IS there anybody out there? There is a headline in the Daily Sport I wish I’d kept as evidence. Not unlike the Sun’s notorious ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ which you can still find if you Google, but a far wittier ‘Alien love-slime killed my petunias’.

The main reason I wish I could find this online is the realistic fear I might have made it up! Petunias? Why petunias?

In June this year, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) held a press conference on short notice where they announced they were commissioning a study of UAPs.

That’s ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ previously referred to as unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The fact that NASA have dropped the acronym UFOs for more technical sounding words suggests a desire to shift away from a term associated with corn circles, frothing conspiracy theories, bad plots in B movies and loopy (let’s hope they are!) alien abduction stories.

It’s a classic PR move. If you want to lose a reputation that’s damaging, rename and rebrand. In 1981 nuclear plant ‘Windscale’ was renamed ‘Sellafield.’ This followed years of bad publicity following a fire that had caused considerable radioactive fallout in 1957.

For a different and lighter example of corrective name-change, glamour model and Sun Page 3 girl ‘Jordan’ dropped her ‘stage name’ to reversebrand back to herself as Katie Price. Judging by recent press coverage of celebrity style disasters, I’m not sure that’s worked out so well for her!

It’s impossible to imagine alien life without in some way projecting a version of ourselves.

Maybe that’s why the thought of being visited by planet-hopping extra-terrestrials is so gut-grippingly terrifying. (For me anyway). What if alien life were as greedy, war-faring, power-mad and climate-destroying as we are and what if they’re a lot stronger than us?

Bigger, stronger, faster, smarter - being attacked by a vastly mighty opponent must be the most common story line in all literature from all of human history. From the Bible’s ‘David and Goliath’ to ‘Independence Day’ to Dr Who, we humans have created stories that terrify with images of overwhelming threat while celebrating a lone hero who somehow saves the day.

Mind over muscle. This triumph of the ‘innocent brave weakling’ must come from a desire to believe that no matter how puny we are in comparison with an external attacker, that somehow, our character, our ‘exceptional selves’, can always win the day.

In the movies anyway!

And to those looking up into the skies for answers this weekend, you can’t prove a negative. So, the reply to my question ‘is there anybody out there?’ is ‘nobody knows - till there is.’ Happy Bank Holiday weekends everybody!

The self-declaimed ‘world’s most outrageous newspaper’ does have some laugh-out-loud content but I wish the Sunday Sport would cut the misogynistic tropes of nagging wife and put-upon husband.

Or do I? If the prejudice wasn’t always one way it might be less infuriating. If the story were ‘Husband bores three wives to death’ would I giggle and turn the page without objecting?