TELEVISION Future Fantastic (BBC1)

Help! Strange creatures with small brains are being allowed to air their views about UFOs on terrestrial television. Jasper Rees runs for cover and tries to raise the alarm

Future Fantastic is a kind of Day After Tomorrow's World, bothered not with what science has made possible, but what it might - that area, in other words, that remains fiction. In Part 1 we met an astronaut called Story Musgrave who believes in alien beings, even knows they exist. This is possibly because, with a bald dome, dull staring eyes and a droning voice, he is one himself. What kind of a name is Story anyway, meaning yarn, tall tale? It's exactly the kind an alien invader would give himself in the delusion that it would blend him in with the locals: a fiction.

In ufology as in religion, those who package belief as knowledge can make the most arrogant assumptions. It seems to be taken as read, for example, that when the aliens come they'll head straight for the States. Why? Something to do with the exchange rate? Or simply because no country has a higher concentration of gullible fantasists who divide their time between gazing at the stars and their navel? You dread to think what it would do to national morale if, after orbiting in search of a choice desert landing track, the aliens plumped for Libya.

This short history of ufology, while telling us absolutely nothing about UFOs, teaches us a great deal about ourselves, and the paucity of our imagination. Man, looking into space as if into a mirror, can picture only a life-form that approximates to his own, with arms, legs and eyes. Imagine the shock when an alien turns up in the shape of a paper clip, or a regular portion of french fries.

The contagion afflicts even the more credible (ie famous) space-watchers lined up. Arthur C Clarke plugged the theory he first road-tested in 2001: A Space Odyssey that "contact would be the most important event in human history, because it would tell us whether we're near the apes or the angels". Of course, he hasn't the faintest idea. And just marvel at the solipsism that believes an alien's first duty is to tell us something about ourselves. But, hey, it looks like a fun sentence to say, grand and cosmic and tidily alliterative. And in this uniquely unargumentative field, the great thing is that no one can tell you you're talking out of your black hole.

The cleverest people we met were not the professors and astronauts, but the inhabitants of Rachel, Nevada, down the road from the top-secret UFO research base, who all profess to believe in alien life because it's economically advantageous to do so. Future Fantastic betrayed a quietly sceptical attitude to it all. With one eye on the ratings, they hired Gillian Anderson to present, and shot her in engulfing white light, or prowling around the moving camera in a deserted warehouse. Contact, she burred, "will be the most profound event since men left the confines of this tiny planet". The biggest event in the last three decades, in other words. Not so very big after all.