A VISITING UFO expert (visiting from America, not a distant galaxy) says Australia is Flying Saucer Central.
Chase Kloetzke reckons Australia's big open spaces attract more extraterrestrial visitors than almost anywhere on this planet.
It is true that there are plenty of sightings out there on the Nullarbor and that great red dust bowl in our middle.
The big question is not whether these sightings are evidence of alien visits. The big question is why highly intelligent beings would travel light years to land in the middle of a desert. 
There's not much out there in the guts of the Great Southern Land, let me tell you. The towns are about a petrol tank's drive apart.
Most of them are just a servo, a motel and a general store, surrounded by powdery dust.
Now, unless the aliens are fascinated by dirt and roadkill, I can't see what they would be looking for out there.
I once had a schoolmate whose father was a stationmaster with the railways. His dad was transferred to the town of Cook, which is pretty much smack bang in the middle of nowhere. The boy, who was a recent European immigrant, did not have a great command of English and used to call me Berry rather than Barry. He sent me a postcard from Cook.
"Dear Berry, I am lonely. No one lives here." It broke my heart. And it's true, no one lives out there. Unless you count the aliens, who are popping in and out all the time, apparently on some secret mission.
I have my own Nullarbor UFO story and here it goes.
It was a cold and misty night (as all good stories should start). I was travelling east from Perth with a bunch of mates in a beat-up Toyota HiAce. The road was as straight as a stretched piece of string and it was lined by shrubs that looked exactly like the last shrub you saw.
Suddenly, up ahead, as the bitumen narrowed to the horizon, we saw a dazzling shape, shining and looking a heck of a lot like a silver stealth bomber.
We stopped the HiAce and got out and looked at it and the space ship was fearsome. We watched it for seconds, then it dipped back below the horizon. Gone.
We were bamboozled. All our boozles were bammed.
We got back in the car and the weird silver spaceship rose again, brighter than before. We stopped and looked and it vanished again.
One of the gang was keen on turning back, but I said let's push on. We could meet aliens.
This weird shining spaceship thing happened four times, before we realised what it was.
The road ahead had slight undulations and what we had seen was an approaching car's headlamps as the light hit the fog in one of the dips.
The light had fanned out, giving a perfect wing shape. We had seen light and thought it was an alien craft.
But if I had driven back to Perth, I would be swearing to this day that I had seen a spaceship.
I'm not saying my experience disproves UFOs.   Maybe they are out there in the Nullarbor.
And it would seem absurd to assume that we are the only intelligent life form in this kind of biggish universe.
I'm just not sure what makes the aliens interested in the Australian desert. The petrol's cheaper in the big smoke and the cities have better coffee.BAZ BLAKENEY IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST