“Regarding the bright green beam spotted in the skies article of the 7^th. August issue of the Hinckley Times. Given the closest known potentially habitable planet is 13 light years away (c. 78 trillion miles) orbiting Kapteyn (a halo red dwarf discovered by Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn) it would take 13 years travelling at the speed of light (186,000 mi/sec) to reach our little earth. Even if we take more recent estimates of the nearest habitable planet to be 4.3 light years away, why would habitants of a non-terrestrial planet come all the way to Hinckley? Just to shine a light and then vanish? Equally nonsensical to me is why do they always come at night and light up their craft like Christmas trees? Surely for a super intelligent civilization (which they must be to have attained minimally the speed of light and/or figured out how to fold space/time or travel inter-dimensionally) only visiting at night and not bothering to invent some sort of camouflage is crass stupidity, no? I mean, if you wanted to creep about at night carrying out anal probes on unsuspecting homosapiens why announce your arrival with a light show and frighten the horses? As one of my hobbies since childhood is astrophotography, I am often found in my back garden at night scrutinizing the sky through my telescope. In all this time with thousands of images and hundreds of hours of video of the sky, comets and the moon, I have never seen a UFO, never seen an alien or structures on the moon, never seen Santa or the tooth fairy (sorry kids). I have seen plenty of private helicopters ‘beaming’ down lights and seemingly quiet as wind conditions at their altitude meant I could hear nothing. I have seen cloud anomaly that appear to be alien craft, I seen atmospheric conditions which cause planets to appear larger pulsing, multi-coloured and moving. I have also seen Chinese lanterns, helium balloons adrift and once a flying bin liner with a small amount of reflected light from the waning moon making it appear to be metamorphosing! If aliens, moon men, Greys, Darth Vader, Area 51 escapees, time tourists lit up like drag queens on New Year’s eve or any other exotic being or extraordinary craft had been within 10 clicks of Hinckley’s skies, I promise you I would have captured it on film. Although proponents of extra-terrestrial life like to quote the Drake equation, which provides a best guess at the probable number of alien civilizations to be anywhere between 7,000 and 12,000 (Drake, F., 1961), the Fermi paradox nicely points out the lack of observable evidence (Fermi’s question - where’s everybody?) In pointing this out I am not discounting other wiseacres the universe - I would not be so conceited to consider us unique. However, I am questioning ‘visitations’. For example, in 2013 New York had 7478 reported sightings which equates to just over 20 night every night of the year! Conversely, and to some, perversely, Physicist Stephen D. Unwin calculates 67 percent probability of there being a God. Putting aside the psychological theories expounded for alien sightings and visitations - false memories/recall, dissociation etc., my view, given the observable proof of God all around us if one is willing to see, and the building scientific evidence that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is flawed in numerous ways (e.g. See Epigenetic - how viruses and one’s lifestyle and environment effects heredity gene expression), is that it is lamentable our increasingly secular society would rather adopt in an unquestioning, vicarious manner the atheist attitudes of some trendy vapid comedian on ‘8 out of 10 cats’ - or worse, the paranoid and delusional David Icke - in believing little green men visit us, instead of the gift of our eternal soul.”

Additional: By Dean Ross Parry Published in the same issue - On Green Beam UFO Over Hinckley - Green light above head height in Hinckley? - That would be traffic lights!