Personally, I blame Chris Carter for the whole thing.

In the last few weeks, the skies over the United States and worldwide have been filled with all manner of darting, zooming, spinning and dancing lights. In this video-obsessed culture, more and more people are carrying around camcorders, digital cameras and cell phones that do everything but add the special effects and soundtrack to your film of the alien invasion.

Let me state up front that I'm a UFO believer. I believe that there is life out there, and I believe that at least once or twice some representatives of that life have paid us a social call. Whether we just didn't look intelligent, seemed too savage or were larger than their soup pots, they didn't stick around to chat. I'm not sure they ever will, but if it's going to happen I'd be much obliged if they'd get it done before I'm too old to whack my friends on the head and say, "Told ya!"

Ever heard of the Drake Equation? I'll spare you the full breakdown and the volumes of analysis. (If you're interested in those, Wikipedia has a fairly good, well-footnoted entry.) Essentially, Dr. Frank Drake estimated from available data the number of stars similar to our Sun, the number of those with planets and a host of other circumstances that resulted in Earth being populated by an intelligent, communicative species. The Drake Equation, regarded by some as very conservative, estimates there are at least 10,000 communicative civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

Communicative, of course, does not necessarily mean they're space travelers. We rank as a communicative world, but the best we've done with anyone on board is the Moon. We have the wherewithal to go farther, but the political will has been stultifyingly weak. We'd rather have more shiny new tanks and Laser Death Cannons.

I apologize to any workers in our nation's vital Laser Death Cannon industry for any implied slight. You're defending freedom and spreading democracy, all of you. Really.

What it boils down to is that it's fairly likely that somewhere out there we'll encounter a few civilizations that have decided it's more important to explore than explode. Of course, anytime we think about travel between stars, we come up against our pal Einstein, who posited that it's not possible to travel beyond the speed of light.

How 'bout if the folks from the Galactic Noodle Confederation (or whatever they call themselves) have never heard of Einstein? It's amazing what you can do if no one tells you it's impossible.

I've always loved Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" concept of Earth. In the books, Earth is a "mostly harmless" curiosity, whose inhabitants are blissfully unaware of the various alien races who pop in for a visit every now and again. In fact, among the aliens, it's considered fun to fly down, put on a big-eyed alien costume and walk about for a bit making beep-beep noises. The concept of alien visitations as the interstellar equivalent of fratboy pranks is hilarious ... and completely plausible.

So why do I blame Chris Carter? I think he's got connections in the Intergalactic Fratboy Network that go way back to the first time an episode of "The X-Files" was picked up by an alien monitoring satellite near Alpha Centauri. He's hit up his green-skinned (and purple and orange and ... well ... I'm not sure what that color is) friends to do a few flybys as a good promotional trick to get people primed for the next Mulder and Scully movie coming out this summer. It's the flying saucer equivalent of putting Lite-Brites with cartoon characters outlined on them in odd spaces, without the ensuing federal charges and million-dollar fines.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the thousands of lights, shapes and shadows seen by millions of people in the skies all over the world over the last century or so have all been weather balloons, swamp gas, pranks, hallucinations and/or cloud formations.

Maybe.

Speaking of seeing things, do any of you out there have UFO pictures of your own? Send them in and in an upcoming column we'll show off the best.