Who needs UFOs when you can play Sudoku?

Your chances of being abducted by a grey-skinned, blank-eyed alien creature have receded very greatly over the last decade or so. If you haven’t already been abducted, bad luck — it might never happen. Your chance has probably gone.

Last week a report into UFO activity over Britain was made public by the Ministry of Defence (because it was forced to do so under the Freedom of Information Act). It seems that the whole subject of flying saucers had, for a while, been taken very seriously by our defence intelligence chiefs; the report took four years to prepare. It came to the conclusion that there were indeed such things as UFOs, but that these were not spaceships piloted by humanoids from the general area of Andromeda but were, rather, hitherto unexplained manifestations of the atmosphere. In short, what the puzzled and frightened observers on the ground were witnessing were plasmas of gas created by charges of electricity and sculpted into aerodynamic shapes by air flows. Further, the strong electromagnetic fields present when such phenomena appear had the useful side effect of rendering people on the ground a little doolally. ‘Local electromagnetic fields have been medically proven to cause responses in the temporal lobes of the brain,’ they report. Which may explain why people who think they’ve seen UFOs sometimes appear barking mad.

Well, this explanation may meet with the approval of William of Occam, but I suspect it will play badly with the dwindling band of perpetually paranoid UFO spotters, who will sense a conspiracy on the part of alien infiltrators and the government, and quite possibly freemasons and Jews too.

But dwindling, though, they most certainly are. The UFO craze lasted on and off for more than half a century, but it is on its last legs.