1 of 40

Write now Article Tools

This is a story about flying saucers. I say "flying saucers" because it lends an air of the innocent and childlike, even the everyday, to something that became, in those heavy days of the mid 1990s, so absorbed in currents of recursive conspiracies, with gruesome accounts of surgically dismembered cows, pierced abdomens, and abductions, that it was almost a branch of psychological horror.

One day someone should study how the visceral UFOlogy of that time did or did not reflect the time itself, before it all collapsed in an orgy of butcher's throwaways in a cheap London bedsit, thanks to Ray Santilli and his "Roswell autopsy" footage. I often wonder, now that we seem so certain there is nothing out there at all, what the significance of alien implants and painful experiments and UFO crashes with the all important dead bodies and child-sized coffins really was.

No, this is an old fashioned story about lights and disks in the sky.

When I was eight, I had my first encounter with strange things in the heavens. It was in a book that I treasured for its full colour drawings and paintings, more vivid to a child with slightly dodgy eyes than "real" photos (which are often, of course, fuzzy and out of focus, if they depict anything other than a blurry cloud, that is). Reading that book, day after day, I was gripped by a certainty I can remember as clearly as if it were in my diary for tomorrow: a bone-shaking knowledge, or insight, that something truly strange was happening - not here, maybe, in the shallow valleys of England, apart from everyone losing their jobs - but somewhere else, everywhere else. It would take an effort not to see a UFO, because they would be lurking, especially in slate grey autumnal skies, and, crucially, whenever I opened my curtains at night. There they would be, turning at right angles, shimmering and glowing, and I would have no more ordinary world to fall back on.

In fact, this is exactly how it did happen, though it was eight years later and the world had moved on from delicious glimpses by then, into the full-blooded murderousness of the "grey" epidemic I mentioned before. And something even weirder happened on the same day.

Despite my conviction by then that Truman's signature on the MJ-12 documents was real, that JFK had been telling Marilyn Monroe of the vast conspiracies, and that live aliens were being stored and occasionally interrogated in US bases, I did have a few friends. One of them, Paul, was my best friend,

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about Short stories: A science fiction mystery?
We want to hear your view. Write now!