At an age when I was enjoying Enid Blyton’s series of ‘The Faraway Tree’ and then discovering ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, the village of my childhood was as slow and naturally rhythmic as a house that has never known television.
My imagination was nourished by reading. The images conjured up while reading Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Mowgli’ were as dark, fearsome and majestic as the growling jungle in which he lived. A filmed version of the book is someone else’s imagination and a caricature, further limited by a screenplay which, of necessity, leaves out a lot of detail. Although the name is the same, we’re not talking about the same thing.
Within roughly the same time and space, a Major Donald Keyhoe is being interviewed on television by Mike Wallace - the subject being ‘UFO’s are real.’
I didn’t see that - didn’t have television. It would be another few years before I discovered Science Fiction and devoured our local library of all such material, working methodically, A - Z.
Not too interested in ‘Star Wars’ type reading and feeling that it’s just ‘Cowboys and Indians in Space’, I naturally moved to the ‘What if?’ of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and others who have looked at this and other worlds and then changed some small detail or posed some ethical consideration when it comes to our own developing future and .......contact.
Fifty years go by before I see that interview with Donald Keyhoe. He is earnest. The interviewer is taking the emotional ‘tone’ of that time. Incredulous that the Government could or would hide such information from the public.
What can you say? It was 1958 and the Second World War wasn’t long ago. The Cold War was immediate. Secrecy was the ‘order of the day’ and .... nothing’s much has changed although various governments have opened their files on UFO related material.
There is no question about it - UFO’s are not only real, they pop up in medieval art. They really aren’t difficult to find.
What prompts this train of thought is the disconnect between what our main stream press feeds us as ‘worthy of attention’ and what is actually going on. The world we now inhabit has elements of all the science fiction I ate.
The New World Order ushering in The Brave New World of Animal Farm and of 1984 is grim in aspect but it also ‘ushers in’ a Universe teeming with ‘who knows what?’
Add the reality - also derided or dismissed - of a spiritual framework, a divine purpose, an unfolding before our eyes ..... something is stirring.
A perfect autumn day and the Easter holiday is over. Playing lots of guitar and life itself is magnificent. Who could argue with either the ‘glad yellow’ of a daffodil or a smile of delight from a babe in arms.
A cheerful pox on the ‘powers that be’ and notwithstanding Fukushima and every other man made catastrophe I hope for a global transformation of consciousness.
Rather than ‘kill the bastards’, I’d prefer ‘ oh - gee, golly gosh - I understand now - sorry - can we start afresh?’