(See, there. I knew that would get your attention.)

Many of the people I meet in my professional life are not professional, at least not in the sense that word generally is used. Murderers generally do not make a career of it. Contrary to the impression one gets from novels and television, most murders do not even think about killing much before it happens. They do not plot and plan and conspire to get away with it. Instead, they just react, badly, to something with little or no time for thinking. Prostitutes, however, are a bit different. Many of them are in it for the money or drugs they can get. For them, it�s a business. You look at their general skills, education level, and perception of their own opportunities and you have some idea how and why they became prostitutes. Or so I thought until I was in the grocery checkout line today.

The headline blared at me: �Fifty Percent of Hookers are Space Aliens.� It was in print, right, so it must be true. No political party would make that one up, would they? It couldn�t have been made up to scare us into better behavior, could it? If it were, why not say that eighty percent or one hundred percent of hookers are space aliens? After all, once you get past the space alien part, believing the percentage would be easy.

So now I am puzzled. Why, exactly, would space aliens want to become prostitutes? I suppose they could have dropped out of high school or, more likely, failed to pass the planetary test necessary to get a diploma. Here, it is not that unusual for a kid from a small town to fight with her mother, get on a bus, and end up as a prostitute. Perhaps on their planet you fight with your mother, get on a space ship, and head for earth.

But if they can get to this planet, surely they have other job skills. If you could take an interplanetary equivalent of a bus here, we would be aware of lots of them coming and landing. We would see them walking around in tour groups and posing in front of the Calatrava addition to the Art Museum or waving whatever body parts they have while overlooking Lake Michigan. No, they must arrive in smaller ships that they know how to pilot.

So why wouldn�t they go off and become engineers, for example? A little oddity among engineers is fairly easily overlooked and they would know enough more than us to fake it. Then again, getting a good job with no social security card or green card can be a problem. These days, the �space� part of �space alien� may be less of a bar than the �alien� part. That �alien� part can be a real kicker.

Okay, now I realize that they have to be part of the underground economy. No social security card, no green card, no opportunity. That part of the puzzle fits. But why prostitution? Popular culture always has assumed that space aliens come either with hostile intent or to explore or both but maybe it�s wrong. Maybe it�s about something else all together.

Most prostitutes I meet are not particularly young or particularly attractive. Maybe those are the aliens and maybe they have good reason to come. Maybe, like the busloads of senior citizens here who board busses for Canada, they travel to get cheaper prescription drugs. Who knows how expensive drugs have gotten on Pluto or Neptune or even further out? And who knows what a desperate space alien will resort to when they discover that they have landed in the United States, not Canada, after all and they can�t even figure out which governmental card to forge.

It�s obvious I wasn�t wrong after all. They do it for the same reason our home-grown hookers do it: it�s the money and the drugs.

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