When does an obscure 77 year old astronaut from a mission no-one remembers, become a 'Top Astronaut'? When its a slow news week in the States in the middle of what journalists call the Silly Season. Dr Edgar Mitchell recently decided to tell Sky News that Aliens do indeed exist, and NASA has known about them for years. Notwithstanding the fact that he has made these statements on and off over the last decade, Sky, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail reported them last week. Oddly enough, the story does not seem to have made many of the other papers.

Still, if Sky, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail all say its kosher, it seems I ought to join the herd and start revising the skeptical tone of a couple of my recent posts on the peculiarly high number of UFO sightings reported in the Walthamstow area.

I still consider, however, that I might as well also feel re-assured (if re-assurance is the correct word) by reports that the Americans have aircraft which easily could be mistaken for, and explain, many of these sightings, if ordinary civilian traffic doesn't do it for us. These reports, from an 'Expert', (someone who has met someone who has had a look round some of the items in the research sheds at Lockheed Martin that have not yet made it on their website), are as substantial and detailed as Dr Mitchell's utterances, and to my mind, have the added credibility of not having been quoted yet by Sky or those other two 'news' sources.

What such top secret military hardware would have been doing flying over this part of London would still remain a mystery, of course, but I expect I can find some lonely attention-seeker on the edge of dementia who can cobble together some theory or other to excite us all until the end of the holiday season. Either that, or I'll have to try and get worked up about Miliband's 15 minutes of fame.