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.
Last week saw unprecedented media interest in the CFZ to the extent that when my friend Fleur logged on to MSN midweek a story about the Devil’s Fooprint in a Woolsery back garden was sitting there in cyberspace. It doesn’t get much bigger than MSN in the Internet age and our website and associated blogs spiked when the story hit.
The strange thing is that, in many ways, this is a non story. Whatever made those footprints, it was certainly not the devil but the lucrative combination of a winter’s scene, strange markings and a history of such folkloric goings on in Devon certainly made this a story worthy of the title “Weird in the South West”...
What we discover is that the mass media is run by people more interested in a lot of entertainment and a little news for our many serious expeditons to all parts of the globe have afforded us only patchy coverage at best. Recently, there was all the hoohah about a supposed “UFO”, some said “alien craft” hitting a wind turbine in Wiltshire. The story turned out to be a whole lot of nothing – a problem with the turbine itself – but for 24 hours the whole world was agog at the “best proof ever of aliens” or whatever UFO researcher Russell Kellett called it.
Against the background of job losses more extreme than the bout of redundancies in the 1970s and 1980s that some of us can remember and at a time when the economy is, to quote my boss at work, “on its arse” the media prefers to indulge us with stories about Cheryl Cole of Girls Aloud reaching the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and did she have an affair with Take That’s lead singer whilst trying to reach the peak and did her husband Ashley have one too many in a club the same night.
Where did all the serious stuff go?
What this tells us is the public, through the lens of a media dedicated to telling us as little as possible about the serious issues, is looking to feed us a diet of frippery, infotainment and total bullshit. The CFZ shall, it seems, have to live and learn and provide the media with stories of gooks, goblins and gay scandal whilst scientists and cryptozoologists seeks to answer the Big Questions about rare and undiscovered species.
Throughout history there is example after example of how small groups like ours have shaken the earth with the might of their ideas and the strength of their will in terms of having the guts to push themselves forward. We find Ourselves Alone in 2009. The media has decided that we have collectively witnessed “the end of history” and that there is nothing further to discover or to learn about ourselves and sceptics agree because they know best after all...
We shall, then, have to work the CFZ media machine even harder to provide our colleagues in the national and international newsrooms with stories about very little of substance and use their occasional grace and favour to bring the few decent and sentient beings into our orbit. As every day passes the best people are coming to the CFZ. Maybe only a few “active” converts each week or month but they are coming home to us. UFO Data magazine has just closed its doors as interest in that subject has plummeted in recent months probably because there is no meat in the subject.
But there is much detailed and depthy material to put out via cryptozoological news media and we shall continue to do this. In the space of three months we have witnessed a 1000% increase in visitors to our websites and if we need to talk about The Devil Incarnate to win the battle to make ours the most relevant, updated and dynamic website then we accept the challenge as we make the world a better place...just a little bit.
The strange thing is that, in many ways, this is a non story. Whatever made those footprints, it was certainly not the devil but the lucrative combination of a winter’s scene, strange markings and a history of such folkloric goings on in Devon certainly made this a story worthy of the title “Weird in the South West”...
What we discover is that the mass media is run by people more interested in a lot of entertainment and a little news for our many serious expeditons to all parts of the globe have afforded us only patchy coverage at best. Recently, there was all the hoohah about a supposed “UFO”, some said “alien craft” hitting a wind turbine in Wiltshire. The story turned out to be a whole lot of nothing – a problem with the turbine itself – but for 24 hours the whole world was agog at the “best proof ever of aliens” or whatever UFO researcher Russell Kellett called it.
Against the background of job losses more extreme than the bout of redundancies in the 1970s and 1980s that some of us can remember and at a time when the economy is, to quote my boss at work, “on its arse” the media prefers to indulge us with stories about Cheryl Cole of Girls Aloud reaching the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and did she have an affair with Take That’s lead singer whilst trying to reach the peak and did her husband Ashley have one too many in a club the same night.
Where did all the serious stuff go?
What this tells us is the public, through the lens of a media dedicated to telling us as little as possible about the serious issues, is looking to feed us a diet of frippery, infotainment and total bullshit. The CFZ shall, it seems, have to live and learn and provide the media with stories of gooks, goblins and gay scandal whilst scientists and cryptozoologists seeks to answer the Big Questions about rare and undiscovered species.
Throughout history there is example after example of how small groups like ours have shaken the earth with the might of their ideas and the strength of their will in terms of having the guts to push themselves forward. We find Ourselves Alone in 2009. The media has decided that we have collectively witnessed “the end of history” and that there is nothing further to discover or to learn about ourselves and sceptics agree because they know best after all...
We shall, then, have to work the CFZ media machine even harder to provide our colleagues in the national and international newsrooms with stories about very little of substance and use their occasional grace and favour to bring the few decent and sentient beings into our orbit. As every day passes the best people are coming to the CFZ. Maybe only a few “active” converts each week or month but they are coming home to us. UFO Data magazine has just closed its doors as interest in that subject has plummeted in recent months probably because there is no meat in the subject.
But there is much detailed and depthy material to put out via cryptozoological news media and we shall continue to do this. In the space of three months we have witnessed a 1000% increase in visitors to our websites and if we need to talk about The Devil Incarnate to win the battle to make ours the most relevant, updated and dynamic website then we accept the challenge as we make the world a better place...just a little bit.
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