I WILL be candid with you here and confess my jury is out on claims that the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, met aliens in a pyramid under the ice in yonder Antarctica last week.

Not only is my jury out. It’s never coming back. It has done a runner and gone to bed, pulling the sheets over its head and refusing to have anything to do with the world ever again.

On the same day that this alien pyramid story was running in a mid-market madsheet, a redtop ran a story about hundreds of UFOs departing from the surface of the Moon.

These UFOs had ostensibly been “captured” on film by someone who happened to be passing by the Moon at the time but the footage appears, to say the least, inconclusive or cuckoo.

On the same day again (Tuesday, if you’re taking notes) an American publication ran a story, based on a Cold War spy’s “secret diaries”, naming yet another suspect in the assassination of John F Kennedy.

And again on Tuesday, which should be renamed Daftieday, a British website speculated that JFK had been killed by a “mysterious Babushka lady”.

Readers, gather round while I whisper a secret in your ear: conspiracy theories abound. They’re everywhere, and their subject matter ranges from ooter space to your local cooncil.

Tragically, the internet has allowed us unfettered access to the fetid minds of our fellow citizens.

Previously, norms of social behaviour meant that this wacky stuff was kept under wraps. Now it’s out and proud and, to adapt the words of PG Wodehouse, nutter calls to nutter like mastodons across the primeval swamp.

Outer space is the least of our worries. On the controversial planet Earth, troubled souls aver that 9/11 was an “inside job”, that climate change is merely a matter of cooked statistics, and that your local cooncil runs on “broon envelopes”.

At the most disturbing level, you find people who still believe in Zionist conspiracies for world domination.

It’s real jaw-dropping stuff. Check out those zieg-heiling fellows emerging in the States, and you find levels of amorality that make you despair of mankind ever making progress. The only hope is escape to a parallel universe. I’ve horrified you before, I’m sure, with the tale of the time I was placed upon a special stone at Rosslyn Chapel which was a portal to a parallel universe, ken?

My fellow conspirators (for the day; I was writing a feature about them) joined hands and meditated while I scooted off crab-wise to another dimension.

Indeed, at the time of going to press, I’m still over there and this column is being written by a hologram programmed to write “uncontroversial newspaper articles and carpet-sale fliers”.

Talking of uncontroversial, the American presidential election threw up conspiracies galore.

Derek Trump – is it Derek? yon bloke with the peculiar barnet anyway – was supposed to be conspiring with Voldemort Putin to carve up the world between them and discombobulate the uppity Chinese.

Derek himself seems prone to conspiracy theories – policies, he calls them – though he’s rapidly being talked out of these by the US equivalent of Sir Humphrey stamping his manifesto with the official classification “Mince”.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, was supposedly in dodgy deals with donors and, even worse, using a pizzeria as the HQ for a perverted sex ring.

The pizzeria has received death threats, which is just topping.

If that’s got you saying “D’ough!”, then brace yourselves, brothers and sisters, for I’m about to reveal the sad fact about conspiracy theories: they are all rubbish.

Before I justify that scientific-style finding, answer me this: who doesn’t enjoy a frisson?

Yes, I thought so. We all enjoy a frisson and the truth about conspiracy theories is that they afford such thrills, particularly to those whose lives are sad and dull.

They make life more exciting and interesting than it really is and run counter to the Big Fact confirmed by philosophers down the ages: it’s all one big cock-up.

No one is even mildly interested in you, never mind out to get you. Cabals are not convening. Aliens aren’t coming.

My advice to the impressionable is as follows: don’t believe the reflected lights on YouTube footage; don’t take your history from anyone who isn’t a proper professor at a top technical college; just chill out, take a step back and accept that it’ll all work out.

At least that’s what the aliens told me to tell you.