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The scientists calculated that gamma-ray radiation from a relatively nearby star explosion, hitting the Earth for only ten seconds, could deplete up to half of the atmosphere's protective ozone layer.

Scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas say that a gamma-ray burst might have caused the Ordovician extinction 450 million years ago, some 200 million years before dinosaurs evolved.

What causes them? There are conflicting theories. None so far have been proven.

Eventually a small Dutch-Italian satellite called BeppoSAX was able to pinpoint the position of gamma-ray bursts. They were indeed coming from beyond our galaxy. So far away in fact that they take us back to the very dawn of the Universe, 13 billion years ago.

If they were right, then each burst would expel more energy in 20 seconds than our own sun in ten billion years. They would be the most powerful source of energy in the Universe. Anything directly in their path would die.

For many years, scientists who dared to suggest an extra-galactic source were ridiculed.

Furthermore, the bursts were not clustered along the plane of the galaxy where stars are densest, but randomly across the sky.

But try as they might, they could never find a source in the direction from which any given burst emerged.

Scientists assumed they must be coming from within our own galaxy.

But the sheer number of detected gamma ray bursts indicated a scale of cosmic event of far greater magnitude than a mere nuclear explosion.

...and frequent claims are made by UFOlogists of alien bases there to this day...

A similar idea involving Nazis more recently formed the plot of the spoof movie Iron Sky...

The Pentagon believed this was evidence that the Soviets had established a base on the far side of the moon in order to carry out secret atom bomb tests.

These were so intense that the presumption was they must be nearby.

As more satellites were launched with better instruments, the Los Alamos team continued to find inexplicable gamma-ray bursts in their data.

On July 2, 1967 the Vela 4 and Vela 3 satellites detected a flash of gamma radiation unlike any known nuclear weapons signature.

Convinced that the Soviets had the same idea, the U.S then developed the Vela program, comprised of 12 satellites designed to detect nuclear tests in deep space. By 1963 nuclear test ban treaties in theory prevented such activities on Earth.

The secret project, innocuously titled 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights' was never carried out.

Its planning included calculations by astronomer Carl Sagan, then a young graduate student, of the behavior of dust and gas generated by the blast.

In 1959 the U.S. considered detonating an atom bomb on the moon as a display of America's Cold War muscle.

The Dark Side of the Moon

"There is no spaceship in these stories. But most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?"

In The Demon-Haunted World astronomer Carl Sagan points out that the alien abduction experience is remarkably similar to tales of demon abduction common throughout history.

Sleep paralysis in particular is often accompanied by hallucinations and peculiar sensation of malevolent or neutral presence of "something," though usually people experiencing it do not interpret that "something" as aliens.

Psychological explanations of the abduction phenomenon have included hallucination, temporary schizophrenia, epileptic seizures and parasomnia—near-sleep mental states (hypnogogic states, night terrors and sleep paralysis).