A British Navy warship may have come within seconds of opening fire on Unidentified Flying Objects above Merseyside, possibly narrowly avoiding the precipitation of an interstellar war and the extirpation of humanity by testy aliens.

© Unknown
Reports have it that the UFOs - speculated to have been visiting spacecraft from beyond the solar system - were tracked on naval weapons radars.
The revelation comes from the
Telegraph, reporting on last week's sightings of "orange, ball-shaped" UFOs cruising above scouse beauty-spots between South Liverpool and Southport. The orange, blob-like flying balls - said by some witnesses to have "dropped fire" at times - were assessed by some to be floating Chinese lanterns, but this theory was widely disparaged among headline-writers in favour of the more crowd-pleasing interstellar visitors hypothesis. Also, Chinese lanterns don't move 3,000 miles/hr.