This photo is of the perimeter fence around the former RAF base at Rudloe Manor, Wiltshire, described by "ufologists" as "Britain's Area 51," where deceitful government stooges concealed evidence of extraterrestrial tourists (as here, in "the Welsh Roswell") and, of course, their dead bodies. True? I dunno. Probably not, on balance. But as a secular humanist who sometimes gets tired of secular humanism I've always been a sucker for UFO sightings and the whole ambient woolly-headed mythology that, to me, always brings with it nostalgia for innocent pastimes and a pleasing shiver of the uncanny. Indeed, I once firmly claimed to have made a UFO sighting myself: a mysterious light in the sky above southwestern France one evening in the summer of '89. There it was: a huge, brilliant, fixed white orb, directly above me. However, in the intervening years I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that the mysterious light was actually the moon seen through the hazy lens of the contents of two bottles of cabernet. Bummer. But all the more reason to continue with my taste for ufology. (Plus, I've always missed the '50s, and UFO sightings, like Elvis, big-finned Chevies, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, are the essence of that decade.)