Aliens are coming and they are not bringing PPE

"Take me to your leader." Photo / Getty

Sometimes it feels like all the good things in life — sport, book launches and the third series of HBO's Succession — are on hold, but all the bad things — Twitter, runaway climate change and the inexplicable BBC sitcom Mrs Brown's Boys — carry on regardless.

We can add aliens to that list of bad things that don't obey lockdown. This week, the Pentagon released three videos of "unidentified aerial phenomena" — the politically correct term for UFOs. The videos had leaked out before and are probably innocuous. But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it is to fear the worst. The aliens are probably coming, and probably aren't delivering PPE.

Crucially the aliens won't arrive at a time of our choosing. Neighbours only ever pop round when you are in the shower. Aliens will only ever arrive during a pandemic.

We can, like disgraced celebrities, ask them to respect our privacy at this difficult time, but let's face it: having flown millennia across the galaxies, they aren't going to turn back when they hear Virgin Atlantic needs a bailout.

An alien visitation now would be, almost above all, embarrassing. Imagine when they say, "take me to your leader", and we have to point to the bleach-curious sociopath.

Even if we convince the aliens to settle instead for his deputy, that still leaves us with Mike Pence, whose highest-profile contribution to defeating the pandemic is to be the only unmasked person in a Minnesota coronavirus clinic.

Our best hope is that the head alien turns out to be female, so Mr Pence refuses to meet her alone. Otherwise, there is a risk that the visitors would return home, reporting they'd found no sign of intelligent life.

We could try to make ourselves look good to the aliens. We could point out that Mr Trump has promised to put an astronaut on the moon by 2024. (We won't add that this promise will inevitably end up with him asking a scientist, in a 2023 press conference, if Nasa has considered just throwing the rocket really hard upwards, or maybe bringing the moon closer.)

We could ask the aliens to come back in a year when Joe Biden may be US president. But they will probably have concluded that we need an intervention now. During the SARS outbreak, the US and UK invaded Iraq. There is no telling what we might get up to before the end of Covid-19, especially given our current political leadership.

It's a fair point. South Korea, New Zealand and Germany have handled the pandemic well. But almost the only leader of a nuclear power not to have made serious mis-steps during the crisis is Kim Jong Un, and that is quite possibly because he died in the middle of it [update: Kim lives. Probably].

Fingers crossed, we get lucky. Maybe an asteroid will hit us before the aliens do. Maybe the extraterrestrials build a base on the outskirts of Birmingham, and everyone just assumes it is an Amazon fulfilment centre. Certainly if ET turned up in England in 2020, he wouldn't have the chance to ask for hospitality; he would have been reported to the police for a non-essential journey.

When a neighbour comes around at that inconvenient moment, you try to explain that you don't normally listen to Jazz FM or have pizza boxes strewn over the floor, and that you were just about to fix that strong smell coming from the kitchen bin. Of course, you both know this is fiction.

Similarly, if aliens visit, we could pretend that our planet isn't normally a mess. That we were actually on the brink of bringing peace to the Middle East, cutting carbon emissions sustainably, and avoiding major geopolitical conflict.

We know the truth. We might as well tell the aliens what we ultimately tell the neighbour: come in, now is as good a time as any.

• Covid19.govt.nz: The Government's official Covid-19 advisory website