If Only Today Was April Fools Day,

this would be such a great story, but this story is true, newly released documents show how unprepared the UK was for an alien invasion back in 1967, a student rag decided to plant 6 UFO's along the 51.5-degree parallel, which runs from Kent to Somerset, and plotted six more-or-less equidistant points, the six oval flattened objects, 54 in long, 30 in wide and 20 in deep, were moulded from fibreglass and laced with artist’s graphite to give them an other-worldly sheen, they decided that they would have to have something ‘alien’ inside them before they were sealed up, so they concocted disgusting jelly-like goo made from bread dough boiled at a high temperature, it looked like mashed human brain and stank to high heaven, also inside each saucer was placed a small electronic loudspeaker, programmed to emit an unearthly wailing noise if the UFO was disturbed, let the fun begin!

saucer No 1 was placed on the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary, near a new housing development, at 2.30am the alarm inside the saucer began to wail as it was placed in position, but it was in Bromley, my home town, an hour’s drive away, that the fake spacecraft had the biggest impact — thanks to a weird cosmic coincidence, a strange noise coming from the night sky disturbed the sleep of a woman called Cynthia Tooth, she went to her bedroom window and saw a strange light — a UFO, she claimed — and ‘it went down behind some trees’, she alerted the local paper the next day, and her report played right into the hands of the hoaxers, I will not tell you what happened next as the story is such a good read but the fate of the aliens was sealed as police forces independently prodded, drilled, manhandled and in several cases punctured the saucers, the Chippenham one was blown up in a controlled explosion by bomb-disposal experts, if it had contained anthrax or smallpox or some deadly Soviet material, never mind alien technology, it would have been a catastrophe, meanwhile, one of the other saucers, the one in Winkfield, was taken down to the police station and put in the lost property office - where it was lost!

there were two bits of good news from this Farnborough students rag, (as well as a few laughs and red faces along the way), firstly the students raised over £2,000 for charity, a not inconsiderable sum in those days, secondly it showed just how unprepared the UK was for an invasion of the little green men!