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

What is Going on with Betelguese? I hope it's not Boring!

Betelgeuse, Alpha Orionis, the blazing orange star that marks the shoulder of Orion, the celestial hunter, well it's been going through a weird time lately.

First of all it faded so much it went from one of the ten brightest stars in the sky to being one outside the top thirty and nearly outshone by Bellatrix and its other less famed constellation-mates.

"Was it going to go Supernova?" wondered more click hungry astronomical sources and even I looked at it with excitement, wondering if at any second it would suddenly flare up and blaze brighter than the full moon and cast us all in starlight the likes of which no pair of eyes on this earth has ever seen.

Of course, it didn't, and I can see with my own eyes that it has started to brighten noticeably again. probably some dust built up in its atmosphere and then was blown away to free the light again. Boo, mundane, boring, dull.

Could it be more exciting? Perhaps it was a giant signal, a giant curtain of star-proof material, held before the star and then let go to signal the start of a giant space race, a race of super powerful spacecraft looking to see who could be the fastest to Rigel and back. Perhaps we will soon see (from 600 years ago obviously) their hge glowing ion trails shining through the spaces in the stars as they rip space time to pieces as they compete for the universe equivalent of the Indy 500?

Maybe a Dyson Sphere was being constructed, and someone fucked it up and broke the whole thing, a sleepy multi tentacled crane operator the size of the moon drunk on the fucking job fucking typical.

Maybe they were just repainting Betelgeuse and ran out of paint.

or perhaps, just perhaps, perchance, perhaps, a massive solar sail was being unfurled on a generational ship designed to sail space to the Earth and render us slaves, or worse still food?

The sail has now stopped blocking the starlight, and the ship to end civilisation is on the way.

Copyright BloodyMulberry 17.03.20

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"

BOOKS - 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Having seemingly, and unconsciously, avoided sci fi novels since the death of Iain M. Banks, I found myself reading a work on which he seems to bear a significant influence on.

Another one, in fact.

In fact, I find myself thinking that the work is almost a prequel to Banks' "Culture" universe, with early forms of terraformed planets, terrarium spaceships with evocative names, and a form of AI that has developed well beyond Turing Test levels.

I'm probably a mile out with this assessment, but then again I'm hardly Clive James when it comes to criticism.

The story involves terraforming artist Swan being involved in an apparent accident on her adoptive home of Mercury when her city - which rolls around permanetly out of the scorching sun - suffers an apparent projectile strike that nearly claimed her life; and left her cancerous and wandering tunnels to survive in the company of a new acquaintance, the lanky Wahram, native of Saturn's moon Titan.

As she investigates the incident from one end of the solar system to the other, it becomes clear that the incident on Mercury was no accident, and only intelligences of the very highest order could have arranged the attack, but who? We also see her on Earth, attempting to re-introduce extinct animals to the North American landmass from "space ark" terraria to a flooded, struggling planet where most folk capable of doing so have long since left.

It is a far easier read than Banks' work, and although not possessing the incredible span of his imagination, it is easier to grasp the spaceborne society of the novel. It also acts as a fascinatingly deep study of sexuality and body modification; males and females as we know them are not the dominant genders with many people choosing to have the genitals of both, or neither. DNA from other species, both alien and not so, are also combined with human with varying degrees of taboo.

The world of 2312 is one where people can sing like birds, and have experience sex as a male and a female simultaneously.

I Love the Silurians!

The Horror Channel's Doctor Who repeats have been an absolute godsend for me; wallpaper TV I can write to without ever. having to concentrate too hard. All of the Pertwee and Baker era storylines knock the modern era into one of those "cocked hat" things - whatever is a cocked hat FFS - and the fact that most episodes appear to have been dug out of a bog make it easier to ignore, or indeed enjoy, the daft costumes, sets, and rubber suited monsters.

So. Doctor Who and the Silurians. I knew what the Siluruans were, roughly (things to get confused with the Sea Devils) and I knew they were among the best loved monsters. But I had never seen their 1970 story until now.

It is, or rather they are, fantastic.

The thing is with these Silurians is that they are not really monsters at all. They may be up to no good, but it is only initially in reasonable self preservation...their leader even has a sense of burbling charm...no mere evil green blobs on wheels, these fellows. Their high intelligence shines through.

