Many politicians including Ronald Reagan and Jack Kennedy knew how to express reality through humor in order to communicate real news hidden behind quips. I believe their style would be useful today.

In my two years as the SDI chief scientist, I often used that approach to deal with the daily chaos, confusion and contradictions in my assignment. I recall sitting  in my SDI Pentagon office just down the hall from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger when I got a call to hurry over to the Hill to answer an urgent question from a senator. The question was regarding a reporter’s claim that we were hiding an alien spacecraft at a secret facility on a South Pacific island. Even worse, I was accused by the reporter and the editor of the paper of being involved in developing the alien’s propulsion technology.

I had no experience with “fake news,” but I was already prepared with my approach to SDI humor. During my time with the SDI, I had become the brunt of ridicule–depicted as a chubby lying penguin named opus in Bloom County cartoon–and my natural sense of the ridiculous had become well developed during my two year assignment. It was a common occurrence that some serious event tested my communication skills, or maybe it was just my sense of humor that I used to preserve my sanity.  My official memo to my supervisor, Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, aka Abe, giving a record of the meeting was even sillier than the alien accusation, but it allowed me to deal with the real and the unreal. For the rest of the story, check out my soon-to-be-published book Death Rays and Delusions on Amazon.com.