A lawyer who landed an out-of-this-world job defending people who have suffered at the hands of aliens has started his first major case.

Former industrial law specialist Jens Lorek announced last year he would defend those whose close encounters with outer space visitors left them physically and mentally shattered.

Now he has his first client - hotel chef Paul Hoffmann, 23, who claims he was kidnapped by aliens and has never been the same since.

Hoffmann said: "About two years ago a cross-shaped space ship sucked me up and took me to space. When I came around, it was daylight again."

He does not remember the aliens' looks, but only that he had been "manipulated" and was sent back to earth as an "apprentice shaman".

"I was supposed to bless the city for the arrival of further aliens," he said.

The chef closed his bank account, squatted in an empty property in Dresden and bathed nude - "as ordered by the aliens" - in a municipal fountain. When police caught him naked on a bike, he was sent to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital.

Lorek thinks that police acted wrongly and is demanding his client's release. He has brought a lawsuit against the city in which he places the blame for his client's behaviour on "things unknown".

"There are no legal grounds to put somebody in a psychiatric hospital because he was a victim of aliens," said Lorek.

"The state is socially responsible, even for alien shamans, if they cannot protect them from abduction."

He went on: "Aliens stick needles in their victims' genitals and interfere with their organs. Since 1961 there have been tens of thousands of alien abductions."