They've been called "the most disgusting toy in the world." This may be so, but there's certainly a sick thrill in recklessly hurling embryos against a wall. Especially as they collapse on impact with a satisfying splat into formless ectoplasm. But the best part is there's no mess to clean up afterwards. Slowly peel them off and they magically reconstitute themselves into embryonic form.

Alien Embryos, the latest kid's craze to sweep the UK, are proliferating at an alarming rate. To date, around 7 million have been snapped up by eager kiddies -- and they're sending the authorities into apoplexy.

As advances in toy technology goes, this is worse than a new twist on the Space Monkey. Your Alien Embryo is a molded plastic, fully-featured alien fetus (for children three years and up) whose only purpose is to be thrown violently against a wall. Some come encased in a clear plastic egg filled with slime, others are simply mounted on plastic packaging which encourages kids to "Touch me! Squeeze me! Throw me!" (The warning "Do Not Swallow" seems to have been added as an afterthought in case baby gets bored and decides to eat his new jelly friend.)

Cradle the little alien bodies (which are curled up with three-fingered hands clasped together above shriveled umbilical cords) and their Spock-eared, vein-popping pinheads loll about just like a real baby's. So it's easy to understand how they could be mistaken for a human fetus, as happened recently in London, causing a security scare and generating alarming headlines.

A cleaner on night shift at a London tube station was shocked to find a fragile, slime-covered little body lying in a huddle of discarded candy wrappers under a bench. It looked suspiciously like a fetus, and it wasn't moving. So he did what anyone else would do in the circumstances: He scraped it onto his shovel and showed it to his supervisor for a second opinion. The supervisor also decided it looked like a fetus and called the police, who cordoned off the station and declared it a crime scene. Paramedics arrived and, under the watchful eye of a police officer, sped the gooey little mess to the nearest hospital. There, it was carefully examined by a senior doctor who declared it well and truly "alien." Journalists caught wind of the incident, and the red-faced rescue services were plastered all over the papers. It later emerged that four other similar incidents have occurred since the entities first arrived on this planet.

If any proof is needed that an insidious alien technology is being disseminated among earth's population, then surely this is it. Which also makes it a given that somewhere out there, in a parallel universe, squeezable, crushable and smushable human embryos are the plaything of choice for extraterrestrial toddlers. And that's a thought horrifying enough to make Pat Robertson blue in the face.