The Mother of all Special Interests

Warning: Many of my articles may appear to be a bit unusual to those of you who don’t have an autism spectrum disorder. I do however usually expect those of you with an ASD to understand and empathise with that I’ve got to say, and I trust that you do. Be warned that this article may appear to be very left-field even to those of you who usually understand my work. The article is also rather long.

The following is all true and from the heart. I hope you can take it at face value.

I grew up in a family of mixed but unspoken religious views.

My father never spoke about his take on religion, and my mother went to the local Methodist church every Sunday. Until the age of eleven or so, my brother and I went too, and attended the Sunday School as well.

By the age of ten or eleven I was developing a strong sense of logic, one that has stayed with me ever since. I reached the conclusion at around that age that the bible was just a set of stories – the people mentioned had never existed, and that the church was playing a cruel trick on those who attended. I also decided that Sunday School was a lightly masked attempt at brain washing those who were too young to make up their own minds to become believers.

I told my mother about my thoughts, and following a brief argument I no longer attended church. I had made my own mind up, and logic told me that church wasn’t for me. Over the next few years I’d tell my school mates that I was an atheist if anything remotely like religion cropped up as a conversation.

Then, when I was fifteen, something happened that would change how I saw the world forever. I changed my views on religion and why we are here, and many other things besides.

You may be suspecting that I had something of a religious awakening, and in some ways it was – but at the same time it was something completely different.

This is the story behind what would turn out to be the biggest and most obsessive special interest of my life to this date, and the profound effects it has had on me.

When I was fifteen, I had an after-school newspaper delivery round. I’d pick up the local evening paper from the little newsagents a half mile from my house, and I’d spend forty five minutes or so wending my way back home delivering papers as I went. I’d done this for the previous couple of years, and could do the job pretty much with my eyes closed. I never did though – then as now I spent my time observing the world, seeing the patterns in every day things.

It was early autumn, and the evenings were drawing in. It was around 16:45 and still light – dusk was probably another hour away. I’d finished delivering the papers and was making my way up the little lane that led to our house. The road is single track and one way with the traffic flowing in the opposite direction to my up-hill walk, so I walked close to the side, near to the slightly ramshackle dry stone wall. As I passed the gate into the field on my left, something flew silently over my head, above the trees. Thirty seconds or so later I was passing the first of the houses on my left something caught my eye, and I looked up, whilst still walking.

The next five or six seconds would change my life forever.

What I saw made me stare wide eyed. I followed it, whilst still walking as it tracked across from the left of my view, over the park to my right and over the brow of the hill. I was agog, but not frightened. It was dark in colour, and cigar shaped. It had an intensely bright white light about half way along it that stayed on, and about half way through my sighting an intense red light came on towards the back of the object and then stayed on. Both lights had a strange single colour wavelength feel to them – much more like the colour you get from an LED than from a regular light. The object made no sound, and size-wise was equivalent to holding my thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart at arms-length.

I walked the remaining ninety seconds or so home, and sat down a little dazed. I was the first one home. What had I seen? We lived at that time about 20 miles away from one the UK’s large airports, and our house was over one of the regular approach paths to it. I saw planes every day, and they didn’t look like this, nor sound like it either. What’s more the object was flying at 90 degrees to the usual flight path, and felt to be flying much lower, although it’s impossible to judge the height of an object that is uniform in size and colour. Perhaps it was very small and flying low and fast, or maybe it was much bigger and flying slower. I couldn’t say then, and I can’t say now.

My mother arrived home some fifteen minutes later, and I made a decision about what I’d seen. “I’ve just seen a UFO”, I told her, and I explained what I’d seen. I don’t remember her reaction, or indeed my immediate thoughts and feeling from that point about it in detail.

What I can say is that my life took a new direction from that point onwards. I needed to know more. I took books out of the library about UFOs. I bought some books with my pocket money too. I read everything I could find. I joined the regional UFO group, and started getting and pouring over their amateur magazine.

In ways similar to my later discovery and dawn of understanding of Asperger’s, I started to see that I was far from alone in the sort of experience I had witnessed.

The group I’d joined had aspirations being UK wide, and they were publishing various case studies of famous (well in UFO lore at any rate) events. I spent my spare cash on buying lots of it, re-reading it over and over again.

Clearly, this had become in Asperger’s terms, a special interest. It was so much more than that though. It was obsessional. It was deeper than that even. Getting embroiled in a subject like this is in my book very similar to getting deeply into religion. You ask the same sorts of philosophical questions about where you come from, and just what your role in the universe is. Where did we come from? As a deep logical thinker and from a science background, this was a profound question to be asking.

