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With all the political conventions and hurricanes and introductions to oddly named vice-presidential offspring, many people seem to have overlooked the single most important news story of the entire week. In a landmark study discussed by the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, economists Peter Leeson and Claudia Williamson showed that a significant and positive relationship exists between the places where unidentified flying objects are spotted and where America’s most mysterious cryptozoological species, bigfoots (er, bigfeet?) are observed. In particular, the researchers said, the two are both frequently reported in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico, Washington and Wyoming.

However, Leeson and Williamson failed to follow up this exciting revelation with sufficiently strong analysis. To explain their results, they suggested that these are all sightseeing states (so there are more people looking at outdoors things), that the potential boost for tourism produces an incentive to falsely report bigfoot and UFO sightings and that their residents report relatively lower levels of religious belief than other states (as if a perfectly rational person couldn’t simultaneously believe in saviors, saucers and skunk apes!). But in this they completely ignore the scientific logic of Occam’s razor: that the simplest solution is often the correct one. In other words, that UFOs and bigfoots are showing up in the same places.

But why? We can’t know that without further research, but the possible explanations are deeply unsettling and demand a full investigatory effort by the agencies of the federal government or, at least, Leonard Nimoy:

First, the UFOs might be abducting our bigfoots! The reason for this is unclear, but perhaps after years of studying rednecks they’ve decided to move on to probing even larger, hairier hominids.

Second, the bigfoots might be following the UFOs! Again, we can’t know why without further examination, but I suspect it might have to do with the aliens’ appearance. The most commonly reported species of aliens, the Grays, are small with large eyes, gray skin and, most importantly, entirely hairless. This indicates that they have hair-removal technology far beyond our primitive shaving, waxing and plucking. Using this technology, hairless bigfoots could infiltrate our society, joining with the Illuminati, Freemasons and Martha Stewart to establish a new world order!

Third, maybe their joint appearance is a coincidence. It just happens that people in those six states are particularly observant. See, while you’re sitting around watching your soap operas, reading your “mainstream newspapers” and sleeping without the use of goat tranquilizers, there are people in these states that remain ever vigilant, staying up night after night to clean their guns and await the signs of the apocalypse.

And thanks to that, they’ll see, smell and ingest things that are beyond your feeble imagination.

Whatever the case, it’s time that we put the massive human and technological resources of the United States of America to work on resolving this question before it’s too late.

What’s that you say? Perhaps we’ll find that the explanation for all this is that bigfoots are really aliens? Oh please. Who’d believe that?