Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World

I've always been interested in UFOs, Lake Monsters and other Cryptids, and as the famous UK magazine called it, "The Unexplained". And that is despite knowing it all to be nonsense.

I think it is always going to be a part of humanity to want their lives to be full of mysteries, to not want everything to be explained lest the world becomes boring.

I can't remember when I became interested in all this stuff, but I've got a feeling that Arthur C.Clarke's Mysterious World, which was first shown in around 1980, was a big part of it.

Right from the crystal skull - a wonderful object we now know to be a modern fake - rotating to face the camera in the opening titles and causing the terrified me to look away before its unearthly eyes gazed upon my child face.

There were, I think, 12 episodes, some dealing with non-supernatural stuff we don't know the purpose behind - chalk figures, the Nazca Lines, the Tunguska event etc - that I as a child found a bit humdrum compared to the episodes that dealt with the real hard stuff - The Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, Yetis and Bigfoot.

Narrated by soon to be TV-AM newsreader Gordon Honeycomb in doom laden tones - "Is this a photograph of Nessie's flank?" - I have always remembered the story of the Scottish forestry worker who was attacked by two spiky balls that emerged from a spaceship.

The (faked) photography of the Loy's Ape cryptid was always pretty scary too.

But the most famous imagery from the show, to me anyway, is the Patterson Bigfoot film from 1964. Now accepted to be a pretty blatant "man in a suit" fake, back in the day it attracted serious scientific study from academics, and serious outbreaks of sleeping with the light on from me.

All text Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.08.20

My Alien Friends

I was recently delighted to rediscover, at my folks' house, my old UFO reports book. I'm a sceptic, I know it's all rubbish, but I find UFO's a fascinating psycho social reflection of their times.

Plus the fact that it gives illustrators a chance to let their imaginations run, run into deep space.

This book contains some nicely atmospheric pastels of UFOs, such as these;

UFO from the Valentich disappearance

UFOs buzz cars

But, it is with the aliens that they really get a chance to shine. Or not, as the case may be.

Armless aliens and their blue blob spaceship

Happy smiling spaceship holding hands

Lobster handed floating monsters

"I come in peace and fetishwear!"

"It could be you!"

Tony Benn pipesmoking dude

Rejected cyberman design

Vilas Boas space babe

"Don't fuck with my garden!"

Errrrr

"And I saw, mushroom head"

"My Headaches are Caused by Alien Implants!!!"

Or so I would be saying, if I was a "certain" kind of person.

Yes, I'm struggling with headaches at the moment. Not through hangovers, cheeky reader, but rather the sort of seasonal, heavy wet air, amorphous sinus headaches that come in little waves throughout the year.

But whatever my wishy-washy shilly-shally self diagnosed for reasons for my headaches, I'm not a long standing alien contactee - or abductee as we should probably say these days - who thinks their aches and pains are caused by the dreaded Greys implanting them with devices to monitor their position and medical status, thus making it easier for them to be located for further abduction, and breeding experiments.

This is a long standing trope in science fiction, and was portrayed in reds-under-the-bed movie "Invaders from Mars" back in 1953. In 1957 the first implantation case reached UFO researchers, but the Hill Abduction of 1961 was probably the first major publicity such cases got.

Implantation in "Invaders from Mars"

Later on, Whitley Streiber's "Communion" brought anal probing and Christopher Walken dancing to intergalactic disco to the fore, and of course the X files was just one long story of implantational probular interference by the evil Greys.

As these tales reached popular culture, then the number of people reporting alien implants, and even finding strange bits of metal of supposedly unknown composition falling out of their noses or fished out of their teeth by dentists grew too.

This explains my fascination with UFOlogy not as any real science whatsoever, but rather as a reflection of society's current cultural fascinations, and subconscious worries. Some folk get headaches and think "Sinuses!" - others may think "Brain Tumour!" and a few may think "OH MY GOD I'VE BEEN EXAMINED BY ALIENS!!!!"

