhaps more confused by the people of St. Bernard than the locals were by them. Their parting message—beamed telepathically to a panhandler on Judge Perez who wrote it on his cardboard — read simply, “We came, we saw, we were ignored. But give this guy lots of money for our trouble.” Experts believe the panhandler hastily added the last part of the statement in an attempt to cash in on the moment.
The extraterrestrials landed in St. Bernard and left with no probing, no abductions, or offer to join their interstellar federation—just a story to tell back home about a planet where they managed to go entirely unnoticed.
For the people of St. Bernard, it was just another Tuesday.