Investigators of Phenomena Involving Nimrods and the Supernatural,

I was playing football this evening; I marshalled a defence that was so tight that our goalkeeper became bored. Eventually, I volunteered to mind the net to allow him a kick of the ball for his money. Of course, he was not as good a defender as me and I was required to make some amazing saves. In between my heroics, I gazed at the lights in the sky – bright orange ones that seemed to hover and vary in intensity in a hypnotic fashion before disappearing completely. They weren’t UFOs but light aircraft waiting to land at Fife Airport.

STV repeated an episode of a series they made called Beyond Explanation last night. The first episode discusses two UFO cases. The first case was Tom’s; he had his first encounter as a boy in Aberdeenshire. Tom saw a red light hovering above the road on the way home from a piano lesson, and then he saw there were three of these lights. He ran home, brought his sister outside, the craft came towards them until it was overhead. They looked up and saw a circle of tiny red lights; the UFO remained above them for 30 seconds. This was the first of many encounters for Tom, each night of the week, he’d see these nights mingling in the sky and he believed they were recording him. He recorded the UFOs once or twice but the footage shown was inconclusive. Once into his thirties, he decided to move to New Zealand to escape the UFOs – his emigration was successful.

The second case was that of a man who might be viewed as a crank, George Smith from Inch, Aberdeenshire. George’s interview was recorded in his corrugated iron shack. One night, when he was sitting in his tartan-clad seat, he felt a strange urge to go outside, once outside, he saw lights that danced in the sky, brightening and fading – all for his attention. But that wasn’t the end of George’s story, he woke one night to see two aliens at the bottom of his bed, they were tall and human-like. When on business in England, he saw these same two aliens in the York pub, they communicated with him by telepathy. Once out walking, he met these two figures again at Inverurie stone circle. He claims to have been on their ship many times but they had only allowed him to recall 7 of his trips on board. He believes that the purpose of his encounters was for George to be given super intelligence to take on special tasks on Earth. With his super intelligence, he’s learned how to generate hydrogen from water; we saw George hook up a car battery to a tub of water and pop the hydrogen created by the electrolysis of water.

There are not enough programmes about UFOs on TV, and they few there are always feature the oddballs. I used to love It’s a Mystery on CITV, it was worth running home from school for and is still the best programme they've ever shown, apart from Taggart.