Good News - Aliens Don't Smell

Well that's a weight off my mind I can tell you. I mean, it's bad enough being abducted and probed without also having to deal with bad alien breath or armpit odour (especially good news given how many limbs they likely have). Thankfully, the UK has finally allowed such important facts as these to be declassified.

In addition to knowing that alien space ships don't smell, we also get to find out many other things that the UK government have been deliberately hiding from the general population (something devotees of Torchwood or Dr. Who will already be all too aware of).

Firstly, they have an infinite variety of shapes, sizes and types of craft. No two sketches are the same, other than to note that many of them look to have been drawn by a spatially-challenged 5 year old.

Secondly, and for as-yet unexplained reasons, flashing lights are good, apparently. Either these aliens just want to yank our collective chains or they forgot to turn off the landing lights, not realising that these would make them somewhat conspicuous to even the most casual of observers. (Seriously, not even a half-way decent invisibility shield amongst them?) I find this all to be quite perplexing. Did NASA engineers, when working out the basic architecture of the LEM, ever reach a point where one of them slapped their forehead crying, "Bloody hell, we forgot the flashing lights. We'll have to scrap the mission and do it in a hanger outside of LA instead"? I think not. Well, at least not the first bit. So, unless this is as the result of some galactic edict, equivalent to the imposition of the back-up beeper we humans decided to stick on all lorries and trucks, then flying around some - likely hostile - planet advertising your presence with megawatt strobes going off all over the place really isn't the smart way to go.

Thirdly, don't ever, ever, treat seriously a statement from, as the BBC puts it, two blokes from Staffordshire who told the police that, "as they returned home from an evening out an alien appeared under a hovering UFO hoping to take them away" because "an evening out" was most likely a huge piss-up at the nearest pub. Just look at the drawing of the alien they saw and tell me it 'aint so!