From the divine New York Times today comes a story about alien abduction. Now I've never been abducted by aliens, but I have had that sleep paralysis thing happen three times in my life.

While in light dream-rich REM sleep, people will in rare cases wake up for a few moments and find themselves unable to move. Psychologists estimate that about a fifth of people will have that experience at least once, during which some 5 percent will be bathed in terrifying sensations like buzzing, full-body electrical quivers, a feeling of levitation, at times accompanied by hallucinations of intruders.

I didn't have any of that stuff, but I did wake up unable to move. Each of the three times, someone was standing there. Scared the hell out of me, and then I woke up fully to an obviously empty room, so I knew it was sort of a state between sleep and complete wakefulness. But imagine that happening to you in the sort of detail the article describes! And then your mind, already at work on War of the Worlds, tosses some aliens into the mix. Yeesh. I'd be a basket case.

Also from the NYT, an article that makes you mad.

More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

And no one did anything about this why?