YOU might have seen in the news recently that scientists have quite rightly been getting very excited about some discoveries they have made on a planet many light years away that strongly hint at the possibility of life way beyond our solar system.

Let’s face it, this plant is so far that you couldn’t even get to it on the legendary 203 that trundles through Hooton Pagnell at considerably less than the speed of light.

The chances are that the inhabitants of this planet, whoever they are, might never get to visit us and vice-versa, but I guess we can dream, can’t we?

And maybe Stagecoach will fit an overdrive to the aforementioned 203 to get it to supertrundle through hyperspace at warp speed.

With that in mind I can exclusively reveal that astronomers and physicists, working in a secret bunker on the old pit stack at the back of ASOS near Grimethorpe have discovered a planet that seems to have a similar makeup to our own, or at least to parts of our own.

I became dimly aware of this secret space exploration bunker a couple of months ago when, as usual on my early stroll, I would see the first 28 making its way to ASOS at about 0540.

The bus would inevitably be scattered with people wearing hi-vis ASOS jackets but I started to notice a smattering of what I can only describe as boffins and stargazers, mainly wearing white coats, mainly looking out of the window at the sky.

Intrigued, one day I got on the bus and got off with the rest of the passengers at the ASOS warehouse.

Most people on the boss went into ASOS, but the boffins and stargazers went up the hill behind the warehouse and seemed to go behind a wire fence guarded by somebody who looked like one of the cybermen in an early episode of Dr Who.

I approached the fence. The guard said, in what seemed to be an AI-generated voice: ‘I’m sorry sir but you’re not allowed into this secret bunker’ which demonstrates the level of sophistication that AI language and thinking is capable of.

I tried to argue my way in because I was intrigued to see what was happening behind the fence but I still wasn’t allowed in so I did something I don’t do very often, I played my Freedom of Barnsley trump card.

Luckily I carry my ceremonial scroll with me at all times in case I need to pick up anything for nowt. I’ve got the Freedom of Barnsley, tha knows.

At first the guard didn’t seem impressed by the scroll, despite the fact it’s a really magnificent object in its own right as well as being culturally and politically powerful.

After a while he spoke on his intercom to a superior and, after he’d taken a photograph of the scroll, and after we’d ascertained with the aid of SatNav that we were indeed standing on Barnsley soil, to my slight surprise the gates opened silently and I was allowed in.

I went below ground in a life that oddly mirrored the descent that pitmen would have made back in the day on that very site except that this was much slower and a lot more comfortable.

At the end of my journey the lift doors opened silently and I was admitted into a brightly-lit almost science fiction world. I didn’t have to walk: I glided along on a moving walkway like the ones they have at airports. People, presumably important people, whizzed by on personal hovercrafts.

I saw a door marked TOP SECRET so, with my Freedom of Barnsley scroll in my hand, I walked in. What I saw in that room astonished an amazed me.

People were gathered around a huge screen, like one you might see in a cinema; on the screen you could just about make out figures who seemed to be floating above the surface of a planet that looked a little like pictures I’d seen of our own moon.

And the thing was, they were floating on giant flat caps. And the thing was, the surface they were floating over looked like a well-done Yorkshire pudding.

‘That’s the planet OR8’ a boffin said. ‘Just three leet years away.’ I knew it: Intelligent life on another planet. And not just that: intelligent Barnsley life! The universe is in safe hands!