Snatched by aliens? No, by armed men in the North Caucasus

As the (appropriately-named) Sun reports today, a senior Russian leader’s claim that he was abducted by aliens is … well, unusual.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the president of the Russian republic of Kalmykia, has been on TV in Russia saying that back in 1997 he was abducted by aliens. They apparently came to the balcony of his Moscow flat one evening saying that they’d come to Earth to take samples and promptly took him aboard their spaceship.

As “spliffmonster” says on the Sun site, this happened to me as well once, but no-one believed me. I’ll Iet that pass…

Meanwhile, some people in authority in Russia are taking this seriously. The Russian MP – Anton Lebedev – has asked Russian President Medvedev to personally investigate, not least because Lebedev is worried that Ilyumzhinov might have given away some state secrets in his telepathic conversations with the yellow-space-suited aliens. Yes, he might. Then again he might not.

Call me an earth-bound plodder, but what would actually worry me a lot more if I were a Russian MP is the fact that mystery abductions are most certainly taking place on Russian soil and little is being done to investigate them. For example, Ibragim Gazdiev is one of the many people who’ve “disappeared” in Ingushetia, Chechnya, and other parts of Russia in recent years. Little green/yellow men apart, this is exactly the sort of case the Russian authorities should be devoting some time to (the extraterrestrials can probably look after themselves).

Oddly enough, I’ve blogged before on politicians – or politician’s partners – talking about extra-terrestrials (namely the Japanese prime minister’s wife’s voyage to Venus in a “triangular-shaped UFO”).

Call me unnecessarily sceptical, but this politician-alien interface leaves me … kind of uneasy. Don’t get me wrong. I like a good sci-fi moment like the next man/woman/unusually-coloured creature. I loved the far-out hippy space flick Dark Star, for example (saw it on DVD at the weekend; highly recommended). But other than that …

If we wake up tomorrow and find out that Clegg, Brown or Cameron has been abducted by aliens who are now in Downing Street and running the country, then I’ll take it all back. But back on terra firma, maybe the Russian authorities could give up on the alien inquiry and start looking into Gazdiev’s all-to-real abduction.