It was the most impressive undertaking the government had ever been part of.

In 1997 President Clinton set up an agency with a cool-sounding name to monitor alien traffic going to and from the planet, because he’d just seen “Men In Black” and asked out loud why America didn’t really have something like that. An obscene amount of cash was pumped into the project – a high-tech facility was built under Los Angeles on the basis that people would think the Government too clever to hide something under a city built on the San Andreas Fault.

The smartest minds from around the world were hired to take up positions in the agency. However after years of scanning the galaxy, they came to a stunning conclusion.

Man was alone in the Universe. They had gazed into the abyss, and it hadn’t so much as blinked back.

By this time, George W. Bush was President, and he found the agency to be “too awesome” to shut down. And so it remained, a drain on the tax-payers’ money and a waste of dozens of the world’s finest boffins.