Probably the most sensible thing I ever heard on the subject of unidentified flying objects was a comment made by an old coon hunter who had certainly seen his share of nighttime skies as well as the daylight variety.

"They's a world of critters in the ocean we don't know about," he told me, "and I figger the sky is considerably bigger."

Ozark folks never talk much about UFOs for obvious reasons. The fear of being regarded as a person who "sees things" is always a factor in small communities where you depend on someone's word as his bond. If a neighbor starts talking about aliens buzzing his cornfield, you tend to get uneasy about his maybe sticking his bill too deep in the jar.

An old friend of mine looked askance at stories about people who reported being abducted by aliens, but he was just being practical. "If aliens are smart enough to get here in the first place," he wanted to know, "why would they want to abduct the dumbest people on the planet?"

At a family get-together, we got to talking about UFOs. Because none of us would be embarrassed to admit anything in my bunch, I was all ears when my son-in-law said he had tried once to follow a silver sphere down a dirt road in Iowa. It was only a quarter mile up, and he said it looked like a stainless steel ball going around 50 mph against the wind and not making a sound.

None of the rest of us had an extraterrestrial encounter, but that didn't stop my wife, Diana, who, luckily for me, remembers everything funny she ever saw happen.

She told something that I had forgotten, and maybe you have, too. It seems that on Twilight Zone 20 years ago, Rod Serling came up with an answer to the UFO question that pretty much explains them.

A flying saucer lands outside Washington, and its alien passengers present a metal book to the reception committee, which--as far as expert linguists can puzzle out--the title is "The ways to serve mankind."

While the experts are trying to interpret the book, a whole bunch of politicians and diplomats accept the sign language invitation of the aliens to come aboard the spacecraft for a trip to their home planet to "prepare" them for the new millennium.

At the last minute, one of the linguist-translators comes charging out of the building, shouting at all the senators and diplomats going up the ramp to the spaceship.

"No, no!" he shouts. "It's a cookbook!"