London: With claims of UFO sightings increasing day-by-day, the UK Government has recruited a squad of special FBI agents who will be functioning like Mulder and Scully of the X-Files to investigate the matter.

Leading scientific researchers in Whitehall, puzzled by the growing number of extra-terrestrial activity, contacted a top US agency for the purpose of investigation.

The job of the undercover unit, which will begin its work in a high-tech London lab, will be to analyse the unexplained photography and debris, before they move into the field to obtain explanations of bizarre crop circles.

The public interest in alien life forms began late last year when the Ministry of Defence opened its X-Files to them for the first time since records began in 1967, and it has since been a topic of interest to the public and surprisingly to the House of Lords.

But cynics have stated that revealing the secret files has only put the publics over-active imagination into overdrive.

For a lot of people its just a sci-fi fix, the Sun quoted Georgina Grounded of an unnamed local council as saying.

There are those who think that this Fox Mulder fella cuts a bit if a dash and are just desperate to believe.

But these are credit crunched times. We need people with down-to-Earth attitudes, she said.

The number of UFO sightings this year has increased far more than the total of 135 reported to the Ministry of Defence for the whole of 2007.

Malcolm Robinson, founder of research group Strange Phenomena Investigations, acknowledges the fact that something is going on.

Something really bizarre is happening in the skies over the UK, he added.