The news this morning that Russian leader and millionaire Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalmykia, claims to have been abducted by aliens, didn’t surprise me overmuch. Aliens have always behaved like policemen: always somewhere else, and never available when you need folks to be banged up as a matter of urgency.

In the UK, we’ve been beaming our election contest out to distant solar systems for some six weeks now, and the waiting list for abduction is getting longer and longer. It is a galactic disgrace that Mr Ilyumzhinov – an eccentric but essentially harmless character – is having his valuable chess-village building time interrupted by interfering green things, while 646 British legislators of no value whatsoever remain unmolested. No wonder Stephen Hawking says we should be careful about contacting these people: the evidence thus far supports his viewpoint.

The thing that’s always fascinated about the Third Kind of abduction is who the aliens choose – and even more so, who they don’t choose. They seem, for instance, to be ineluctably attracted to people who are bonkers. Extra-terrestrials never kidnap reliable witnesses like Gillian Duffy or Adrian Chiles. The net result of this must surely be that, from one end of the Milky Way to the other, Earth has a reputation as some kind colony for barmpots – and thus to be avoided where possible, except for purely scientific study.

But if their chief field of study is the mad, why haven’t they ever abducted, say, Harriet Harman, Gordon Brown, the Board of RBS or Paul Dacre? This is the question people have been asking since science fiction first became a genre, but at last the Slog can reveal the answer.

There is, after all, no point in coming all this way just to study your own species.