Tim Matthews is one of my best friends, and also - coincidentally - one of the most controversial figures in contemporary forteana. He has been involved with the CFZ for nearly a decade now, raising eyebrows wherever he goes. Once upon a time, in the 1990s, the X Files was all the rage and various appreciation groups, fans clubs, UFO groups, magazines and similar publications appeared and many of us jumped on the bandwagon.
Against this background, of every man wanting Gillian Anderson, some women preferring a Fox Mulder to their current model and teenagers scanning their heads in the barcode machine at their local supermarket checkout to see if they had an "alien implant", I came across a strange bunch of X-Files rejects on board a ferry to France the day before the famous Eclipse of the sun in 1999.
We arrived at Portsmouth one overcast afternoon, had a questionable meal in a local pub and wondered why, in a place as grim as this, the locals would have been against the practice of Press Ganging! Give them the open seas any day, I suggested!
Moving to the port where the ship was getting ready to sail into the English Channel in the direction of the French coast, I noticed some disquiet amongst a small group of unusual individuals to my left. These included a large gentlemen in a suit surrounded by a coterie of most unusual individuals that included one Richard of Freeman, Graham “Hawkwind” Inglis, a blonde floozie called Maxine and a weirdo called Jester who, it emerged, had spent a lot of time underground recently.
The large man, it turned out, was Jon Downes and I realised that I had seen him two years ago at a Conference in Sheffield mocking an American quack who claimed to be able to remove supposed “alien implants” from “abductees”. He was standing near me as the not very medical expert examined a woman by holding her head to the light in order to “look for implants”. This whole ridiculous procedure made me sick but what made me sicker was that many people watching this believed in the whole thing from the point of view that the medical establishment had clearly failed the subject in question. The woman in question, stuck in a wheelchair and clearly suffering from multiple (and obvious) medical problems looked to this charlatan for some little hope. He offered her nothing but it was an unpleasant spectacle that made a few people really think hard about the real impact of the X Files hysteria...
Downes was heard to remark, “in future we are going to have to do rather better than this” and it occurred to me then and there that his stall, selling books on mystery animals and associated subjects, was the direction things would go in years to come. “This UFO and X Files nonsense will last a few years more,” argued Jon, “and then it’ll be our turn.” And he was right but what the younger generation of would be zoologists, geologists and biologists probably don’t realise was that, back then, mainstream science was seen as an enemy of the truth. Anything using the scientific method was a problem and the weirder and more extreme the belief the more it fitted in with the believers, the publishers and the promoters of the “conspiracy”.
Perhaps, to an extent, this is still the case and it will always be difficult to adopt a 100% scientific approach when the quality of evidence for Paranormal events is so poor or is based upon first-hand accounts.
On board ship I spoke much with Downes and co and we hit it off straight away and he was most interested to learn of my family connections to various legendary underground music journals of the late 1960s and 1970s. We watched Uri Geller, another guest, bending spoons and spent some time talking publishing projects and Jon spoke of his plans for the future. I am happy to report that many of the things Jon envisaged and hoped for have come to pass although the continued call for less science and more intrigue never fails to annoy us. Seeing Cryptozoology as a mainstream scientific effort, whilst having to keep all sorts of interests on board, can never be easy and Jon likes to be at the very centre of things and in many ways he IS the very centre of things. Happily, he is more ready to delegate these days as the lessons we learned during the X Files period was that groups based on a single figure (for example UFO Magazine’s Graham Birdsall) never have a rosy future!
It is fascinating to compare the then - 1999 - with the now. The CFZ has published dozens of books, a regular magazine, appeared on numerous TV and radio shows and is making real progress with an all-new web presence. These are things of which we could only dream ten years ago when the Internet was in its infancy and Jon and I had to drive through the Cheshire countryside on ancient buses and trains to attend meetings!
Whilst many of those involved in the X Files movement have disappeared for good (thankfully), others have moved onto different pastures whether it be the Reptilian charades of David Icke or the cultism of the Raelians. We, however, have embraced the mainstream and are moving more in that direction as the days pass.
And guess what? Mainstreaming WORKS!
I remember Jon and I being invited to address the 2,000 or so Eclipsers on board the ship from the comfort on the Captain’s quarters and Jon making some comment about the sight and feeling of the Eclipse reminding him of HP Lovecraft’s work. He turned around to me and said, “The scenes during the Eclipse make me realise that Cryptozoology is the same thing; you rarely come across it but when you do it’s a magical experience that we can document for science.”