Achh, who am I trying to fool? The charm is in the daft turd brown rubber suits; the fluttering eyelashes; the aforementioned burbly voices that make them sound like "The Fifth Element" Mondushawan on acid; they have a funny stumbling walk as if their arms have been strapped by their sides while their amphiboid heads bob back and forth; they have a light in their foreheads which have a duel purpose of killing people and moving coffin like hibernacula around; their faces are silly, and as ever when they do have a plan to hatch for the usual earthling killing purposes, it is far too long winded and complicated for it ever to work, especially when they set it out to the Doctor beforeheand in the tradition of every movie bad guy.

I love them, for every single on of those reasons, and more.

"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

Gamma Ray Burst Creatures

At the time of writing, it seems the Gamma Ray Burst “observed” in the Andromeda Galaxy may be some kind of instrumentation artefact, but no matter.

It doesn’t change a thing.

There are creatures that live near black holes, neutron stars and other potential sources of super high energy gamma rays. They are intelligent yet tenuous, a loose collection of exotic particles with nervous systems based on the scintillations produced by hydrogen atoms emitting energy in transitions high above the Paschen and the Pfund. Their brains exist in the Plank fluctuations, and they “see” by registering energy transitions caused by these energy transitions I describe.

They enjoy nothing more than to observe the beauty of the hyper high energy universe, to us, I suppose it would seem as if existence was coloured in brilliant silver and glittering purple-violet.

Every time there is a cataclysmic event like a gamma ray burst, the tremendously energies cause these contemplative creatures to begin to sail the gamma breezes out into intergalactic space, communicating their happiness at motion to all their kind.

Each of these creatures, a hundred kilometres across or more, is encoded to breed by budding off in the 7^th dimension and so we don’t encounter their off spring for a thousand years or more, as they gradually drop back through the dimensions into our space.

This is just as well, because sadly, though these beautiful creatures mean us no harm, and would be highly distressed to think that they were, every time they encounter a planet of sentient life forms, as aetherially as ghosts, their Plank energies cause terrible damage to living beings. It causes the nervous system to spasm, causing Tourette’s and other worldly analogues in some creatures, but death in others.

Who it happens to is a matter of pure chance, as by a lucky quirk their Plank fluctuations are only in phase with living matter on rare occasions. But when it happens, it can be devastating.

 

And every time we observe a gamma ray burst, they are passing through something. And someone. On our world.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 28.05.14

The Moon-a-Mucks Aboard Spaceship Moon

So, if it has been established (!) that the moon is indeed a giant spaceship, who are the intelligences behind it? What are the entities that hollowed it out using huge steampunk sounding engines and rendered the surface a mess of lava and slag? What is their purpose?

Looking at all the evidence for Spaceship Moon, I can venture a few theories of my own.

The moon was once a beautiful, fertile world that orbited the star Epsilon Eridani 11 light years away. However, the action of a passing mini black hole ejected the world from that stellar system, and catapulted the Moon across the local region of space in the direction of the sun. As soon as the sun got too far away, all life died, including the sentient inhabitants who were much fond of gardening and other agricultural pursuits.

When it had nearly reached the heliopause, a group of wandering bio-mechanical life forms encountered the dead, lonely world, and were greatly saddened. Luckily they specialised in planetary renovations, so having claimed salvage rights, they endeavoured to recover the moon's lost beauty, evidence of which had been left by the former inhabitants.

As had been theorized, these tall, 8 tentacled creatures, resembling a semi-metallic, upright squid, used their vast technological advances to hollow out the moon, install living quarters for themselves, and take up vast amounts of space with an inertial gyroscope drive, and terraforming equipment to green the Moon once again.

They wept, so they did, at the devastation they caused to get their engines of creation in place - their had still been a certain sterile beauty to the Moon - but remembered that given time the Moon would be a treasure of the heavens again, and time was something these near immortal life forms had in abundance.

So they set a course for the nearerst habitable looking solar system, our sun. It took a while for their inertial propulsion system to bring the colossal mass of the Moon into the Earth's sphere of influence. But once they had done so, contrary to geological evidence a mere 10,000 years ago, they began to work. The Quartz moonflowers began to grow.

