It's a simple idea: If aliens can travel interstellar distances, they must be more advanced than us. If they are more advanced, by how much?

Well, it's physically impossible to drive a metallic object faster than the speed of light. You'd have to bypass the known laws of physics. To send a metal ship to another star using conventional fuels would take decades and exhaust planet Earth's resources. Science fiction gets round this by inventing 'warp drives' and 'wormhole technology'.

I don't believe that alien visitors, if they exist, arrive in metal spacecraft, but we'll get to that later.

It follows that if they are coming here, they are *way* more advanced than us. And there follows an interesting question; just how much?

If they are to us, as we are to, say, a wild dog, then UFO phenomena makes sense. We can barely comprehend what we're perceiving: strange lights, odd indentations in the soil, weird experiences.

A wild dog suddenly hears a loud bang. One of his pack falls down mysteriously, and lays still, and dies. He then hears and smells a truck in the distance, then sees it's lights; what the _hell_ is that thing?

Reaction: panic, curiosity or dismissal.

If alien beings are coming here, what for? Because we are a threat, curiosity, to help us, or because we have something they want? A bit like soldiers, scientists, missionaries or merchants going to the Third World, in that order. And we know what happens to the locals when _that_ happens!

Then we have the phenomena of angels; superior beings mysteriously turning up to lend Man a hand. Are they a separate phenomena and entirely different, or do they just overlap occasionally?

An answer may have been provided by Dr. Stylianos Atteshlis, called Daskolos by the author Kyriacos Markides, in the series of books he wrote about this remarkable Greek Cypriot.

In brief, he contended there were aliens, and there were angels, and they were distinct beings. What was interesting was that he contended that interplanetary visitors were highly advanced alien mystics who could travel in space, by dissolving their material bodies before departure, and recreating them on arrival. They weren't really travelling on the physical plane.

This bypassed the drawbacks of moving a physical object in three-dimensional space. It also explains, for example, the bright lights moving very fast that pilots sometimes see, and why UFOs leave little trace.

Advanced terran mystics can perceive the angels of the Lord. They can be visited by, or visit, advanced beings from other planets. The rest of us have odd experiences we can't explain, and keep quiet about them.

This explains the lack of hard, scientific evidence for both; they're operating at a different level to us, are unlikely to leave physical traces, and won't oblige scientists by turning up on demand, to be poked and prodded at!

The dog expects his master at the same time every day, but often he doesn't arrive, for reasons the dog cannot begin to imagine. Sometimes the master does baffling things, but provides food, company and seems to care for the dog, so the dog is content. He has explained the Man to himself as powerful, having some dog-like behaviours, worth keeping-in with, and strange.

One caveat: One can't discount mental illness, misperception or fraud in a person who claims experience of UFOs and angels. The key test is whether they are manifestly superior or saintly. The abundance of 'evidence', provided by those who are not, easily obscures the real phenomena, and contents scoffers.