Alien life-forms have been cutting holes in sheep in Shropshire with highly powered lasers and strange glowing balls of light. According to a local farmer, reported by an oddly credulous chap from the Daily Telegraph, there is a ‘corridor’ of 50 miles stretching from Shrewsbury towards the Powys border where UFOs arrive quite regularly and do weird stuff with sheep. The farmer insists that sheep have been found with perfectly circular burn holes on their foreheads, and sometimes their brains dissected. Also he has seen the UFOs and pronounced them ‘frightening’. I agree with him. Most of the UFOs I have seen have been frightening, especially those which turn up just after there’s been a lock in at the local pub. They can be really scary bastards, swooping down with multicoloured lights and erasing my memory and sometimes removing my trousers.
I wish the alien-sheep stuff were true. It’s not that I wish sheep to have holes drilled in their heads, just that the revelation that UFOs really were speeding up and down the A5 with ovine mischief on their minds would distract me from the witless undebates of the general election campaign, the lies and elisions and smarm. But it’s not true, is it? You imagine you are the boss of the Intergalactic Space Agency (ISA) based on the methane-rich Planet Thrang, some 6,500 light years distant from earth on the edge of the Crab Nebula, and you have to explain to your politicians how this year’s budget is to be spent. What’s it to be, the ministers ask: terraforming barren asteroids in the Kuiper Belt? Making contact with those incredibly intelligent life forms inhabiting a solar system in Andromeda?
‘Nope, sorry. We thought we’d go to Oswestry and bugger around with some sheep.’
Huge intake of breath from the politicians.
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