The new X-Files movie has opened at a promising time, with a poll suggesting that more than 60 per cent of Britons believe in space aliens, and Edgar Mitchell, a renowned former NASA astronaut who once walked on the moon, claiming that they’re already here.

Ed, 77, says he has it from unimpeachable sources that the aliens have been visiting us for some time, but that governments around the world are hushing the story up.

They are afraid, he suggests, that if we knew the truth there would be mass panic and people might lose confidence in things like, oh, you know, the security of the oil supply and the global banking system.

From a world leader’s point of view, it’s therefore much easier to pretend that aliens don’t exist. Rather harder to understand is why this should also be the aliens’ point of view.

Being evidently cleverer than us they might have a different way of doing things, but the whole (admittedly, human) history of exploration and conquest suggests that when an advanced civilisation meets a less advanced civilisation, the advanced one quickly takes over.

To have reached our world, the aliens would have had to develop spacecraft of unimaginable sophistication and fly them from distant galaxies. Why, having gone to the trouble, would they spend their time stooging around over abandoned farmhouses in the middle of Kansas, and abducting the cast of the Jerry Springer Show?

Prominent believers in alien existence offer a partial answer to this. Frank Drake, the founder of the California-based SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), the foremost research institute in the field, contends that aliens are almost certainly well-intentioned.

“If they were bad, or aggressive in nature,” he says, “the likelihood is that they would have already destroyed themselves in a nuclear war.”

The aliens, according to this theory, are here to learn and observe, and their moral awareness of what might happen if they established a stronger presence compels them to remain discreet. “People always say: ‘Why don’t they land in Downing Street or at Heathrow?’?” says Malcolm Robinson, founder of Strange Phenomena Investigations, Britain’s leading UFO-tracking group, “but imagine the consequences for our civilisation if something like that actually happened.”

The Mitchell exposure sure has the corpo-media circus in an uproar about UFOs and aliens. I’m surprised that Frank Drake had something to say about it too.

I disagree about the statement that a species capable of crossing interstellar space would’ve shed their aggressive tendencies totally. Crossing interstellar distances, either sub-light, interdimensional or warp drive takes a certain amount of curiousity, aggressiveness and a will to survive.

If they were totally pacifist, they would’ve stayed home and gazed at their respective navels.

If they had any.

Aliens stole my brain