Though here are two true stories, as told by Liverpool paranormal investigator Tom Slemen, that may show that extraterrestrials ARE visiting and both occurred in his native city of Liverpool:
A child from space
Local Mysteries with Tom Slemen, Maghull & Aintree Star (a Liverpool newspaper)
RAIN, descending in fitful showers, was swept against the window panes of the sandstone cottage at Olive Mount, Wavertree, in the Liverpool of 1951.
Inside the cottage a bakelite radio blared out the "Adventures of PC 49" starring Liverpool's own Brian Reece in the starring role.
Twelve-year-old Danny Foster was perched on the edge of a fireside armchair, gazing into the red incandescent coal embers, lost in precious memories of the time when his mother was alive.
She had died from some terrible disease that his Dad and Gran refused to even talk about; all that Danny knew was that it had been in her bandaged bosom.
Danny's father reclined in an easy chair smoking his pipe, gazing at the floor as the radio formed pictures in his mind.
Gran was in the kitchen washing clothes in the dolly tub, humming a sad old tune called the Butcher Boy.
The downpour thinned to a mizzle, and Danny cupped his hands to the rain speckled windowpanes and looked out into the gathering gloom.
How he pined for a friend. He and his Dad had moved from Anfield to live with Gran, and two months after starting at the new school, Danny still hadn't found a friend.
He suddenly recalled a library book about superstitions and ghosts he'd read. In the book it said that if a person made a wish at midnight, it was more likely to come true.
Well, midnight found Danny standing in the hall in his pyjamas. He wished for a friend, and after the twelfth chime he went to bed.
Then he had a strange dream about the local wood in Bowring Park, near to the golf course.
A silhouette of a boy was beckoning him, calling out Danny's name. Danny could sense the loneliness of the boy who was just as lonesome as him.
The same dream was repeated in Danny's mind on the following night, and in the morning he went to Bowring Park, feeling that the boy would be there.
Danny returned to the cottage a changed boy.
He packed his little suitcase, and was about to leave when his grandmother collared him. "And where do you think you're going? What's all this?" she said.
Danny said he was going to live with his friend, but then refused to say who this friend was or where he lived.
Danny's Dad grilled him until the lad admitted his friend lived 'somewhere in the wood' at Bowring Park.
Danny returned a strange answer: 'Often do we look, seldom do we see. Often do we hear, seldom do we listen.'
"Where did you get that from? You never thought of that," said the father.
That evening Danny broke down and cried and talked incoherently about his friend, and said, rather mysteriously, that if he didn't go to the wood his friend would leave without him, and that he'd never see him again.
"He's lonely as well Gran, and he came to me because I wished for him."
Then the father saw it first, then the Gran, and Danny. Something was looking through the cottage window in the twilight.
It had huge eyes like a cat and unearthly features.
"Jesus," said Mr Foster, and his mother recoiled in horror.
The small entity stood there for a minute, then raised its hand - as if to wave.
Today, Danny has vague memories of the entity he met in Bowring Park wood, but believes the thing was a lonely alien child that somehow answered his desperate longing for a friend.
***********************************************************************
Doctor invaded by deep space medical mystery
Local Mysteries with Tom Slemen, Maghull & Aintree Star
IN 1967, a thought-provoking science-fiction series called The Invaders came to our television screens.
The series began with a character named David Vincent (played by actor Roy Thinnes) driving into a seemingly deserted ghost town in the American mid-West during an exhausting car-journey home.
Vincent has a nap in the car, and intends to continue his journey in the morning, but is awakened during the night by the spectacular landing of a spacecraft from another world.
He subsequently discovers that this craft is carrying aliens from a dying world in space who are planning to take over our Earth by masquerading as human beings.
Vincent tries to warn a sceptical society that aliens have landed, and are infiltrating the human race, then finds to his horror that many of these outwardly human extraterrestrials are already among us, disguised as policemen, senators, refuse collectors, and so on.
Could such a nightmare scenario ever become a reality?
Well, we know virtually nothing about the worlds of space beyond our own derelict Solar System, so it's debatable, but, according to a respected doctor in his 70s, aliens may really be among us.
Last month a doctor wrote to me with an amazing story which he would allow to be printed on the grounds that his anonymity would be preserved.
I will therefore called the GP Doctor Jones.
In 1962, Dr Jones had a practice in Liverpool, and one afternoon he was summoned to a house on Waylands Drive, off Hillfoot Road in the Hunts Cross area.
Dr Jones was admitted into the house by the woman who had called him, and she took him up to a bedroom where her friend, a Mr Darby, was serious ill in bed.
Dr Jones put a stethoscope to the middle-aged man's chest, but could not hear the slightest beat, nor could the medical man find a pulse.
Mr Darby certainly wasn't breathing. He pulled back the inert man's eyelid and shone a pen torch gently into the eye - but the pupil did not even shrink. "I'm afraid he's passed away," said the doctor, and at this point he felt very unsteady on his feet. Then he blacked out.
Dr Jones regained consciousness sitting in his car, and found himself in an unfamiliar place, which turned out to be a secluded road overlooking the river at Otterspool, over three miles away from Waylands Drive.
The time was 3am, and try as he may, Dr Jones could not recall where he had been in the 12-hours that had elapsed since he blacked out. He returned home and found his young wife hysterical with concern. She had notified the police of the doctor's disappearance.
Eager to get to the bottom of the mystery, the doctor called at the house in Hunts Cross, but the woman there had no recollection of the doctor, and said she had never heard of a Mr Darby.
There the puzzling matter rested, until five years later, when Dr Jones was on holiday on the Isle of Man.
One day, the very same man he had pronounced dead in 1962 walked into the Manx Hotel where the doctor was staying with his wife.
Jones said nothing to his wife, as he thought she think him mad. Mr Darby however, noticed the doctor, and later appeared in his bedroom in the dead of night.
The sinister man told the doctor he was from another planet, and would be returning to his own world soon.
" We are only here to observe," Darby explained, and he also apologised for the incident in 1962, saying it had been "a mistake". Mr Darby then left the room, and Dr Jones fell into deep sleep.
The next morning he discovered Mr Darby had checked out of the hotel.
