Chris Richards, about as close as civilization is ever going to get to a bona fide scholar on the Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership, reports today that the Unidentified Funky Object has a new owner: the Smithsonian. According to Richards, the Institution has obtained the stage prop with the intention to feature it as the centerpiece of a permanent installation at the National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opens in 2015.

Richards’ report is one fun read:

“I’m about to cry!” Parliament-Funkadelic frontman George Clinton said over the phone from his home in Tallahassee on Wednesday. “They’re taking the Mothership! They’re shipping it out! . . . But I’m glad it’s going to have a nice home there.”

It isn’t the original Mothership. This 1,200-pound aluminum spacecraft was built in the mid-’90s — an indistinguishable replica, Clinton says, of the smoke-spewing stage prop he first introduced to slack-jawed funk fans in 1976.

Of course, Richards knows more about the indistinguishability of that replica than anyone. His 2010 quest to locate the original Mothership — which took him to a Prince George’s County garbage dump and concluded with a scholar’s belief that the spaceship is “bound firmly in the bosom of the strong black communities that straddle the D.C. line between Suitland and Seat Pleasant” — remains required reading.