So many factors at work.

Having Tourettes and OCD as I do, I am well used to getting panicky about contamination fixation. I wash my hands constantly to avoid flu and the dreaded bete du jour Norovirus, and if ever I get spots on my skin, or any itching, I get really anxious about having picked up scabies or lice. How much time I have spent in my pre medicated days, hunting for evidence of parasites.

Doctors would call this "Neuro-Dermatitis" or "Delusional Parasitosis". But not those who claim to suffer from Morgellons a condition where people believe they have an itch caused by strange fibres embedded in their skin - this always reminds me of "The Fly" or "Ginger Snaps" - and may collect specimens thereof, which usually get identified down the line as the sort of natural or aritificial fibres you'd expect in a domestic environment.

I put it down to OCD. I know what that genuine condition can cause.

This piece, well, it hasn't gone where I expected. A day of bad headaches, and I'm talking about aliens and new but unknown skin diseases. I offer an explanation based on OCD and anxiety, and cultural contamination.

I have no idea if I'm right, but I'm putting it out there.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01.09.2014

Spaceship Moon

I have to admit, with a really shameful and apologetic face, that I find UFO culture to be endlessly fascinating. I have a number of books on the subject, some of them of the classic “The Unexplained” magazine reports collected in a single volume, another with some wonderful illustrations of Nordic blonde spacemen apparently dressed as fish. And account of the classic sexual encounter between a Brazilian called Vilas-Boas (not the football manager) and a spacewoman with blood red pubic hair.

Another is a rather more sober volume with a black cover illustrated with the so called Washington Invasion photos of definitely-not flying saucers giving the Capitol a buzz in the 50s. Within it, are some rather strange theories about the moon.

Now let me say straightaway that the UFO stuff is all utter rubbish, and most of the reports a four year old with a reasonable sense of scepticism could see through. I find them interesting as a cultural document of their times, and the deep seated sub and supra conscious fears of folk through the various tumults of the nuclear age. And one idea that a few people had on the go was that the moon was some kind of spaceship, expounded upon in the sober black book.

We don't really know how the moon came about – a fissioning of an original larger body into the Earth and Moon, a capture of a straying Moon, separate accretion from proto-planetary matter, or the most supported new theory, that of a Mars sized object striking the proto Earth and splitting the Moon off from it. So I suppose if your mind is out there enough, why shouldn't the Moon be a spaceship (Populated by who???!!!) that has decided to plonk itself in a pseudo-tidally locked orbit around the Earth (Why???!!!).

The evidence? Well the fact that the craters are all the same depth, supposedly, indicates that Spaceship Moon has an outer “Weather Shield” to protect it from extremes of heat and radiation that is easily penetrated by meteorites before they are stopped by the second Space Shield, a far more substantial barrier. Others claim to have spotted glittering bridges, buildings and even giant lettering. Apparently a couple of Russian scientists put this theory together in 1970 – avoiding deportation to the salt mines – saying the lunar seas were the result of molten slag and lava being created and spewed out by the giant machines that powered Spaceship Moon.

So remember this, the next time you to to bed with the moon shining in through the window. The man in the moon may harbour a terrible secret, and who knows, it could be far deadlier than what HG Wells envisaged dropping in on is from Mars.

And it wouldn't have so far to come, either.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 21.03.14

Spaceman Came Travelling

I haven't heard this song for such a long time.

This is of course no bad thing. Chris de Burgh is a rolled up jacket sleeved, mono browed buffoon who's best known song is a paean to strange love with Cardinal Wolsey in drag. I have never paid the ferryman, I never even fixed the price, he drowned Mr de Burgh for me for free.

It's Christmas you see, and you'd think Chris' Von Daniken inspired talk of the birth of Messiahs being a 2000 yearly thing heralded by the appearance of the Angel Gabriel in a spaceship would be dominating our local gold station's seasonal output. But they have better taste.

