I was scanning the cybersky for UFOs and spotted a cow being repeatedly plucked from its pasture in a very funny fashion on a website actually called CowAbduction.com.

The site complains about the “serious problem”, with the number of bovine disappearances nearly 720,000 and on the rise, primarily in California — possibly because the milk is tastier and creamier, it says — but also in 27 other US states and in Europe and Russia as well.

Evidently the cattle go flying off the surface of the planet with a “meee” rather than a “mooo”, followed by silence.

There are offers of support groups for bereaved farmers (those left eating their cereal with water) and several handy products, such as the fearsome, made-in-California, electric “alien cow crow”, designed to scare off predators but reportedly dangerous for everyone concerned.

Victims, witnesses and sympathetic visitors submit photographic evidence of the phenomenon, such as this picture from John Edgecombe of Cornwall, taken from inside the cockpit of a Cessna at 3,000 feet. There are many reports of Unidentified Flying Bovines.

And here’s Scott Walker’s shot of a spacecraft of some sort actually lifting away a cow. He said he was blind for nearly three hours afterward because of the intense light of the beam.

Well, it didn’t take too long to figure out that the website is another clever promotion from the California Milk Processor Board, the same people behind the long-running and ultra-successful “Got Milk?” advertising drive.

This is the campaign that’s had everyone from Andre Agassi to Zhang Ziyi, with Batman, Bart Simpson and Yoda along the way, wearing a milk moustache, and spawned parodies like “Got fleas?”, though the board didn’t care much for PETA anti-dairy “Got pus?” campaign.

Californians will have to forgive me for knowing nothing about the two-year-old Cow Abduction campaign, which took the form of five TV spots ads. I’ve tried to make up for my ignorance with the eyewitness photo of my own, at the top of the post.

Okay, and the one below as well.