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Out of the Blue: ‘Overwhelming’ evidence of wire-tapping? (opinion)

Mike Restaino
Out of the Blue

I was commissioned in 2015 to write a screenplay about not just a UFO conspiracy theory, but one that was particularly believable.

I frequently venture into outer space when it comes to movies and literature, but I found the act of stripping the sci-fi away from most of what I could drudge up on the internet to be not nearly as credible I felt my gripping ‘real-life’ story needed to be.

I spent the summer driving all around Northern Nevada, tracking down not only experts in the field, but folks who simply had interesting takes on little green men.



I spoke with ex-army officers, conspiracy-theorist housewives, Native American women with fascinating tales of both modern and ancient myths about the non-human population of the universe — anyone who would answer my telephone calls got chased down.

My longest travel day involved a voyage out past Fallon, where I heard there was a particular bar I needed to see.



Rumor had it that if you could prove verifiably that you were extraterrestrial, your third beer was free. I absolutely put that phrase in my script, but as far as I can tell, no such establishment exists.

After my not-so-close encounter with the alien watering hole, I drove on, to one of the northwestern edges of Area 51.

I was instantly mesmerized by the place, and while I did not (alas) see any flying saucers on test runs, I spoke with a bunch of folks who also just couldn’t share with me an E.T. narrative that didn’t sound provably valid.

They were often emotional re-tellings of abductions and interplanetary sight-seeing, but if your end-game logic is only “I know what I saw,” that just can’t be fully certified.

Just before I left for Incline, though, a professorial fellow spent ten minutes outlying what I was missing in my quest for UFO truth. I kept asking for specifics, but he was deft at dodging me.

As I left, he put particular emphasis on his final statement to me: “The evidence is overwhelming.”

Now it’s March 2017, and we exist in a science-fiction landscape where from a ritzy resort in Florida on a quiet Saturday, the leader of the free world has claimed — without an iota of substantiation — that Barack Obama tapped his phones, that he was spied on.

I couldn’t make heads or tails of such a baseless accusation, but once the Sunday politics programs had made their rounds, I was able to pinpoint where the Worst Supporting Actor Razzie Winner (Ghosts Can’t Do It (1990)) got his hot tip about Obama’s power-mad deceit.

Conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin apparently brought up Obama’s subterfuge in a Thursday rant that was covered by Breitbart the following day.

His thesis was that Trump was the victim of a wildly illegal surveillance, one that was implemented by someone in Obama’s inner circle who was ready to use police state tactics to compromise DJT.

Levin claimed the FBI started a criminal investigation into connections between a Trump server and Russian banks, and just kept the phone lines open.

Levin asserts that he has exhaustive proof of this “silent coup,” and — in keeping with our alien theme of the week — Donald wants to believe.

DJT is so bent out of shape about all this Russian stuff and his Muslim bans not going over well that he has become desperate for revenge.

Now a “proven” victim of that terrible president of ours from Kenya, DJT wants Congress to examine his surveillance with the same attention to detail as his handful of other hot-potato scandals (I heard even the Trump University case might even be coming back onto the scene!).

But as much as Trump wants this wire-tapping thing to go his way, there’s nothing underneath the hood here. This is his record-breaking inauguration attendance, his five million accounts of voter fraud.

As a nugget for a morning-commute segment on talk radio, they make for effective calls to arms, but even those who claim to have information to back themselves up fall apart under even marginal scrutiny.

Just like my learned Area 51 pal wanted me to believe the Air Force was reverse-engineering alien spacecraft at Groom Lake, Levin wants us to assume his “silent coup” is a real, vital threat to our president and his administration.

But after just a few questions on Fox & Friends, Levin said exactly what my alien-loving compadre did: “The evidence is overwhelming.”

Keep watching the skies…

Mike Restaino is a writer and filmmaker based out of Incline Village. He is also a founding member of the North Tahoe Democrats. He can be reached at mike@northtahoedems.org.


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