Moonflowers are two metre tall sunflower like pseudo-plant designed to provide oxygen, through a complex light driven reaction with the quartz crystal matrix. But they need help, and this is where the moon-a-mucks come in.

Moon-a-mucks are a metre long, soft grey creatures, with a beak like a platypus only in a trumpet, or horn shape. They have bright green eyes, and don't need to breathe, existing as they do on joy absorbed from the eleventh dimension. When a moon-a-muck is fed with joy, its grey fur fluffs up, and it begins to sing a song in the electro magnetic spectrum that radiates out everywhere in the universe...so when you smile on a sunny day, that is caused by the moon-a-mucks song, the song of a creature only I suspect exists on our narrow minded little world.

But the moon-a-mucks prime function is to sing to the moon flowers in the sub-surface growing rooms. Their songs cause the quartz crystal structure to resonate like someone rubbing a wine glass with a wet finger, and as it does so it stretches, before snapping back in place with a melodic molecular shattering, releasing oxygen from the Sio4 structure.

As the oxygen is released, the moon-a-mucks collect it with their lunar-flippers into a special feldspar container on their backs before carrying it deeper underground on their moon-a-muck railways to deposit in caves.

We don't see this, how can we? When every time we send a probe or lander, the tentacled moon-masters gather up their singing flocks of moon-a-mucks and herd them to underground barns where they won't be found or heard...they tell them to be very quiet and bribe them with moon truffles.

The purpose of all this is to one day flood the lunar surface with oxygen, held in place by gravity generators so it doesn't leak out into space, and then commence the Greening of the Moon.

One day, the moon will rise, and we will find it as green as an emerald. And the tentacled moon masters and the moon-a-mucks will be waiting, for those they deem worthy...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.03.14

The Lair

I've always wanted to have a lair, a secret bolt hole a few miles away, on the outskirts of town.

What is it's purpose? Well, in my wandering mind, there are two stories that tell of “The Lair” - one is the dissident escaping the fascist torturing secret police, the Okrana of the future oppressors. For some reason, this internal story always involves jumping into a river, and finding my secret entrance under the surface, in the river bank. They chase me, dogs close behind, but after I've jumped in the weed and lily clad water by night, they lose my trail.

I enter the airlock behind a door disguised as shale and mud, and within I have a supply of food to last three years in a storeroom beneath a livving accomodation about the size of a tent, well equipped with sensors, and means of communication with my fellow dissidents.

The dogs and torturers clump about the surfae lit by a quarter moon. But they cannot find me, and when things quieten down the modern day junta defying Scarlet Pimpernel can escape from his hideout, and resume tweaking the tail of the neo-nazis and leading the popular rebellion.

A real life fantasy tale from the riverbank.

The other daydream is darker. I am a killer, a mass spree killer, who has carried out a brutally bloody crime for reaons beyond his understanding. I am cornered, like Peter Lorre in M, a cornered rat, fear in my eyes. I escape by bicycle, unlit, in dark country lanes, and race for a bridge out towards some local woodland. I am like an American black helicopter, a mutilator of cattle and people, of uncertain but perhaps celestial background. In the wall of the bridge on the cycle path, is a false brick that acts as the key to my lair and laboratory...the wall opens up, and the bicycle disappears.

I take the sack of organs from my shoulder, and place it in the medical fridge, as I turn of the Inrfa Red monitors and laugh at the police helicopter. They can't see me, this place gives off no heat trace as I burn the remains and transmit messages back to my handlers off world.

Every day, the modern day devil rides out, and patrols plebeian streets for victims.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.02.14

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.

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

What "Really" Lies Within?

My hometown, like many others, is full of strange little old brick buildings that seem little used, and never have any visitors going in or out.

The old bowling green pavilion. Various perma-locked old public toilets. Outhouses on the edge of public parks. Car park attendant shelters no longer used since automation - the old man in the orange flashed donkey jacket kicked out onto the street to slowly strave to death while being taunted and urinated upon by passers-by in favour of non-functional ticket machines swallowing nickel coins for no sticky paper prize.

By the cemetery, a plot of land with a brick structure stands next to undistinguished housing, a “For Sale” sign flapping in heavier breezes. Still there. Still undeveloped.

