Was President Bush abducted by aliens?

When Dubya had his close encounter of the pretzel kind, did he in fact take a trip far, far away?

By Chris Colin

Feb 5, 2002 | I'm no political scientist, but I do have a slow resting heartbeat.

KPCC, the Southern California public radio station, revealed last week that President Bush's Jan. 13 fainting episode had less to do with a pretzel than with a heart arrhythmia called sinus bradycardia. Sinus bradycardia is any heart rate slower than 60 beats per minute; we know from a Jan. 14 Los Angeles Times article that the president's ticker clocks in at around 34-45. The pretzel was still a key player, but only insofar as the gagging slowed the president's heart rate even further, via stimulation of the vagus nerve. Medically, bradycardia is nothing to worry about and I wouldn't bring the whole thing up if it weren't for the alien abduction thing -- it seems to have happened to both me and our president. But more on that later.

There's a fun, if not consistently credible, tradition of interpreting the behavior of American presidents through scraps of medical information; of gaining access to their hearts and minds literally through their hearts and minds, as well as their livers, lungs, colons and kidneys. FDR's polio, Reagan's Alzheimer's and Dubya's former drinking habits have all generated lively speculation over the years -- in what ways might these conditions have actually shaped history? Napoleon's hemorrhoids, after all, famously helped him lose Waterloo, the pain having delayed his attack until noon, when weather and military conditions favored the British.

Paul Wolf, clinical professor of pathology at the University of California and V.A. Medical Centers in San Diego, studies the impact of illness on creative geniuses and, recently, political leaders. Roosevelt's hypertension, Wolf has written, played a decisive role at Yalta, allowing Churchill and Stalin to take advantage of the president.

"At the conference, Roosevelt's cerebral arteriosclerosis and reno-vascular hypertension and cardiac cachexia certainly affected his judgment, leading to the imposition of communism in Eastern Europe and Asia," Dr. Wolf says.

A subset of this approach to deciphering presidential history is the sympathetic sufferer method: Like Kennedy, I have Addison's disease, some writer might announce, and can therefore add another wrinkle to our understanding of JFK. It's this tactic I employ with our current president, thanks to a slow heartbeat and an extra-terrestrial conspiracy.

As health quirks go, low heart rate is one of the duller things that can show up on a world leader's medical file; at first glance, it's hard to imagine how KPCC's report will get us any deeper into the president. If anything, bradycardia is generally associated with good health -- it's not uncommon among athletes -- and good health doesn't turn the tables at Waterloo. Occasionally bradycardia causes trouble for women giving birth, but Bush is not a woman. Fainting is the main concern for men, and even fainting's not so bad if you can take the jokes and avoid hitting your head.

Me, I hit my head. It was the one time in my life my slow heart rate came to my attention, and I succumbed to the highly unmasculine activity of fainting. It happened Super Bowl Sunday, 1997. I remember because the game was boring me to tears, and I'd gotten up to pace around my friends' apartment. The EMT later guessed that I'd stood up too quickly. I recall standing in the bathroom and observing myself in the mirror above the sink. I can see my heart beating through my T-shirt, I thought. Next I was on the tiles, staring at the ceiling.

Except my eyes were closed. The ceiling I was looking at wasn't nearly as interesting as the walls on either side of me, which went to the floor in panels of lights and flashing buttons. I was lying in some sort of corridor. The corridor emptied out into a larger room about 25 feet south of me. I had the impression something interesting was happening in that room -- Murmurs? Negotiations? -- but my eyes opened before I could learn more. I inspected some grout, then got up and told my friends what happened.

At this point, instead of actually suggesting that aliens are actively abducting human beings with slow heartbeats during postseason football games, I will simply list other seemingly implausible scenarios from history: the fall of the Roman Empire, the invention of the light bulb, the Big Bang. I rest my case; well, not quite.

Next Page: Perhaps we've been lying in spaceship corridors all our lives

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