Here is what everyone agrees on: this Halloween, a “massive” asteroid will pass close to earth at “unusually” high speeds. Will it kill us? Well, that is the question.

Certainly, when we are confronted with news of a looming date with an asteroid “the size of a football stadium,” the question that is foremost in the minds of the public, as well as media representatives such as ourselves who exist to serve the public, is: Will this asteroid, which is moving at a speed of more than 78,000 miles per hour, crash directly into Earth, setting off a calamitous global extinction event of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs long ago? After all, if an asteroid is merely going to pass within 300,000 miles of our planet, as so many of the “experts” hasten to reassure us, then it makes us wonder why we should pay any attention to the asteroid’s fly-by at all. I may not be a credentialed astronomer or famous planetary scientists, but I do have a dose of common sense. So I ask myself: if this asteroid will not get within 300,000 miles of us, why are all these media outlets publishing stories about it? What difference does it make to readers if a big rock flies by so far away that we can’t even see it? Why so much hubbub?

I may not be a NASA “insider,” but I do feel a responsibility to use my media platform to keep readers appraised of important—and potentially life-altering—news developments. And so I am simply raising to you the unavoidable question: is this asteroid, in fact, going to strike earth with terrific concussive force, vaporizing huge swaths of lands instantaneously in a fireball and darkening our world’s skies for months or years with deadly, ashy fallout? Is the end of humanity only days away? Will we face our doom, with ghoulish propriety, on Halloween, the night when we celebrate Satan’s power? It is simply dishonest not to confront this question, based upon the strong circumstantial evidence at hand. I am not here to scare anyone unnecessarily; nor am I here to participate in a vast coverup. I am here only to ask why we are hearing so much about this huge asteroid, if there is no chance that it will kill us all. Why—so we can look at it in a telescope, a vague and grainy dot in the far skies? To me, that seems boring.

I am just one respected journalist. I do not seek to cause alarm. I only want you all to use your own critical faculties to evaluate the “official” story of what’s happening. I’m obligated by professional ethics to report to you that NASA says “There is no asteroid threatening earth.” But let’s dig deeper. In fact, NASA’s statement is about claims “that an asteroid will impact Earth, sometime between Sept. 15 and 28, 2015.” A NASA scientist says, trickily, bolding ours, “There is no scientific basis — not one shred of evidence — that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates.”

Will an asteroid impact Earth on Halloween though? I don’t even want to know. Do you? I’d rather just die quickly. I’m not asserting that we will die quickly—or slowly—on that day. But if the possibility can be ruled out, I am not the one capable of scientifically doing the ruling-out. So I simply present the theoretical options to you. The rest, I suppose, is in God’s hands.

Happy Halloween—I hope.

[Not a “real” photograph, technically, but certainly a graphic representation of a theoretical possibility: Shutterstock]