They must still be standing for a reason, otherwise greedy councils would flatten them – every tiny little space has a value. I wonder why. Who really controls them. What really are they used for. What “really” lies within?

They are obviously control rooms, observation posts, and the likes. The forces that would infiltrate our society and act for powers beyond our solar system – in one case, within it – use the apparently unused old buildings for their own nefarious purpose. The perma-closed public lavatory, for example, is run by human-cultivating carnivores from Tau Ceti, who monitor the vital signs of folk walking past, and pounce on those with the nourishing characteristics required.

Seeing as they like meat rich in ethanol, the mortality statistics of street drinkers are explained.

The worm-men of Triton, our only solar system based visitors, live in bowling green pavilions all over the United Kingdom. They are secretly digging our our richest and most fertile soils from underneath the surface, and exporting them back to the homeworld to wriggle in. Soon, they will no loger be able to conceal their activities, as our huge tracts of our farmland will cave in on itself, and we will begin to starve.

Parkland outhouses are home to mutants from a waterless world monitoring our political instability, awaiting a time to pounce when we are at our weakest. Empty houses house the empty skulls of the watchers of Vega, living cameras with no thoughts of their own, they seek to collectivise all. These mindless space communists have fascist rivals, the disused telephone exhange dwelling Maggotoids of Mizar, and even as they vivisect the homeless, the Vegans seek to start a war with them.

A war that will kill us all in the process, even if they don't kill us first. So remember, watch those funny little buildings. Ignore them at your, and our, peril.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/10/2013

The Earthling Wedding Sham

The registry office weddings are a sheer study in classiness. Saturday mornings, the families gather, the screaming children, elderly fag-ash Lil parents, men squeezed into morning suits that push their stomachs up to meet their chins, a shade of grey the colour of tarmac. And they all have those strange prop hats that they carry but never wear.

The stars are of course the women. The bride, often in blood red or fuchsia pink, surrounded by her entourage of overweight bridesmaids dressed the same only less so. All smoke like an industrial revolution. The fabrics they wear do not actually come from this planet, small satin and taffeta creatures on nearby extra-solar planets are brutally harvested to make these garments, which are manufactured by green skinned alien beings in slave labour conditions. Tentacles nailed to benches, they are forced to make size 22 ivory dresses with a sort of oversized belt thing.

The finished garments are then sent to bridal shops, the only trading outlets in the galaxy that stock such creations.

Why every single groom doesn’t do a runner, I have no idea. Because, as so few men sadly know is a special dimension reserved for men who decide to leave their partners at the altar. It is not one of punishment, it is one of reward. All are assigned useful projects to keep the under fabric of the Universe running smoothly, and have their blood transfused out and replaced with platinum laced nectar as a reward for not having children.

They spend their days procreating knowledge by contemplation of the beautiful. Just like Socrates said.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 07/09/2013

CINEMA - Super 8 Scores a 7. And a Bit

Finally got to watch Super 8, having bought it originally as a present for the folks and having had to wait for a discretely decent interval before spiriting it back to my place alongside some onions.

After about half an hour, it was pretty obvious I was watching Super Close Encounters of the Extra Terrestrial Cloverfield Kind - there were so many Spielberg identifiers in there it was hard to see where JJ Abrams could have put his own imprint on the movie. Cute child - check. Cute child who lost their mother to an unfortunate crushing incident - check. Cute child gets kidnapped by alien - check. Lashings of sentimentality - check check check check.

Finally, Abrams own DNA gets a look in. A monster that looks pretty much the same as the Cloverfield one. But for all the movie's obvious derivations, it has a lot of charm. The framing device, the kids of the cast shooting their own zombie apocalypse movie on the titular Super 8 camera, is a fantastic one and it also bears noting that the finished product you see over the end credits is better than Planet Terror by a mile.

The young cast - Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths and the tons-better-than-her-sister Elle Fanning - are great too, and the fact that the creature is given more depth than either a building crushing giant prawn, or a finger glowing be-good moralist, adds a dimension to the film other creature flicks lack.

In short, it's not amazing, but it is a highly watchable film, and I whiled away a happy sofa bound couple of hours watching it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/08/2013

Alien 3 is better than Aliens

Alien 3 is better than Aliens. End of.

