My teacher is an alien
Three quarters of children believe in alien life and a third are convinced one of their teachers is an extra-terrestrial, according to a survey.
More than nine out of 10 16-year-olds could not name all eight planets in the solar system, according to the survey of what youngsters know about space.
The poll of 1,000 five-to-16-year-olds also found little difference between the planetary knowledge of teenagers and younger children with 95 per cent of five-year-olds failing to name them all compared with 94 per cent of 16-year-olds.
Other findings included:
72 per cent believed aliens would be peaceful beings.
21 per cent of 16-year-olds believed in aliens, compared with 7 per cent who believed in Santa.
a quarter said they were eager to visit other planets.
22 per cent cited meeting aliens as their reason to venture into outer space.
Child psychologist and TV presenter Laverne Antrobus said: "Children have many fantasies and love to escape into a world of make-believe that they can imagine for themselves.
"This survey reveals that believing in aliens is far more exciting than actually thinking about where they may come from."
Weird Science Factoid: Shrimp can only swim backwards. So they can see who's chasing them...
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
