"Florida: Aliens Found at Space Center"

Headline writers are a unique and important breed. Their ability to distill the essence of a story into two, four, six or eight words, to craft a headline that both sings and sells newspapers is an art too often overlooked.

Great headline writers dream of the Big Ones–the first birth of dozentuplets; the discovery of a live unicorn or the Holy Grail in a farmer’s attic; the theft of a Rubens, still in its frame, from the Louvre, in broad daylight.

A little over a week ago, The New York Times–which, despite its current foibles, is still the best newspaper there is*–bagged one of the biggest. We waited to see if anyone else would comment; no one did. We waited to see if the tabloids would steal it; they didn’t. Well, it’s summer and it was in a Saturday paper, which probably explains how some dear soul slipped it in.

There it was: "Florida: Aliens Found at Space Center." A tabloid would have devoted a cover to it, but the Old Gray Lady buried it on page 10, demurely running it in the National Briefing section. Well, okay, the story wasn’t about those aliens, just 15 of the everyday illegal kind who want to live in the land of the (increasingly less) free and had parked themselves in the shade at the Kennedy Space Center.

Whoever you are who did that one–whether at the Times or AP, which originated the story–you are worthy.

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* We wish, though, that you’d stop reminding us that you published the Pentagon Papers, stop promoting the trampling of the First Amendment (which wasn’t written just for you) in your support of campaign finance reform and ponder whether it is appropriate for you to refer to the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives as "thuggish."

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