A bloke wandered into my office last week asking for directions to Bentwaters air base. I’m normally rubbish with directions (as I’ve explained before), cheerfully sending people miles in the wrong direction before realising my mistake, but this time I was pretty confident given that this particular air base is, to use a hackneyed and often inaccurate term, a stone’s throw from where I live. I was sitting at my computer so I helpfully pulled up a Google map for the rather rotund chap who had a northern accent and clearly wasn’t from this carrot crunching part of the world. Then he got a bit weird.
“Can you zoom in on the airstrip?” he asked. I was confused, but humoured him. “I’m looking for the ridges in the tarmac,” he continued, “where the UFO shot out its laser beams.” Oh. He was one of them.
My home village of Rendlesham is the location of Britain’s most ‘credible’ UFO sighting in 1980, and tourists still come to look at the site. It has, of course, been fairly conclusively debunked but the conspiracy theories persist and countless books have been written on the subject.
“I really don’t think you’ll find anything,” I said.
“Oh, the ridges are definitely there. The UFO created them to stop any other aircraft from taking off and pursuing them. I’ve been researching the Rendlesham UFO for months now and the whole thing has clearly been a massive government cover-up.”
“I take it they forgot to cover up the ridges then.”
“You shouldn’t doubt it,” he continued, with a look in his eyes that seemed to pity my naïveté. He then enthused: “I’ve driven over 200 miles just to see the place.”
“Well, let’s hope you didn’t have a wasted journey,” I offered charitably. He was about to leave but then stopped at the door.
“Did you say you live near where it happened?”
“Mmm.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever noticed anything strange, have you? Like feeling dizzy or being unable to account for long periods of time?”
I was going to make a crack about drugs or alcohol but chickened out. He was bigger than me. “No.” He seemed to realise at this point that he was flogging a dead alien.
“Just do yourself a favour and read the books,” he grinned, before stepping outside and being zapped skywards by a blinding shaft of light.
But, you know, that could have been anything.
2 comments:
The complete lack of evidence of "alien" visitors is, of course, an indication of just how efficient our masters in Whitehall have been over the years in covering it all up. (You'll never convince them!)
Love the ending! I usually fret over people's irrationality, but I guess in this case it's not really doing anyone any harm. Yet.
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