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.