Last Monday, The Wife and I were watching the Lester Holt show because we are at the age when we watch things like the Lester Holt show. Lester was broadcasting from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, one of the tripwire NORAD installations, a holdover from the Cold War that sadly remains busy in the age of Chinese spy balloons, North Korean nuclear threats, and Vlad the invader.

NORAD is the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the specialty branch of the United States military responsible for detecting and intercepting hostile flying machines before they enter American airspace.

While NORAD doesn’t advertise it, part of their mission includes keeping an eye out for flying machines of possible extra-terrestrial origin. That made the news last week as well.

David Grusch, a former national reconnaissance officer with the Pentagon’s “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force,” testified under oath before Congress that the United States is in possession of “non-human spacecraft.” The hearing was chaired by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, so cynics might dismiss his testimony as exactly what you would expect to get in a congressional hearing conducted by a Florida Republican. But hold your tinfoil hats!

Senate Majority Leader, Charles Schumer of New York is also poking around decades of UFO stories, co-sponsoring a bill with fellow Democrat Kristen Gillibrand that directs the National Archives to immediately release all documents the government has related to alien spacecraft. Somewhere in the universe Art Bell must be smiling.

Lester Holt’s Alaska broadcast included footage of the astonishing array of technology we deploy to detect foreign intruders both terrestrial or otherwise: C-17 Globe Masters, C-12 Hurons, E-3 Sentries and the state-of-the-art F-22 Raptors. Additionally, enormous geodesic domes filled with top secret radar technology scan the skies 24/7/365 to make sure nobody catches us napping. Why? Because we still live in Robert Oppenheimer’s world.

While Lester buzzed around the Alaska coastline refueling fighter places from a C-135, The Wife and I discussed how much all this is costing us. The billions, trillions even, of We the People’s treasure is chewed up every year to prevent bad actors from nuking us; a tragic indictment of how strange we humans are.

And who knows what the ETs might have up their sleeves?

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Meanwhile, the same night The Wife and I watched Lester Holt flying around Alaska, we watched director Shai Gal’s brilliant Netflix documentary, “Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine”, a must-see history of the astonishing James Webb Space Telescope that continues to dazzle the world with images of previously unknown galaxies, some dating back 13.5 billion years. The JWST project took more than two decades and cost $10-billion, which is a lot of money but less than one-tenth of Jerry Brown’s crazy train to nowhere. It has already returned and massive payoff, a quantum leap forward in our knowledge of the universe. On a night when the news seemed particularly depressing, it was therapeutic to spend time watching the geniuses at NASA do their thing.

And that brings me back to how strange we humans are; the shocking death and destruction we are forever inflicting on one another necessitates a vast expenditure to either prevent attacks or inflict them. And yet, the James Webb Space Telescope inspires us with its visionary quest for knowledge and the sheer brilliance of the people who made it happen.

If it turns out extraterrestrials have visited this planet, I can only wonder what they make of us?

Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sundays. His novel, “Frank’s Shadow” is now available online and in stores. [email protected].