Against this background, of every man wanting Gillian Anderson, some women preferring a Fox Mulder to their current model and teenagers scanning their heads in the barcode machine at their local supermarket checkout to see if they had an "alien implant", I came across a strange bunch of X-Files rejects on board a ferry to France the day before the famous Eclipse of the sun in 1999.
We arrived at Portsmouth one overcast afternoon, had a questionable meal in a local pub and wondered why, in a place as grim as this, the locals would have been against the practice of Press Ganging! Give them the open seas any day, I suggested!
Moving to the port where the ship was getting ready to sail into the English Channel in the direction of the French coast, I noticed some disquiet amongst a small group of unusual individuals to my left. These included a large gentlemen in a suit surrounded by a coterie of most unusual individuals that included one Richard of Freeman, Graham “Hawkwind” Inglis, a blonde floozie called Maxine and a weirdo called Jester who, it emerged, had spent a lot of time underground recently.
The large man, it turned out, was Jon Downes and I realised that I had seen him two years ago at a Conference in Sheffield mocking an American quack who claimed to be able to remove supposed “alien implants” from “abductees”. He was standing near me as the not very medical expert examined a woman by holding her head to the light in order to “look for implants”. This whole ridiculous procedure made me sick but what made me sicker was that many people watching this believed in the whole thing from the point of view that the medical establishment had clearly failed the subject in question. The woman in question, stuck in a wheelchair and clearly suffering from multiple (and obvious) medical problems looked to this charlatan for some little hope. He offered her nothing but it was an unpleasant spectacle that made a few people really think hard about the real impact of the X Files hysteria...
Downes was heard to remark, “in future we are going to have to do rather better than this” and it occurred to me then and there that his stall, selling books on mystery animals and associated subjects, was the direction things would go in years to come. “This UFO and X Files nonsense will last a few years more,” argued Jon, “and then it’ll be our turn.” And he was right but what the younger generation of would be zoologists, geologists and biologists probably don’t realise was that, back then, mainstream science was seen as an enemy of the truth. Anything using the scientific method was a problem and the weirder and more extreme the belief the more it fitted in with the believers, the publishers and the promoters of the “conspiracy”.
Perhaps, to an extent, this is still the case and it will always be difficult to adopt a 100% scientific approach when the quality of evidence for Paranormal events is so poor or is based upon first-hand accounts.
On board ship I spoke much with Downes and co and we hit it off straight away and he was most interested to learn of my family connections to various legendary underground music journals of the late 1960s and 1970s. We watched Uri Geller, another guest, bending spoons and spent some time talking publishing projects and Jon spoke of his plans for the future. I am happy to report that many of the things Jon envisaged and hoped for have come to pass although the continued call for less science and more intrigue never fails to annoy us. Seeing Cryptozoology as a mainstream scientific effort, whilst having to keep all sorts of interests on board, can never be easy and Jon likes to be at the very centre of things and in many ways he IS the very centre of things. Happily, he is more ready to delegate these days as the lessons we learned during the X Files period was that groups based on a single figure (for example UFO Magazine’s Graham Birdsall) never have a rosy future!
It is fascinating to compare the then - 1999 - with the now. The CFZ has published dozens of books, a regular magazine, appeared on numerous TV and radio shows and is making real progress with an all-new web presence. These are things of which we could only dream ten years ago when the Internet was in its infancy and Jon and I had to drive through the Cheshire countryside on ancient buses and trains to attend meetings!
Whilst many of those involved in the X Files movement have disappeared for good (thankfully), others have moved onto different pastures whether it be the Reptilian charades of David Icke or the cultism of the Raelians. We, however, have embraced the mainstream and are moving more in that direction as the days pass.
And guess what? Mainstreaming WORKS!
I remember Jon and I being invited to address the 2,000 or so Eclipsers on board the ship from the comfort on the Captain’s quarters and Jon making some comment about the sight and feeling of the Eclipse reminding him of HP Lovecraft’s work. He turned around to me and said, “The scenes during the Eclipse make me realise that Cryptozoology is the same thing; you rarely come across it but when you do it’s a magical experience that we can document for science.”
No comments:
Post a Comment