Little green men on Mars? Or little white lies at NASA?

When I saw the headline “Astronaut says aliens have visited Earth,” I had to blink to make sure I was in fact reading CNN.com and not the Weekly World News.

Turns out that Roswell, N.M. denizen and Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell believes the stories his hometown folks told him about aliens crash landing a stone’s throw away from them–and government attempts to cover it up. Here’s what he said at a recent National Press Club appearance:

I urge those who are doubtful: Read the books, read the lore, start to understand what has really been going on. Because there really is no doubt we are being visited,” he said.

“The universe that we live in is much more wondrous, exciting, complex and far-reaching than we were ever able to know up to this point in time.”

A NASA spokesman denied any cover-up.

“NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover-up about alien life on this planet or anywhere else — period,” Michael Cabbage said Monday.

To which I say: Yeah, right. This is the same NASA that, in the decades since the Apollo missions, brought you those defective O-rings on the doomed space shuttle Challenger … and an internal culture widely and roundly criticized for its arrogance, bureaucracy and duplicity. Trusting NASA is a bit like trusting Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to file his taxes. (I still can’t get over that one. What happened to “God is in the details”?)

What’s more: If NASA is covering up evidence about extraterrestrial life or UFO crashes, do you really, really think they’re gonna tell the flak?

And finally: If I do choose to believe PR spin, it will likely not come at the hands of a man who shares his last name with a key cole slaw ingredient.

If intelligent life exists outside our realm of earth, sea and sky–and the overwhelming mathematical evidence suggests it does–then we need to put away Cold War-era notions that Green Goblins from Galaxy Galaxos want to annihilate us. (Face it: Malevolent aliens packing uber-atomic heat would’ve probably finished the job by now.) That’s the stuff of Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”

As a reporter with an eye towards matters of the spirit, I can’t help but be curious. And as a guy who loves the thrill rides of pop culture, I’m putting in my dibs to board a bonafide spaceship, if anyone “out there” is reading this.

Though from what I hear, press passes are awfully tough to snag.