Driving Home for Christmas by that other craggy Chris is their favourite. Possibly because it doesn't contain such lyrical gems as;

"He followed a light and came down to a shed,
Where a mother and child were lying there on a bed,"

Of course, it gets better than that.

We've always wondered what form our first communications with a sentient extra-terrestrial lifeform would be. We've sent them plaques with naked pictures on, a record with birdsong on, or a beamed message to the globular cluster Messier 13 with a digitised image of DNA within. So far, we've heard nothing back, and we're not even sure that if we did, we'd recognise it.

Chris de Burgh himself is in no doubt.

"And it went la la la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la."

Having travelled "for light years of time" - oh and by the way, light years are a measure of distance, not time, you fool - you'd have thought Homo Superior might have something more interesting than that to say on a First Contact. If the Vulcans had said that to us that wondrous day after Zephraim Cochrane had got to Warp 1, we'd have thought they were taking the piss.

"Gort! La la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la" - well, that wouldn't have helped.

"Ulla-la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la" is just about acceptable I suppose, but visitors, travelling spacemen, stick to "Take me to your leader."

Works every time.

She's an Alien Spy, I Swear

Sitting two computers down from me at the library. Blonde hair, running leggings, trainers decorated with a flash of orange. Foreign trainers, not English. perhaps not even of this Earth.

She is booking flights with her brood mother, maybe to Riga. Her mother gave birth to her and 600 others like her in a larval chamber on their homeworld. They were despatched out through the galactic neighbourhood, to observe, report, and monitor. She is a spy breeder, specifically chosen by the hive elders.

She looked at me just then, clutching the printout of her Ryanair details. Ha, the perfect cover story, why fly Ryanair when she could easily get a ride in one of their space runabouts? She probably works at one of the local warehouses or cake factories, and I know for a fact young genuine Eastern European women disappear from these places, never to be seen again.

Abducted for breeding purposes. Most of them don't survive the experiments and are used to feed new larvae. Those are the lucky ones, the survivors are trafficked back to the homeworld and used as hybrid mating stock for the industrial drone classes.

She's gone now. I'm sure she's reporting to her controllers that I spotted her. I ought to be in fear for my life, they will come through the walls as I sleep tonight.

And if they do, well, let them make it quick...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 13.12.13

They Lurk in the Mist

As I sit writing this, head sore from rum and astronomy dabblings last night in my garden, there is a distinctly misty look about the world outside. The grass is lush and green, with no frost tickling it like yesterday, and the grey sky has come down from the air to meet it.

A number deal of mysterious events are usually presaged by mists...

I think of Napoleonic battlefields, of tales of modern day people seeing phantom armies from the era emerging from banks of mist, for example. The Hound of the Baskervilles prowled the misty moors, HG Well's Martians travelled to Earth in cylinders that trailed a green mist, and of course had a toxic mist, the so called "Black Smoke", at their disposal.

Many famous UFO encounters began as people encountering a strange mist. I think of the famous Barney and Betty Hill abduction, that started off as they drive into a bank of fog. The cases of the Avises in the UK started similarly, and eventually led to a terrifying abduction painting, the worm faced aliens with glowing eyes, carrying out an examination on Mr Avis. I first came across this illustration in a UFO book in the early 80s, and like the Hopkinsville Goblins featured in the same book, made it occasionally rather tricky for me to sleep with the light off.

I wonder what would happen if I were to run off into the mist one day. Would I encounter phantom armies or mythical beasts? Would I find glowing eyed, worm faced aliens insisting on giving me an intimate examination? It does not bear thinking about.

Yet I want to run off into the mist. Fog is the most wondrous atmospheric event there is; everyday objects like people and cars are reduced to indistinct shapes; moisture clings to every surface and if the temperature is below freezing, it makes everything into a crystalline wonderland.

