Next Thing, They’ll Tell Us Bill Gates is a Klingon

It’s not a comedy, but NBC’s new drama, The Event, had a little fun this week with Americans’ fascination with extraterrestrial beings and our penchant for conspiracy theories.

Here’s a hint: It involved the Sage of Omaha.

The show is a serial thriller, set in the present, about the U.S. government’s attempts to deal with the crash of an alien spacecraft in Alaska in 1944 and the surviving humanoid aliens’ own surreptitious efforts to assemble the means and materiel to get back to the Planet Alpha, or wherever they’re from. For some reason, these folks don’t age quickly, so they’ve got time on their side.

In Monday’s episode, the leader of the ETs, Sylvia, is reunited with her son, who has spent the last several decades amassing the fortune necessary to finance their departure from earth.

“You’ve done well for yourself over the last 66 years,” Sylvia says to Thomas, looking over his office in the building in Washington, D.C., that the ETs apparently own.

“Our holdings are in good shape,” Thomas replies. Earthlings’ “economy fluctuates up and down in a way they can’t predict. With our math, we can. Buy low, sell high.”

But Sylvia wonders: “You weren’t concerned about someone taking notice of all this success?”

Then Thomas delivers the punch line: “A man in the Midwest does all of the investing for me. He’s made a fortune following my advice. He brings all the attention to himself.”

And you thought that Warren Buffett was a financial genius all on his own.