Is there anybody out there?

LOADS of witnesses and grainy pictures, but nothing that leaves you convinced

I HAVE just been reading about England’s most haunted houses, but I can never really make up my mind about ghoulies and ghosties and all that hobgobliny stuff.  

The only thing that goes bump in the night at my house is me trying to get to the bathroom and walking into the door. 

You hear of spooky accounts and watch TV documentaries, and it’s certainly enough to get you thinking, but it’s like UFOs – loads of respectable witnesses and grainy pictures, but nothing that quite leaves you convinced.  

Surely there should have been at least one professional photographer armed with the latest Pentax who had managed to whirr off a load of world class snaps by now.  

This would leave nobody in any doubt whatsoever that there are spectral figures whooo-hoooing up dark corridors or little grey men (they used to be green) whizzing around up there, but doing a darn good job of avoiding us.

There are always excuses for those iffy pics – ghosts have no substance so cannot be photographed; UFO’s are powered electromagnetically and so interfere with . . . stuff.   

Well whatever.   

Nevertheless a school friend and I did actually see a genuine UFO many years ago.  It wasn’t so much a flying saucer than a flying ellipsoid, and an ellipse as we all know is a closed symmetric curve that seems to cut the surface of a cone by an oblique plane to the symmetry axis angle, greater than the curve with respect to the axis of revolution.        

Wikipedia’s great isn’t it.   

But okay it was cigar- shaped.

The thing is we both got a good look at the object, although our parents did not believe a word of it because we were only 11 at the time. 

“Mum, Dad, we’ve just seen a space ship!”

“That’s nice dear, now clean your teeth and get to bed, it’s school tomorrow.”

“But Muuum…”

“Bed!”

Perhaps they have walked among us for years disguised as our mothers?  It would explain the curlers.