And then there was the anxiety. This perhaps is the one feeling that you wouldn’t see coming. The more I read, the more I saw a hidden sinister side to things. I had a huge feeling that something big and organised was going on across the world, and that whilst it was understandable that the populace didn’t know about it, it seemed that perhaps the governments didn’t know it either. If they did, I got the impression they were powerless. That feeling not only made me hideously anxious at times, I also found it chilling, and at times terrifying. It felt like I was in on a big secret, and that no-one around me saw it.

Odd things happened. I attended two UFO conferences put on by the regional group that I’d joined. These proved to be strangely tense affairs, with people looking shiftily at each other for the whole day. One of the speakers mentioned that he was aware that there were undercover military people in the room. Another speaker’s presentation was ruined because their slides had been tampered with, rearranged into the wrong order. A previously working slide projector suddenly didn’t work when it was needed for the first time. All in all these conferences were strange.

And then there was the day when I was around 18, where I told my then girlfriend about my sighting. She went white, and started to tremble. She couldn’t immediately tell me why. Eventually, on another day she felt able to tell me. A couple of years previously she’d turned a corner on a road near her house and confronted a huge object hovering above the road. Despite not being good at reading non verbal signals, I could see she was terrified just recounting this to me. She said her memory of what happened next was hazy, and that she couldn’t tell me any more that day. Indeed she never chose to bring the subject up again. I can’t say that I blame her.

My obsession followed me to University when I was 19. As I’ve written elsewhere, I had trouble making friends at University, and I felt very disjointed from the usual university life. I received some counselling towards the end of my first year there, and as the obsession-lead anxiety was at times a big part of the problem, I once spent a whole hour of counselling just pouring out my knowledge and theories of UFOs to the counsellor. How very wonderfully, one-sidedly, Aspie.

Eventually the obsession waned. I think this probably happened once I left university, moved to London, got as job, and started living with my girlfriend. Perhaps I’d grown up a little. Perhaps I found new special interests that took it’s place. By the time this happened, UFOs had been my obsessional special interest for something like seven years. It had taken over my life at times, and had permeated pretty much every aspect of my life.

It’s never quite gone away. The fear and anxiety flares up from time to time. I repeated my hour-long monologue to another counsellor when I was being treated for depression in my final years in London. It cropped up again at bed time last night, which is why I’m writing this today. Last night I could feel the fear once more, and could hear my heart beating in my chest.

The reasons for it recurring, of course, is that I have no concrete answers. I may have spend huge amounts of time and effort trying to understand what my sighting meant, and what lay behind it, but I never did reach any conclusions that I had any way of proving.

Conclusions about UFOs are hard to come by. Many thousands of people see unidentified objects in the sky every year. Many of these are trained observers. There are a remarkably small number of similar shapes of object that come up time and again, and there are characteristics such as the lack of any noise from the object that are very commonly reported too. My logic tells me that I saw something real. Extrapolating that tells me that thousands of people a year also see real objects.

Do governments have a better picture of what is going on than I do? I suspect so, to a degree.

Were famous incidents such as the supposed Roswell crash actually UFO related? I have no way of knowing.  I’d put money on these objects having crashed somewhere at some time. But Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947? I don’t know.

Did I see something man-made and super secret? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Reports from the 1940′s talk of similar objects. I doubt very much we had the appropriate technology at that point in time.

Did the Dogon tribe from Mali get their thousands of years old folk lore that appears to rely on modern astronomy from extra terrestrials? I don’t know. I’ve read a book that suggests they did.

Were the stunning photos taken by Ed Walters in Gulf Breeze, Florida, in the late 1980s actually faked? I don’t know, but on the balance of probabilities, I suspect so.

Is the whole Majestic 12 thing for real? I don’t know. Could be. Might not be. People really do go to unimaginably long lengths to fake UFO-related material, and I’ve never understood the rationale behind that, so who knows. In the midsts of the obsession, the Majestic 12 documents seemed like a smoking gun. But was that just gullibility on my part?

I have, however, reached conclusions of sorts about God and my place in the universe.

I think life exists in many places in the vastness of space, and whilst I don’t believe in a God that took his time to create the Earth and everything on it, I can these days happily conclude there is some form of higher power at play. This may, as I tend to think,  spring from the physics of the universe itself, but I see no problem with someone else describing this as God, or Allah, or anything else for that matter. My place in things is here on earth at a wonderfully exciting point in human existence. I’m a tiny dot in a vast existence that stretches billions of miles in all directions, and that feels a good place to be.

What did I actually see that day half a life time ago? I don’t know.

But I did see something real, and it has shaped my life.

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