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Aliens, time travel, sentient AI - for 60+ years, Doctor Who has been supplying Great Britain (and the world) with fables of the fantastic. It's all fiction, of course; at no point has the BBC's No. 1 scifi ever pitched its plunger-wielding extraterrestrials as plausible. But when a show's been running as long as Doctor Who has, it's likely to encounter some kind of true strangeness. And if one of the UK's strangest airline stories is true, we may know of just such a meeting place.

Our story begins in March of 1967, when writers had The Doctor squaring off against the chillingly-named Faceless Ones. The serial featured Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor (this writer's personal favorite) encountering shape-shifting aliens at a place every Londoner would know well - the Gatwick Airport. In order to present the setting realistically, the series organized a shoot at Gatwick itself, a task with which the airport was "only too happy to help," as Whovian record-keeper Richard Bignell told the BBC.

Tragically, it's unlikely the world will get to see what Troughton and Co. filmed at Gatwick on those chilly March mornings. Much of what was filmed for The Faceless Ones is now believed to be lost, though BBC studios produced an animated reconstruction of the audio in 2020. However, almost 25 years to the day of serial's filming, travelers to Gatwick got a second chance to encounter an otherworldly presence... whether they were looking for it or not.

On April 28, 1992, Britain's Liverpool Daily Post ran a headline straight out of an early Doctor Who adventure - "UFO Near Miss Scare Baffles the Scientists." The article underneath told the tale of a Boeing 737 on descent into Gatwick, interrupted at 14,000 feet by what the flight's copilot described as a "black lozenge-like object." After being spotted, the object to less than two seconds to pass just 30 feet above the airliner's wing, a dramatic and almost disastrous brush that flies in the face of stories skeptics often cite for misidentified aircraft.

Which is not to say skepticism didn't quickly enter the conversation around the Gatwick event. According to a spokesperson from the UK's Civil Aviation Authority, the object could have been a small test balloon that enthusiasts sent up to "test weather conditions" ahead of a larger planned flight. The only problem with that explanation? It's impossible.

"A cloud-based balloon would only reach 6,000 feet," said a spokesperson for Britain's Meteorological Office, "It would never reach the height of the plane. It would be an orange/red color, not black."

While a different color doesn't rule out the possibility of the object being a balloon, the Meteorological Office's description of its height certainly seems to. What's more, the fact that spokesmen from both the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire and NASA itself also admitted to being stumped points toward an explanation that is, if not completely out of this world, at least highly unusual on ours.

But why would an off-world visitor choose London's Gatwick as its destination? And if it possessed the technology to move about so dexterously, why would it get so close to an innocuous holiday airliner? It sounds like a mystery that the Doctor would be required to solve - but he'd left the area 25 years earlier. If only time travel was real...

Ey up, it's British Week here at Popverse. From what's at the cinema to what's on the telly, and even a bit of comics and games for you, here is the highlights so far:

• Star Wars is especially British, despite what it may claim about a galaxy far, far away
• What Zainab Akhtar learned from taking a year away from ShortBox Comics Fair, and why she's excited for 2027's return
• Black Mirror's Charlie Brooker recalls challenging himself to dive into new territory: a positive ending