You're listening to The Inquiry with me, Helena Merriman.

It's my last show for a little while as I'm going off to have a baby.

And as a parting gift, the Inquiry team

have allowed me to make a program about something

that's always fascinated me and hopefully you too.

Here's a clue. Got it? If not, maybe this will help.

That's right, we're going off in search of extraterrestrial life, asking one of the biggest and most exciting questions of all time.

Is anyone out there?

Part one,

Part one, salad-winged horses.

I think we're obsessed with extraterrestrial life because we ultimately can't bear the thought that we're alone in the universe.

Meet Natalie Haynes, writer, classicist and sci-fi obsessive.

She marked the 50th anniversary of Star Trek by watching the series, the whole thing, from start to finish.

And then all of Deep Space Nine.

So a sci-fi geek.

Yeah, we are a house with not one for two replica faces.

So, yes, a little bit of a geek.

She's going to take us back to the very beginning of the search for alien life 2,000 years ago.

Because long before there were observatories or space shuttles, the search began in our imaginations.

One of the earliest recorded alien stories was written by a man called Lucian in the second century.

He writes this extraordinary piece called the true histories in which these

travelers tell the true story of how they travel by whirlwind to the moon and it takes about a week which is I think roughly

...