Crap circles

The world has found a new religion, in the form of UFO fanatics. They are worse than voodoo-practising witchdoctors - they will believe and promote anything.

They ignore all the rules of basic science and propose that we are frequently visited by all sorts of anal-probing maniacs who impregnate our earth-women and then they do experiments on the babies in some weightless lab on the dark side of the moon. Only to return again once it's a full moon and the dogs are howling. The real fanatics will mix these fantasy tales with weird ancient pagan hoo-hah, like vampires and werewolves.

And, of course, we all know who built the pyramids. There's no way humans could have done that; it must have been designed and built by aliens. There's no nation on earth who could be so hardworking and intelligent as to build a big triangular block in the middle of the desert.

If you were an alien, why would you insist on building triangles in the desert? Why wouldn't you go to the nice beaches and build something more modern?

Anyway, part of the Sci-fi culture is the old crop-circle hoax. These large circles magically appear in the middle of someone's crop, and no one can explain how it got there. There are, however, quite a few basic explanations of how they got there, and all of them include human intervention. What a coincidence.

But now there's a new explanation. This one is really good, and it actually borders on that fact/fiction line, the vague area where truth and non-truth fight the age-old battle for survival. It does however present a quite humorous explanation and I personally think it's a great story.

In Tasmania they have discovered that the kangaroos get a bit goofy when they eat opium poppies. This causes them to run around like Tom and Jerry, and while they move in these circles, they eat all they can get. The result? - crop circles in the opium fields.

"The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Ms Giddings is quoted in The Mercury newspaper as saying.

"Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

Tasmanian Alkaloids field operations manager Rick Rockliff said wildlife and livestock which ate the poppies were known to "act weird" - including deer and sheep in the state's highlands.

This explanation would probably not go off well in the USA, because people there only see kangaroos once they've had lots of opium. But it just shows you that there always is a logical explanation for these ridiculous fantasies.

Bring it on, Men from Mars, I still don't believe you exist! Although I do think some earthlings should be teleported to a desolated spot on the red planet.