NASA agent comes out on UFOs

"Just so you know, so we are totally clear," said Gutheinz. "You can dig all over the place - there is no ET at NASA."

But it was Gutheinz who in the February/March 2005 edition of UFO Magazine wrote how he had been abducted by agents even more secret than his own; how, being unable to account for whole days, with only vague memories of brain chips, he stumbled across the desert outpost in New Mexico where the Roswell aliens had been autopsied and a terrible accident had turned NASA personnel to dust in their own biological suits.

"I had taken complaints from people who believed the government had placed transmitter/receivers in their brains before, and I had always assumed they were schizophrenics," wrote Gutheinz. "Even today I know many people who believe this happened to them probably are schizophrenics, but now I know some are telling the truth?"

But Gutheinz was only kidding. He wrote the story for fun. He now finds it embarrassing. His children and students take the mickey out of him. His wife thinks he'll never live it down. And it was just the transcript of a vivid nightmare that had merged his life in a secret NASA bunker with the calls he would get from conspiracy theorists. Just a transcript, cheekily submitted to a UFO Magazine with an introduction that asked, are these real memories or was it just a dream?

"I thought it was a great idea when I wrote it, because I understood it. But it was sort of like Andy Kaufman. His humour - you were the only one who got it some of the time. I got it when I wrote the thing. I thought it was novel," said Gutheinz.

The magazine wrote it up under the headline 'Alien Autopsy Expose - He knows where NASA hid the bodies'.

A self-confessed maverick, Guntheinz has a track record in causing mischief. What do you think he did with those calls he got about alien abduction at NASA?

"I hate to say it, but when I had a rascal instinct, I would find somebody at the FBI didn't like, and I would give them that phone number and have them call the FBI," confessed Gutheinz.

Won't somebody please come forward and reassure us that there really are aliens? That this fragile, lonely planet isn't all we have? Perhaps take some comfort here: the Disclosure Project, the UFO group that inspired McKinnon to hack into NASA systems in 2001, will tell us what we want to know. They only ask for money first.