Danskcolin: Wednesday March 4th 2026 "Worried that YOU may get 'abducted' by some UFO today? Well, relax!"

Yes, Friends, are YOU worried that you'll get taken away by aliens in a UFO again today. Well my comforting message to you is "Frankie say, Relax!".

Even if it does happen to you, the fact is that it's not nearly as scary an experience as many try to make out, which is a comfort! It's all in this reassuring message from America in today's Onion News - turn to page 94 for this welcome report!

"Kudos, that Department of Justice!" And "Kudos, Onion News!" for making this welcome report better known than, perhaps, it would otherwise have been, "languishing" near the back of some less-read organ, which is nice!

And the report brings a smile of relief to the faces of me and my wife Lois, here in rural, semi-precious Liphook, Hampshire, England, as we take a walk over the mud-affected "hallowed turf" of local East Hampshire Premier League's relegation-threatened soccer giants Liphook United this morning, to put it mildly!

And the Onion News story is quite timely, because we ourselves are afraid today that we may have spotted a UFO, even though it's obviously a quiet one, and it isn't making any kind of a "singing noise" - and it certainly doesn't "register" on my phone's shiny new Merlin App (see the app's birdsong data above, if you want "chapter and verse" !!!!!).

Later, when my fortnightly copy of political magazine Private Eye "plops" through our letterbox this afternoon, we see the explanation for the, like, billions of "UFO sighting" stories that have flooded the phone lines of the Met Office, as well as the offices of some of our own British "national newspapers" today, would you believe!!!!

Yes, it isn't a UFO we're all spotting today - it's just a "strange glowing spherical object", something called "the Sun", and we must all remember to heed that all-important advice from the Met Office:

"As long as every family across the UK now sacrifices a goat at the morrow to the immortal sun-god, then twice more in this year, yea, it shall grace our skies in all its golden majesty", which, surely, is good news. At last the ordinary person can do something practical to "make a difference" in the area of Britain's appalling weather.

But, first, catch your goat haha!!!!

Colin's super-tip for today: good advice on how to catch your goat is now

freely available on YouTube, courtesy of veteran goat-catcher Scotty Morris

Well we all had a jolly good laugh [Speak for yourself! - Ed] over Private Eye magazine's somewhat whimsical "take" on the surprise weather we all experienced this morning, didn't we!

However, as Lois and I are reminded tonight from a Channel 5 documentary, there was a time, in these islands, when sacrificing a goat, or possibly even one of your neighbour's goats, or sacrificing one of your actual neighbours, even (!), on some altar-stone or other, was an everyday event, so much so that it didn't make the papers at all, in those crazy, far-off times, to put it mildly!!!!

You may think that there isn't much more to learn about Stonehenge, but the fact is, that archaeologists and scientists are all the time getting cleverer at determining where the monument's variegated collection of stones was actually brought from.

All sarsen stones, or redstones, or sandstones or whatever, are all apparently slightly different, depending on exactly where they were quarried from, and, for example, stones that were originally thought to have come from the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of Scotland, have now been determined to have come from the Scottish mainland, probably modern-day Aberdeenshire, including the sometimes neglected "altar stone", on which all the sacrifices of goats etc were carried out back in the day.

And some stones thought to have been local to Wiltshire, are now, in some cases, believed to come from faraway Brighton, in the south-east of England. And of course, it's been known for some time that the blue stones all came from the west of Wales. What madness, wasn't it !!!

Why did the builders of Stonehenge, in modern-day Wiltshire, go to such trouble to "source" their stones, from, in some cases as far as 700 miles away?

Well, it turns out that archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, our old friend from the Time Team programmes of a few decades ago, has the answer. He says that Stonehenge really gives us a sense that Stonehenge was not just a local monument for local people, but was actually drawing in people, ideas and materials from the whole island of Britain. And there exists no other stone circle in the whole of Europe that is constructed from stones, transported by such huge efforts, from such long distances away.

And what fascinates presenter Jason Watkins, is that idea of Britain being connected at this time thousands of years ago.

Our twenty-first century narrative, he says, that this period was rather brutish and brutal, is wrong, and that then, just as now, people had the need to connect. And Pearson agrees, saying that "it was a world, where there were big gathering-places and ceremonies, that were the social glue that brought the people of these islands together."

And that basic human need to come together, is still evident, he says, in the gatherings still seen in our own times, which take place at Stonehenge each year for the summer and winter solstices.