Take me to your leader...Ma'am!
Okay, so maybe Mazlan Othman, the Malaysian astrophysicist who heads the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), didn't claim she was about to be made Earth's ambassador to visiting aliens. Maybe London's Times on Sunday misinterpreted what she said she would tell delegates at next week's meeting of the prestigious Royal Society in Buckinghamshire, England.
Let's give Othman the benefit of the doubt. The UNOOSA is a sleepy little department of two dozen staffers, shunted off in a corner of Geneva, which spends most of its days making sure orbiting satellites don't collide and countries don't station weapons in space. So when Othman insists she didn't tell a Times reporter she was about to be appointed by UN headquarters in New York as our planet's point of "first contact," should any extraterrestrials hover by for a look-see -- a sort of Wal-Mart greeter for visitors from other worlds--perhaps we should believe her side of the story.
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/col ... story.html
