Chesterton famously said that “A man who won’t believe in God will believe in anything.”

That’s not quite right. He will still believe in God, and a god who descends to our plane of existence, which is to say, an accessible, tangible god.

With foreheads extensions that act as antennae.

For example, according to an Opinion Matters survey of U.K. citizens:

• 52 percent believe UFO evidence has been covered up because widespread knowledge of their existence would threaten government stability.
• 44 percent believe in God.
• One in 10 people has reported seeing a UFO.
• A quarter more men than women claim to have seen UFOs.
• 20 percent of respondents believe UFOs have landed on Earth.
• More than five million British citizens believe the Apollo moon landings were faked.

Now, the English are not much for abstractions. They enjoy a commonsense philosophical tradition. They’re a practical lot. And so it was only a matter of time before they set their prayerbooks aside and got down to the workaday world of waiting for E.T.

For all their faith in reason, the British have merely swapped out one kind of messiah for another. Presumably their space aliens are a superior race of beings, who are no longer plagued by the various -isms and phobias that still plague the inhabitants of the third rock from the sun. One day, in the blink of an eye, Supermen will descend from the heavens and bestow upon hapless man true and abiding wisdom. In short, they will rescue us from ourselves.

Assuming they don’t zap us all with gamma rays, like in War of the Worlds. (In which case, we’d better keep those fluorocarbons coming.)

Now here’s the kicker for me: religion is presumably no longer tenable because it is irrational, based only on blind faith and not on any testable, reliable facts. And yet there is zero, none, nada, zippo evidence for intelligent life anywhere but on this planet. The Good News has been swapped out for No News at All.

Go figure. Let go of faith in place of reason and you lose both.

Now it may very well be that this poll is itself unscientific.

While the survey was conducted as part of a tie-in with a new video game, “XCOM: Enemy Unknown,” it was a legitimate sampling of opinions that can be taken to represent the population of the U.K., according to the agency that conducted the survey.

“Yes, it has been done with an independent panel through a bonafide research company,” said Karen Brooks, managing director of Opinion Matters, a well-known market research agency that created the survey.

“Surveys can be done face-to-face, over the telephone and online. This one was a U.K. adult sample, which is quite broad, and doing it online is a quick, effective way of getting to that audience,” she continued. “We make sure that all of the questions are compliant from a research perspective.”

I’m sure. Just as sure as those five million Brits who believe the moon landings were a Stanley Kubrick production.

Now I myself am an agnostic on the question of life in out of space (see Simon below). I hope there are little green men, women, or children running around another galaxy whining about gas prices and having to wait so long between beamed signals of Mad Men from that damned Milky Way.

But my guess is, they’re no wiser than we are. And if they were to land in Times Square, I bet they’d have the same questions for us that we’d have for them.

Now wouldn’t that be funny. Not as funny as this video, but funny enough.