This week I am excited. Major validation of a phenomenon I have known existed for years, UFO’s. In the early 1970’s I was staying for the weekend on Paul Getty’s Estate, Sutton Place near Guildford in Surrey. It was a warm summer’s evening and we were dining outside. Quite suddenly there seemed to be an oppressive silence as if all sound had been sucked into a black hole. We looked towards the sky. Travelling from one horizon to the other was what appeared to be a huge circular object with an array of lights beneath it. It moved in a zig-zag fashion right across the sky as if scanning all below and then disappeared. We rang Northolt RAF Station to report it. For a while I kept quiet about our encounter but then shortly after my return home in 1976 I met a senior American business-man who said he had seen the same thing in Arizona around the same time. Then last Sunday, CBS’s “ 60 Minutes” aired a programme on UFO’s. Barack Obama participated and said “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know what they are and we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory”. Finally the issue goes mainstream. It no longer sounds nuts to talk about such things. I know what I saw. In the U.S. even the Republicans are getting in on the act. Senator Marco Rubio, Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said “ I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously”. What is driving all of this ? There is a requirement under last year’s U.S. Appropriation Bill that the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defence work on a “Detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence” and that a report is due out in the next 6 weeks.
Now I have had more than a passing interest in this subject for a long time. Science Fiction has intrigued me and my first job after going to Harvard was working for the book publishers Faber & Faber in London. Whilst there I did some work on the Science Fiction list. Also like many of my generation I was intrigued by Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods”. Originally published in 1968 it suggested that the technologies and religions of ancient civilisations were given to them by the Gods or astronauts from ancient civilisations. It sold 70 million copies worldwide. Many of his ideas have been debunked by academics and scientists but if there are visitations taking place now, why not centuries ago. It is curious but this news has really awakened my spirit in a way I had not felt since I stared up at the night sky in the 70’s and saw something incomprehensible that I knew many would not believe. Maybe now part of what is going on will be revealed. But what ? and how will we react to it ? Part of me thinks what a mess us humans are making of looking after our beautiful planet and maybe we need some extra-terrestrial help in handling it.
Finally I cannot let this week go by without expressing my utter disgust with the organised crime group that carried out the hack on the HSE. This is an attack on the Irish State taken from within the Russian State. Putin must take responsibility for what happens in St. Petersburg.