Set phasers on stun.......

Since quitting my job.......what? oh you don't really want to know all the gory details do you?.......oh ok, a quick summary.

Mid life crisis (Reginald Perin Style-Though clothed)

Some appalling management decisions (I can say it now, ah the freedom!)

Dogs

Auditing

Anxiety

stress

Right that about sums it up, back to it.......as I was saying, since quiting my job, I have had some time on my hands. Some of that time has been taken up with household chores, and a great deal of the rest with my ever growing fascination for all things U.F.O!

This really is a tricky one for me, half of me is a weary cynic, and the other half a kind of maybe believer. You see, even the half that believes is half cynical, so what does that make me, you do the maths.

I have actually seen something strange in the sky. One night about eleven pm I was outside trying to encourage our Jack Russells to urinate, when my attention turned to the stars. I often do this as the heavens are a truly wondrous spectacle. It was a semi cloudy night, and out of the corner of my eye something caught my attention. I peered harder, and there, either in or above the clouds, was a light. "So what," you might say, the night sky is full of stars, some of them very bright. But this light was different, it was nearer, it is hard to say how far away it was as there is no point of reference in a cloudy night sky, but it didn't look far away. It was much bigger than the stars I could see, and because of the clouds, it was fuzzy, not clear and concise. Then to my astonishment it divided into four lights spaced at twelve, three, six and nine o'clock, and rotated counter clockwise one hundred and eighty degrees. It stayed like this for a few seconds, then closed to a single light again. It repeated this over and over again.

I rushed in and woke up my wife, so that she could confirm what i was seeing. She agreed that yes it was there, and then declared that she was going in because it was cold! I on the other hand was not going to miss a single second of what might be a close encounter. I dragged a deckchair from the shed, and settled down for what must have been half an hour. The "U.F.O" gradually moved away towards the north west, and eventually faded from view.

Now, can I categorically state that this was an alien craft full of little green men, of course not. But I have mused over this on many occasions, and I continually fail to come to a logical earthbound conclusion.

My interest in this subject was not pricked by this event, quite the opposite. I have had a healthy interest in this kind of thing for a while, and it merely added fuel to the fire. I did toy with the idea for a little while that it might mean that I was the second coming, but having failed miserably to turn water in to wine on several attempts, I have put this notion to bed.

So as I was saying earlier, being at home all day, my Sky box is very often tuned to the discovery channels. There are lots of programmes on these channels that deal with the subject of U.F.O's. Some of it is probably hogwash, but can it all be hogwash? Yes there are some accounts of encounters by "Billie Bob" who after downing moonshine all evening, suddenly found himself aboard the mother ship, but others who I think it is far more difficult to poo poo. Airline pilots, military pilots, police officers, and yes even astronauts! is it really fare to call them all liars? Can they really all have been hallucinating?

A lot of these encounters are not just a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of one's eye, but a prolonged and sustained "Hounding" by what appears to be persistent craft, controlled by some kind of intelligence. World war two pilots often reported seeing balls of light. Some may say that they were merely witnessing ball lightening, but these balls of light carried out manoeuvres that ball lightening simply wouldn't do. The pilots of that era coined the phrase "Foo Fighters." It was suspected that the Nazi's were carrying out all kinds of experiments during the war, some of which were on a mind boggling scale. Some believe that these balls of light may have been some kind of Nazi created phenomena, for what purpose nobody really knows, but was it?

Some Ufologists believe in the ancient alien theories. ie: that aliens descended from the skies thousands of years ago, and kick started human technology. It is agreed by a lot of scholars, U.F.O. fans or not, that about ten thousand years ago there seemed to be a big leap in humans mastery of technology. Paintings throughout history have depicted "Things" in the sky that resemble disc like shapes.

There is a tribe of people in Mali region of Africa called the Dogon people. In 1931 two French anthropologists stumbled upon them, and proceeded to befriend them. Over the next thirty years they became privy to some of the Dogon's most devout beliefs. Among others was that they were visited by aliens many centuries ago, and those aliens imparted knowledge upon them. Knowledge of where they came from etc. The Dogon told the anthropologists that they came from a star that we now call Sirius B. The startling thing is, is that not only would a tribe that live in mud huts and can only have minimal access to books at best be unlikely to know about this star, the educated world didn't know about this star! Sirius A is visible to the naked eye, but Sirius B isn't. It can only be seen with powerful telescopes, and was only discovered in 1976, forty years after the Dogon told the anthropologists about it!

There are examples of this kind of thing all over the world, and history is littered with this kind of stuff. Some say that the Nazca lines in southern Peru are a landing strip for alien spacecraft. I roll my eyes at this theory, really, if an alien civilisation has got the technical ability to traverse the mind boggling distances of space to get here, surely they would have a better method of landing than having to lower the undercarriage! I can just imagining the alien pilots of the craft bursting through the clouds and peering out of the window. "Oh bugger, no landing strip, turn it around Dave, we will have to go home!"

This is where my cynical half (Or was it three quarters, I haven't worked it out yet) starts to raise it's ugly head. Take "The Greys" for example. The Greys are the most "Common" type of alien, the one's that inhabit popular culture. We have all seen depictions of them. Large head, large black eyes, short, skinny limbs etc. Now, we are lead to believe that these beings are far more technologically advanced than us puny humans. They have somehow mastered the ability of defying the laws of physics that Albert Einstein toiled so hard over, and also are able to withstand g forces that would vapourise a human being, if some of the manoeuvres that have been "Witnessed" are to be believed. Yet they apparently haven't mastered tailoring! Why are they always naked, and while i am on the subject, where are their genitals? How do they reproduce? They can allegedly create a worm hole in the space time continuum, but can't have babies, or indeed urinate.

I could go on forever, listing examples of "Evidence" then tearing that "Evidence" down with some cold hard cynical logic, but what would be the point?

I am still in two minds about it all, or is that three minds.......or four! Lets just hope that if and when they do land, they don't ask to be "Taken to your leaders" Then we are all buggered!