Outer space star Brian Cox insists you’re not in the twilight zone if you believe in UFOs.

Because he reckons there could be at least 200 billioin other civilisations in the universe.

The rock ’n’ roll physicist’s claim comes as the US Pentagon prepares to release declassified papers – billed as the real-life X-Files – later this month on the existence of UFOs.

In an interview with the Sunday Mirror he said: “There have to be other civilisations in the universe. I can’t imagine we are the only one.”

And in a BBC documentary on extraterrestrials tomorrow night he says: “We’d all like ET to be real. We’d like ET to arrive. But we don’t want Darth Vader coming down.”

Prof Cox says alien visitors may be using robot spacecraft to explore our planet in the same way NASA is now doing in the solar system. “Why send Battlestar Galactica when you could send something the size of an iPhone?”, he says.

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