Where is Doctor Who when you need him? Just as another series ends with the Doctor saving Earth from the Daleks (again), we are warned that Britain faces a “real life” alien invasion this summer. How mad is that?

Well, maybe not much madder than the allegedly sane fear-mongering we face the rest of the year. Some newspapers have declared “the summer of the UFO”, as soldiers, police officers, academics and members of the public report strange sightings in the night sky across our “alien nation”.

It is easy to scoff at UFO experts who appear from nowhere to shout “cover up!” whenever somebody sees a light. Easy, because most of them have moondust for brains. As Bill Bryson observes in A Short History of Nearly Everything, our solar system's nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri, is one hundred million times farther away than the Moon. Maybe some anti-social alien teens do travel billions of miles just to scare us, “but it does seem unlikely”.

No, outbreaks of UFO sightings historically tend to reflect how people view events on Earth. Thus they were common in America during the Cold War, the peak years of panic about nuclear war and Soviet invasion. If there is more than media silly-season stories behind the latest outbreak of UFO madness, maybe it says something about our apocalyptic age. After all, we are forever being warned by experts and authorities that life on Earth is under imminent threat from global warming, terrorism and war or bird flu, asteroids and overpopulation, not to mention “unknown unknowns”. Why shouldn't some feel free to add UFOS to the list of Unsubstantiated Frightening Occurrences?

When scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, seriously suggest that humanity needs to flee the planet to survive, and Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, calls melting Antarctic ice “even more terrifying” than “a science fiction movie”, it should be no surprise if the space cadets come out in force.

One “top UFO watcher” tells The Sun that the recent sightings “could be linked to global warming and craft from outer space are appearing because they are concerned about what Man is doing to this planet”. Let's hope the little green men use low-emission spacecraft.

If the lights in the sky are morbid symptoms of a gathering cultural gloom about our future, then maybe you don't need to be mad to believe in UFOs - although it helps. All this earthly pessimism is almost enough to make me nostalgic for the Posadists, loony leftists who believed that socialism would be brought by UFOs from superior civilisations. Are there any of them out there?

Copyright: Times Online