Life on Mars?

A remarkable number of people in the US are said to believe they have been abducted by aliens, and subjected to experiences which very often seem to involve probes being placed in bodily cavities in a manner which definitely should not be discussed in a family newspaper.

The debate about life "out there" has been reignited by some of the latest pictures relayed back to Earth from the surface of Mars.

Amid the rocks and dunes, which to this observer do look spookily like a desert scene from our own world, others have detected something even more exciting.

They have spotted in the photograph - brought to us courtesy of NASA's Spirit explorer, a handy little robot which itself looks a bit like something out of Star Wars - what they believe to be a human figure, which some have compared to the famous statue of the Little Mermaid in the harbour at Copenhagen.

I have examined the image myself, and the best I can come up with is a slightly darker shape in the left middle distance, which I suppose one could just about think was a human shape - in the way that an imaginative child finds animals and faces in the shapes of passing clouds. On the other hand, perhaps I am just very poor where observation and imagination are concerned.

The claims this is a human presence do also beg the question, why didn't the Martian go and introduce itself to the Spirit explorer? I'm sure they would have got on well. (Of course, conspiracy theorists will say this did actually happen, but "they" have covered it up - but that's another story.) The fact is, an awful lot of people desperately want something to be out there. There is a perfectly logical side to this. Seeing how huge the Universe is, it is difficult to credit that life might only exist on this little rock.

But for many this compulsion has a different source, one long rooted in our collective consciousness.

Once upon a time, people didn't believe in aliens; they believed in angels. In many cases they also believed in fairies, elves, sprites, trolls, goblins, demons and vampires.

An awful lot of people today believe in ghosts just as tenaciously as those who expect aliens to pop in for tea any minute now. Much of that belief stems from the same extremely powerful source, the conviction that we are not alone, there is something else occupying our Universe. For many, of course, religion fulfils that need. For others, it's little green men.

Interestingly, the fictional aliens of our imaginations, like the supernatural beings our ancestors thought lurked beyond human habitation, don't have to be benevolent. HG Wells, who accurately predicted the use of tanks and mass air attacks in 20th-century warfare, kicked things off in The War Of The Worlds, when Martians who bore remarkably little resemblance to mermaids laid waste to most of the Home Counties before being cut down by a nasty dose of man flu.

Sure, there have been alien nice guys, like the Doctor, ET and the little chaps in Close Encounters, but they are easily balanced out by the Daleks, the Borg and Ming The Merciless. Check out your local cinema, and you'll find Alien and Predator are back to mangle countless hapless humans.

Maybe the point is that the thought of being exterminated, eaten or enslaved by beings from beyond the stars isn't as scary as the alternative - that actually there isn't anything else there. That we are, in fact, all alone here, the creation of some minor cosmic accident, stuck on this little world with no company except the remaining animals we haven't wiped out yet. That's the truly terrifying thought.

Maybe I should take another look at that Martian landscape, just to check if that figure seems any clearer.