Interior Dept. Raises Monster Alert

The US Department of the Interior today raised the monster threat level to Orange, indicating that there was credible information of a legitimate monster attack in the near future. Department officials announced the change today at a press conference in Washington.

“We’ve been monitoring the Yellowstone event for the last few months and, after consulting with specialists all over the world, we’re raising the Monster Attack Threat Indicator to Orange,” said department spokesperson Jennifer ‘Kitty’ Catte. “We’re not entirely certain that it is a monster that is slowly waking up beneath the surface of Yellowstone, causing temperature rises and other strange geological impacts, but even if it’s not Godzilla it presents a potential risk to life and health.”

Ms. Catte said that while the military would not be immediately mobilized, the Wyoming National Guard would be sobered up and put on “High Alert” to report any suspicious activity in the Yellowstone Geological Basin. “We’re advising people planning on visiting Yellowstone in the near future to consider changing those plans,” she said. “You don’t want to be out photographing bison when a 140-foot-tall radioactive monster or a flaming turtle bursts up out of the lake and begins rampaging through the countryside.”

Some experts expressed skepticism at the heightened alert level. “At the absolute worst it’s some dumb CHUDDs that have relocated from an urban environment to escape alligator attack. But I doubt that it’s even that serious, probably not even on the level of a Blob-type threat. My guess is that it’s a Swamp Thing which, while certainly dangerous to those in the immediate vicinity, poses no real threat outside of a ten-mile radius.”

“I don’t care what anybody says, it’s Godzilla.” Said Gigantozoologist expert Timothy Welterweight from his office in London. “The profile of the event perfectly matches the 1952 Tokyo Awakening, where Godzilla rose up out of a lake at the base of Mount Fuji and decimated the countryside for two weeks until Mothra intervened and stopped him. But with the military having dismantled the Mecha-Godzilla project in 1990, the United States is totally unprepared for an attack of this magnitude. They’d better hope that Mothra isn’t in larval form, or the destruction could be severe.”

A small group of skeptical scientists believe that the activity in Yellowstone is actually caused by normal geological incidents. Typical of their attitude is Dr. Timothy Hanson, who claims that a ‘lava sponge’ was filling with magma and causing the heating and geological changes in the Yellowstone basin.

Former vice president John K. Mondale, whose film An Uninvited Guest documents the risks of a monster attack, dismissed the skeptics. Interviewed at the Tony Awards, where the stage version of his documentary won for Best Musical, he said “Even a casual observer of the Yellowstone basin knows that Old Faithful shoots water, not lava. The scientific consensus is clear: there is a monster underneath Yellowstone Lake and it will wake up sooner or later. We need to take drastic and immediate action to make sure that it’s later, before our children wake up to a radioactive, giant-lizard dominated nightmare.”