With UFOs appearing over Chicago and strange metallic globs falling from the sky in New Jersey, it should come as no surprise to learn that aliens had settled along the coast of Maine.

What might be a surprise is that two of the aliens look like Bing Crosby and June Cleaver, complete with pearls, that they drive souped-up Studebaker spaceships and that they live in a river town near the coast called Bugsport that bears a striking resemblance to the town of Bucksport.

Toronto-based cartoonist Ted Bastien has created the online comic strip “Bugsport” that features a human character named Ted and his family as they move to Bugsport to ease his nerves.

They are surprised to learn that their neighbors are Don and June Nelson, two gray, bald-pated aliens who are among a group of out-of-this-world visitors to Earth transported to the town from Roswell, N.M., by the U.S. military to cover up their existence.

The wacky comic strip is sprinkled with not-so-veiled references to things any Bucksport-area residents would recognize.

Don’s flying saucer sports a bumper sticker from Perry’s Nut House, and in one strip entry he’s “getting the old girl ready” for the Bugsport Bay Festival Parade.

The town serves as a backdrop for action that takes place near familiar sites such as McBugs Tavern, the famous Bugs monument, the local Masonic Temple and the Bugsport waterfront walk.

When Ted tries to gather more information about the aliens, he goes to Stack o’ Books, Bugsport’s rendition of Bucksport’s Bookstacks, where copies of the Enterprise are on sale and the store’s coffee pot sits waiting for customers.

And when he’s ready to check out, he meets the proprietor who, though an alien, is a dead-on caricature of Bookstacks owner Andy Lacher.

“It was good,” Lacher said Saturday. “He got the tie down. I always wear a tie.”

The resemblance of the town to Bucksport is not by chance, of course. Bastien, 44, who directs animated cartoons, has shopped at Bookstacks during visits to the town, where he and his family have stayed while on vacation.

“We took some vacations on the east coast of Maine, and we called the Shady Oaks campground near Bucksport [in Orland],” Bastien said in a recent telephone interview. “We rented a cabin from that place, and we went back four or five years in a row. We liked the town.”

It was the sense of small town that attracted Bastien and his family.

“It’s a nice, clean little town,” he said. “It still has that small-town atmosphere with all the stores downtown, the little ice cream parlor. It has everything a town should have. The big-box stores haven’t changed it.”

That’s part of the reason he chose the town as a model for Bugsport and why the lead aliens, Don and June Nelson, are based on Bing Crosby and June Cleaver.

“They were famous characters from the ’50s, and that’s what I wanted,” he said. “I wanted it to be like Mayberry meets ‘The X-Files.'”

Town Councilor Lisa Whitney sees the reference to the town in the comic strip as a very positive thing. Whitney, who heads the town’s economic development committee, said Sunday she first heard of “Bugsport” when a resident directed her to the installment that mentioned the bay festival, for which she serves as coordinator.

“I was so tickled. I thought it was such a good thing,” she said. “It seemed to me to be an off-handed promotion of the community.

“I think it’s great for the town to be mentioned in such a clever way,” Whitney said.

Lacher agreed.

“It’s fun,” he said. “I don’t know what his following is. I’ve only had one or two comments about it. But it can only help.”

The comic strip has generated a small but dedicated following, including a contingent from the Studebaker Drivers Club. One of the members has even created a line of T-shirts featuring Bastien’s cartoons of the flying Studebakers.

Bastien said he also has some detractors who object to his portrayal of the aliens.

“I’ve gotten e-mails saying I was irresponsible for portraying them as friendly when they are really evil and want to abduct us,” he said. “They said I was doing a disservice to the public.”

The comic strip actually got its start while the family was driving around Bucksport on vacation.

“We’d make up silly stories about what a nice place it was until the aliens arrived,” he said. “It all evolved from that. At some point, I decided to see what it would all look like on paper and started drawing the cartoon.”

Bastien draws the cartoons by hand and then scans the pen-and-ink drawings into the computer, where he adds the color and the dialogue.

“I’m from the old school; I actually know what pencil and paper are,” he said.

The comic strip follows the adventures of Ted, a caricature of the cartoonist, and his family as they adjust to the presence of aliens in the neighborhood and eventually begin to work with their new friends to protect them from discovery by FUBAR, which, despite what you may think, is not an acronym for “fouled up beyond all recognition” (or some other, less-polite euphemism).

In the strip, it stands for Fanatical Unified Brotherhood of Alien Researchers, an organization dedicated to hunting down and exposing the alien presence.

The characters poke gentle fun at a wide range of topics. When the alien Don is questioned about why he has switched to biodiesel, he responds that it’s better for the environment and prevents soy from being used for evil purposes.

“What evil purposes?” Ted inquires.

“Tofu.”

“My God, he’s right!”

And when Ted discovers that the manual for a new part for his newly discovered space ship is written in two languages, he wonders: “What bizarre alien culture would write flying saucer manuals in English and French?”

His son replies: “It says ‘Made in Canada’ on the box.”

So far, the online comic strip is a labor of love, but Bastien has ideas for transporting Bugsport to the silver screen.

“I’d love it to be a live-action film done with computers the way they did Gollum in ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ with the 3-D character in with the live actors,” he said. “We could shoot it all in Bucksport.”

Until that time, Bastien intends to continue to pull material from the Bucksport area: Fort Knox and the new Penobscot Narrows Bridge are likely to appear in the strip as Don and Ted battle against the wily FUBAR conspirators.

Will FUBAR expose the aliens, or will our heroes thwart their evil designs? Their adventures can be viewed at www.tedsstudio.com.