SO you're walking down the street minding your own business and a spaceship lands silently in front of you.

A slimy, unearthly creature slithers out of a hatch in a whoosh of green smoke and heads straight for you.

Now here's the dilemma. What to do? Do you wet your pants there and then and collapse in a shivering heap? Do you get out your mobile phone, take a picture of The Blob and send it to all your pals; or call out the army, air force and navy to blast the creature to smithereens?

Do you approach the alien, say 'how do you do?' and offer to shake hands, tentacles, fins, or antenna? Or do you warn 'it' that it had better get some clothes on because it will catch its death of cold - or get arrested for indecency?

Never fear, you will soon be able to go to college to learn how to greet a visiting alien.

It seems the Russians have opened a school where they teach people what to do if they encounter a UFO and where to look for extraterrestrials.

The commotion over UFO sightings in Central Russia's Togliatti began last summer when crop circles appeared in a field just outside the city.

So local UFO researchers decided to establish a school where people would learn about the paranormal.

At the school, experts give students lectures on the correct behaviour in case of encounter with a UFO, and basic guidelines on UFO-watching. After all the theory is done, the students go out to practise their skills.

Sounds crazy to me, but apparently there are plans to open a similar school in Britain.

Perhaps I'm not sensitive enough (my wife reckons I'm not) but I've reached this mature age and have never seen a flying saucer (apart from those at home during a domestic dispute about cremated steaks); nor - despite spending all my time in this, Europe's most haunted city - have I ever seen a ghost.

I do know quite a lot of people who seem to be from another planet, but that's because they are a few stars short of a galaxy. You usually see them reverting to their other-world behaviour at around closing time at the pub - bulging eyes, strange, red colouring and unable to master the Earth's gravity.

On the way home, bloated bladders demand they stop off in a corn field where they walk in circles while watering the crop.

The following morning they wake with great holes in their memory and claim they were abducted and whisked off into space to be experimented on. That's where all the bruises came from (not from falling in through the front door) and that pink smear on their collar must have been alien saliva.

I reckon ETs must exist. Considering all the stars - each one being a sun like ours - there must be billions of planets and the chance of finding intelligent life on one of them is far greater than that of finding it in many licensed establishments on a Saturday night.

So what do you do if you meet an extraterrestrial being? For one thing, if he's made it this far through space, he's not daft. And unless he is from the Interstellar Peace Corps, he will have better weapons than our puny nuclear devices. So don't pick a fight.

Intergalactic etiquette would demand that I invite him home for tea but first I'd have a quiet word in his ear about the wife's scones. That's if I could work out where his ear was. Could be embarrassing, that. He might be talking through his backside like some of those acquaintances I mentioned earlier.

If a close encounter with my missus didn't send him scurrying back to his space cruiser, I'd switch on the telly and let him have a good dose of the soaps, especially EastEnders.

He'd soon pick up his packet of Smash potato and laugh all the way back to the future.