The things you learn

So I spent yesterday at my niece's graduation party. I mentioned to one of my sisters that just before leaving to head over, there was an owl outside my front window and that I had taken a lousy picture of it on my cell phone. (I haven't uploaded the photo from my phone to the Internet. Besides, the camera in my phone isn't really suited to nature photography; the picture is blurry and you'd only recognize it to be an owl if anybody told you in advance.)

The response I got was surprising. My sister told me that she found owls creepy. Apparently there's a movie I havent seen called The Fourth Kind, from 2009. Obviously taking its name by riffing on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the "fourth kind" of encounter deals with being abducted by aliens, which apparently take the form of owls on Earth. So that explains why my sister finds the owls creepy. It' not that they can seemingly rotate their heads close to 360 degrees.

The movie claims to be based on true events, in the style of The Blair Witch Project. That, of course, is a hoax. But if you want to see the trailer and see if it creeps you out (it didn't creep me out, for the record), here you go: