The Klingons used it to make their Bird of Prey spacecraft invisible. The Romulans used cloaking too and variants of this stealth technology hid the nasty alien in the Predator films and have been mentioned in Star Wars, Doctor Who and more besides.

Scriptwriters will be pleased to discover that this science fiction idea is deemed today to be closer to science fact than we realised, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

Prof Graeme Milton, of the University of Utah, and Nicolae-Alexandru Nicorovici, of the University of Technology, Sydney, announce that "we have found that cloaking might be realised". The "making of an object invisible through some cloaking device is commonly regarded as science fiction", said Prof Milton.

But with Dr Nicorovici he outlines how to do it with the help of materials with bizarre optical properties that were first postulated in 1968 by Victor Veselago, a physicist working at the General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

His work remained obscure until six years ago, when his mathematical fantasy was realised by the creation of superlenses that can make objects placed near them invisible."

When an object is bathed in light of one colour, Prof Milton and Dr Nicorovici predict that light becomes trapped near the lens and "almost exactly cancels the light incident on each molecule in the object, so it has essentially no response to the incident light. Numerically we see that the molecule is effectively invisible".

By looking through a superlens at the object "one would only see the back half of it".