The Wailing Wall Street Journal, column one
December XXV, Annum I
U.F.O. SIGHTED OVER BETHLEHEM
Emperor Stresses Need for Star Wars Program
Three Eastern Bloc Scientists Arrested
ROME ”While school children were being instructed in the use of catacombs as fallout shelters, the panicked Senate investigated reports of a technological breakthrough in Parthian air power. The sightings of U.F.O.s over Judea prompted the Emperor Gustus to call for the development of bigger catapults.
At a mosaics opportunity for his head start program for gladiator schools, the Emperor responded to the reporters’ questions by blaming the previous administration of Marc Antony. It was wasting money on aqueducts and roads when we should have been working on the Satyr catheter. A palace spokesman later insisted that the Emperor said Saturn catapult.
The spokesman refused to confirm reports of the detention of three Parthian magi. Reliable sources on the Senate Intelligence Committee indicated that the three were terrorists posing as a scientific mission.
There remains some doubt as to whether the Parthians actually have achieved air superiority. According to some shepherds in fields as they lay, the aircraft resembled a new star and a host of angels. That bucolic perspective was dismissed by defense analyst Pyrrhus Victorius. “Very few of those shepherds studied aerodynamics at Alexandria or Athens.”