TIM MATTHEWS: The morons in our midst

Everyone knew that the Roswell footage was a fake and yet few people bothered to even try and demonstrate this. It took efforts from myself and Philip Mantle to break the dam, so to speak, and begin to show how the footage had its origins in a cheap yet devious home grown, home made fake. Most UFO footage is either fake, or a case of mistaken identity, most ghosts aren't ghosts, and not one crop circle or similar formation has been laid down by aliens, the secret paranormal force or anything of that nature. And yet, despite our knowing this, small numbers of lunatics and believers want to take such simple matters of, in this case, flattened crops, to ridiculous extremes. The same could be said for people who believe that UFOs are alien craft, when, in fact, the better flying saucer sightings related to earthly craft flown under the cover of psychological warfare programmes operated by the military.

Against this background, we have seen the rise (and possible fall) of pseudo fakery like Most Haunted and Most Haunted Live, we have seen UFO Magazine and all its associated weirdery bite the dust and now the sensible people remaining are, it would seem, looking to groups like the CFZ for some sort of leadership and some sort of structure; a place where they can happily do their business and still retain a shred of integrity.

Into this maelstrom, where certain people want to make money at any cost (!), the credulous will always be sucked in and ripped off. The incredible will be said to be within reach and the gullible will be fooled, pay money and believe, pretty much, what they want to believe. Charlatans, fakers, forgers and friends have had a field day over the years. We have seen the Majestic 12 documents treated as gospel by American UFO researchers despite it being massively obvious that the whole thing is a fraud and a fake. The latter is, perhaps, or was, a good one, but it didn't take long for its inconsistency, illogic and fabrication to emerge.

But you can make money from such nonsense, and people do. You can get more hits on your website my making "exclusive" claims and by running "sensational stories" and nowhere has this been more obvious than within a certain segment of US counterculture and society. Some Americans, it would seem, will believe anything and the more extreme the story is the better.

We see, this week, an utterly ridiculous and frankly outrageous hoax promoted by people who really should know better. We shall call this latest insult to intelligence The Toy Goblin Conspiracy and concur that, despite all claims to the contrary, there is no father Christmas, no Mother Earth and certainly no new species of Mini Goblin haunting the shadowy world of our neo-Tolkeinesque existence.

How and why a small rubber toy could become the focus for extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence is almost impossible to understand. How long could anyone be fooled by such nonsense?

First last year's bigfoot scam, where talk of scientific evidence was thrown at a cheap monkey suit in a block of ice, and now a plastic Goblin toy.

Next they'll be telling us that the Loch Ness monster attack someone whilst sitting on a toilet in Inverness........