This week: UFOs I don't get many opportunities to watch television these days, but I remember in my youth spending the whole summer sitting on my hands and watching the intrigues of cricket and Formula One for days on end. While my friends, having spent the summer camping and generally doing healthy outdoor activities, would arrive for a new school year fit and tanned, I would turn up on the first day of school looking as if I had just stepped out of a cave for the first time in centuries. This unhealthy overdose of television has left me wary of wasting any more of my time. So it was recently, 10 years after its introduction to Hong Kong, that I subscribed to cable television, picking all the channels that were supposedly informative and consisted mostly of documentaries. Coming home after work after it was connected, I took a quick shower, put on a comfy set of pyjamas and got some unhealthy finger food ready for a night in front of the television. After skipping through the animal-based documentary channels, for which my interest had waned after a day at the clinic, I found a channel based on science, which sounded interesting. It turned out to be showing a programme on unidentified flying objects. As usual with these shows, it was full of a collection of fuzzy home-brewed footage combined with some re-enactments, mixed in with a guy who really seemed to believe he had had a UFO experience and a big dose of government-cover-up conspiracy theories. It finished off with closing statements summarising the show and adding a disclaimer that viewers should make up their own minds about the reality of UFOs. I was turned off my finger food and my born-again television experience and promptly picked up an old copy of Homer's Iliad that I had lying around - and fell soundly asleep. The media recently reported an uproar when the University of Hong Kong abruptly cancelled a course on exopolitics and UFOs. The cancellation was only announced four hours before the first lecture was to start, so you can understand the irritation expressed by those who had cancelled their dinner plans to listen to the lecture. I would be rather cheesed off if that happened to me, too. But I find myself applauding the unfortunately late action of the university. It said the course was cancelled because of the biased nature of its content - that it only presented the side of UFO believers. This is not a strong excuse, as there are theology courses at the university that are biased in the same fashion, but nevertheless it is good to see that those in charge have enough common sense to see nonsense for what it is. I'm sure the lecture would have been interesting in the same way a tarot reading could be fun and interesting, but it should not be a course at a university. Don't get me wrong. I believe there is extraterrestrial life in our unimaginably huge universe. It would be arrogant of humans to think we are the only sentient life in the vastness of space, as it was centuries ago when we thought Earth was the centre of the universe. I also don't deny there are objects in the sky that are rather difficult to identify, especially with those low-resolution cameras that try to capture a pinprick in the sky at dusk. But I seriously doubt that there are flying saucers controlled by aliens flying around our planet. I know enough about physics and engineering to know the difficulties and impossibilities of interstellar travel. I'm not talking about a flight to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri; I mean stars much farther away where life could exist. Also, look at the fact that it didn't really take us very long to develop radio and we have been broadcasting for 200 years, broadcasts detectable in space, and still we've had no reply from anything out there. Nor have we heard a broadcast from anything out there. An alien race that is close enough to discover us and send a spaceship to investigate us would have been transmitting radio waves for thousands if not millions of years by now. We should have plenty of warning before their arrival. It is arrogance also to think that a life form so technologically advanced, which can cross interstellar distances in the blink of an eye, would be interested in mankind and find us in the enormous vacuum of space amid trillions upon trillions of star systems - and then to have such poor stealth technology that any moron can take a photo of its spaceships with a Polaroid. If Galileo Galilei had as much evidence for his discoveries on the solar system and that the Sun is at its centre as these UFO 'experts' have on visiting aliens, he would be a nobody, long forgotten in the annals of time.