I don't know what lurks within the mist. But I must encounter it, shed all my fears. And when I run off into the mist, I may not come back.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 11.12.13

The Anti-Carbon Ghosts of Warminster

This is not a post about inhabitants of the spirit world who have an inexplicable hatred of element number 6 in the Periodic Table, but rather, it is based on a conversation I had with a strange man from Warminster I met last week.

He was an elderly fellow, just about turned 70 give or take, but his hair was only lightly streaked with grey and his face relatively young looking, but he walked with a stick and his eyes were such a pale blue I thought initially he had cataracts.

Anyway, we were sat waiting in the Betjeman at St Pancras station, and talk turned to his Wiltshire hometown. Warminster has long been famous as a strange sort of place, and in 1964-1965 had been the home of the Warminster "Thing"  - a bizarre series of UFO sightings and strange  happenings - men in balaclavas wandering country roads late at night, that sort of thing. Anyway he told me of what was really going on, as we both drank JD and cokes while waiting for a delayed Brighton train.

It wasn't Aliens. It was far stranger than that.

Apparently, Warminster is historically located around various nexuses (nexi?) of ley lines. This old guy - a former maths professor -  believed rather than being rooted in organic hippy dippy lore, the ley lines are dimensional rifts, less than a quark in width, that are so narrow they don't normally affect our space time.

However, at Warminster, at a hub where several of these rifts intersected, there is a larger interdimensional intersect, where matter from dimensions 8 and 11 is able to find its way into our universe. The stuff from the 8th Dimension is an irrelevant mess of random open superstrings that don't correspond to any of our standard theory particles, and thus don't interact a whole lot of bugger all with anything.

But the 11th dimensional matter is different (He explained to me over another drink)  - it's anti matter carbon, atomic number -6, valency 4(1+i). To put it simply, as he was eventually able to after a fifth drink as rain shorted out the rails, it's ghost carbon. Reverse carbon. Graphite hard as diamond, diamond you could write with.

A carbon that in our world has negative mass, yet thanks to the positron complex root 1 valency, it can actually covalent bond with our hydrogen. And its low energy state means it can substitute out native carbon atoms from the organic chemicals found in such things as...living matter.

This was a lot to take in. He himself didn't believe it until he saw the effects on night in Warminster in 1965, where a farmer, his two sons and flock of sheep suddenly glowed black, and vanished from the field in which they were working. Three days later they re-appeared, the sheep unshorn, and the farmer wild with tales of "some other place" he had visited that he could not describe, but was wonderful.

He was sedated and locked in a padded cell, from which he disappeared three weeks later, this time permanently. 167 pupils and 9 teachers were sucked out of a Warminster primary school the next month, and neer seen again apart from eerie imprints certain short sighted people could see, ghosts on the landscape, apparently smiling, but as insubstantial as the wind.

And it wasn't just organic forms disappearing from our world. We had visitors from the 11th dimension too, velvet soft trees you couldn't see, but you could bump into, and climb, before their trunks swept back into the dimensional rift from which they came.

Clouds came too, from worlds as indescribable as love, and it was these, sailing high in the sky, inverse-gravity lensing their background, that were mistaken for UFOs. And it were MOD spooks, confused but excited by the goings on, that were running around on Norton motorcycles in black in the middle of the night, chasing the shadow people that had fallen foul of the leaking ghost-carbon as they flitted between states of being no one had ever been able to comprehend.

And as he told me this, the fellow's eyes twinkled, and I wondered if he had been one of the chasers, or one of those sprites that could flit between our world and the eleventh. And as I looked into those odd eyes of his, I barely noticed his hand pass straight through his own glass, before it picked mine up. And then as his hand reformed, it seemed, that glass of his shattered, and began to bleed pure molten silicon while his own flesh was whitely untouched.

And then, after draining my drink, he winked and left the bar, heading in entirely the opposite direction from where the Brighton train was shceduled to leave, if indeed it ever arrived.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17/08/13

I Broke A Girl's Heart

I needed to try and refire my story writing in a hurry. I've been reading a lot about alien abductions lately. Wonder what goes through their minds?