Better cast of decent british actual acting talent and the tall bloke from Casualty who has just had his ear bitten off. The setting is more atmospheric, the characterisation deeper, and despite Fincher's production problems, it has a sense of style way above the KY dripping big gun techno porn of Cameron's vision.

And it has Chales Dance in it. I've liked Charles Dance ever since the wonderfully daft White Mischief, where he was shot by Joss Ackland and then masturbated upon by a middle aged ukulele strumming posh woman from the Kenyan Happy Valley set.

As for the rest of the reasons, it is best if I just list them as a procession of "No" bullet points, that will definitively illustrate for you why Alien 3 is better than Aliens.

NO irritating child NO actually rubbish subtexts about motherhood et al NO silly picture of an aged Ripley daughter that looks like it was ultrasounded in the womb of a tree NO stupid trainers that go over the ankle with velcro fasteners NO suits with turned up lapels NO scary corporate Rosa Klebb lesbian NO lines of dialogue that are flagged as a radical new symbol of female empowerment that aren't NO NO NO Bill Paxton rapping NO director's cut featuring Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf in an LV426 set that looks crummy when lit NO director's cut with Sentry Guns NO "Don't be gone long Ellen" NO silly giggle names like "Spunkmeyer" NO shot of Lance Henriksen in a tube that gives me nightmares NO heterosexual bromance between a crop haired latino and a guy last seen in a recurring role in Murder She Wrote. And above all NO NO NO over-rating by male critics who want to look like they were in at the beginning of some kind of female emancipation movement in world cinema.

Have a nice, dark, set on a prison planet that was originally a monastery kind of day.

Don't bother with the Aliens Extended Edition. Really. Don't.

Do you know, it took me a long time to see it, until I finally got the Aliens DVD and see all this amazing new footage that my friend at University had been going on about back in 1994. "You should see the Sentry Guns!"

I wouldn't say my heart was pounding when I pressed the play button, but I was shall we say, "Interested."

Ridley Scott doesn't do Director's Cuts. All of his extended editions seem to be introduced with a little clip of his Ginger-Going-On-Greyness sat there in a chipperly avuncular fashion, saying that basically he doesn't do Director's Cuts cos his first cut was the best, but it's nice to see the deleted scenes.

. I can't remember what James Cameron said before this one, but I'm sure it wasn't "These scenes are a crock of shit, I can't believe I wasted the money filming them."

We kick off with a long and tedious "oh for fuck's sake cut to the chase" bit set in the colony on LV426, which is apparently entirely constructed with cheap plastic curtain rails and is populated by a myriad of crap actors of whom Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf is the best known. Cue redneck dad discovering alien ship and returning with a rubber chicken stuck to his face.

We are also treated to seeing Ripley sat on butcher's grass in the space hospital, being given a really really stupid photograph of her dead daughter - looking like Judith Hann off Tomorrow's World" - and doing some unconvincing crying. Or did this happen before? Fuck it I'm doing this from memory, and it doesn't matter anyway.

What else do we have. Oh yes, the much vaunted "Sentry Guns" scenes, along with the silly conversation about "Ant Hives". The Sentry Guns look ok, as models go, but they kill aliens rather too easily - in the manner of the Army of the Dead in The Return of the King - and the aliens they do kill are re-run footage hastily stitched in from what looks like the first marine raid on the cooling towers, but given a sort of fuzziness to make it look a bit different.

Yep, it looks different. And worse, like a Squid Head Star Wars figure being blown up with a firework while having yellow washing up liquid thrown on it. Shot in Super 8 and shown over and over again.

We finish with some "Don't be gone long" twattery, but the worst "Deleted" bit, by a mile, is the dire dire Hudson "rap". Forcing us over and over again to "Check it out" he masturbates over his weaponry like it's the night before Columbine round Dylan Klebold's house, reaching an orgasm with a decisive "Whap" before sticking his hand down his government issue camos for another round of frothy hand fun. "We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks" he ejaculates, before Apone  - and all of us - fearful of getting another faceful of sticky word come - tell him to "knock it off."

Er, I thought that's what he was doing already. Anyway, stick with the original cut. It does you no harm, and as Sly Stone would say, it might even do you some good.

Booba Lacka Lacka Lacka Booba Lacka Lacka!