From: United Kingdom UFO Network <ufo@holodeck.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 20:08:55 +0000
Fwd Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 22:46:20 -0400
Subject: Re: 91} part 3 - United Kingdom UFO Network

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 U K  /  /  //  ___/ /  /  '                               15th April 1998
     /  /  //  /    /  /  /  N E T W O R K                 part 3 Issue 91
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The United Kingdom UFO Network - a free electronic magazine with
subscribers in over 40 countries.

This issue comes in 4 parts. If any part is missing please mail:
ufo@holodeck.demon.co.uk giving the issue number. The issue will be
reposted to you. Please put the details as below in the subject
section e.g.  Repost {91} part 1, part 2, part 3 or part 4.

________________________

They can produce visions of the Earth blowing up on vast TV screens
and present these images to Jason and his mother simultaneously.

Mostly, such visitations are benign. But once, claims his mother,
Ann, they came to her in the night and painlessly induced a
miscarriage, implanting a voice in her mind that told her: 'It's all
for the best.'

There is much more in the same vein. Their story, told in a
compelling book by a respected and talented British journalist,
author of 13 books and an expert in the field of the paranormal,
could well be a best- seller.

Such accounts have already made fortunes in America, where alien
abductions have become a media sensation and have involved
mainstream scientists. Already, TV and film companies are said to be
interested.

All of this has been highly profitable. The Andrews family have been
mostly broke for years, sometimes living on less than 15 pounds a
week. The only asset they have ever owned is the scrubby little ten-
acre smallholding, near the village of Borough Green, which they
bought nine years ago for 25,000 pounds.

They live in a nearby council house. But every day the family move
up to their much-loved scrap of land and tend to their livestock - a
few ponies and a flock of geese.

Now all that has changed. The money will soon be rolling in. They are
already guaranteed some 60,000 pounds from the book, including money
from The Sun, who serialised it this week. They have their own agent
and the celebrity chat show circuit beckons.

'I'd be a hypocrite if I said the money wasn't nice,' said Ann. 'But
we never wanted to go public, and I never saw it as an opportunity
to make money.

WE THOUGHT long and hard about doing the book, and it was only after
big family discussions that we were persuaded it would help others.

The book's author, Jean Ritchie, is also quick to point out that if
she had never stumbled on the story in a copy of a magazine about
UFOs, the Andrews family would have remained in obscurity.

'I thought it would make a good magazine piece,' she said. 'But when
I met Ann and read her diary I saw that it was far more important
than that. I began as a total sceptic, but now I have an open mind.

'I feel they are telling the truth. I checked everything they told
me, including the medical records. I have the names of all the
doctors who were involved and there is no doubt they were mystified
by what the boy was telling them.

'There is no doubt Jason was suffering from strange injuries and
illnesses at the times when he claims he was abducted. There is
clear evidence of scarring and strange marks on his body. And
throughout it all Jason was consistent.

'One thing I am sure of: Ann and Paul Andrews are not liars out to
make money.'

There are two things to remember with alien abduction stories. One
is that they are almost comically derivative. If you have read one
you have read them all.

All aliens look the same. They all have saucer eyes, pointed heads
and are inherently benign. If they were monsters no one would ever
get back to their beds. Nothing new in the literature has appeared
in half a century, since the first B- movies of the Forties and
Fifties.

Second, the victims of abductions cannot lose. It is impossible to
disprove a paranormal invention. All they have to do is get their
story right and stick to it. If witnesses say you never left the
house that night, you simply devise a scenario when every one else
in the house was zapped into frozen immobility for several hours.

Why didn't the video camera and the tape recorder set up to capture
the aliens see the bright lights and hear the noises? Because they
knock out all electronic equipment. And so on. For each reasonable
question there is an unreasonable but complete answer. The aliens
have all power.

So are the Andrews just liars and fantasists trying to earn a little
media money? The answers to these questions are fascinating and
complex.

AND the answers, in turn, pose intriguing questions about so much of
the burgeoning UFO industry. There is no doubt Jason was a disturbed
little boy. He suffered from bad dreams and he sleep-walked. Both he
and his older brother, Daniel, told their mother they had seen
things in the night.

Jason's schooling was a disaster. He began to be disruptive and was
threatened with expulsion. He was forced to undergo psychiatric
counselling.

Up until that point neither of his parents made any claims of alien
intervention. Then Paul got some books from the library. And they
began to immerse themselves in the cult of alien visitation and
abduction.

The possibilities of this childlike rubbish are endless. Every
dream, every small family crisis, every strange sound, every odd
piece of behaviour by their pets, even a lightbulb blowing, becomes a
sign of alien intervention. The Andrews family became instant
converts.

'Suddenly, it all made sense,' said Ann. 'We knew we had found the
answer.'

What she had found was an elaborate potpourri of pseudo- scientific
mumbo-jumbo, invented by largely harmless obsessives, that has
become a flourishing industry in the Western world.

They contacted one of the leading British 'authorities' on this
phenomenon, an agency called Quest, and were eagerly welcomed to the
fold by Tony Dodd, a retired Yorkshire policeman who styles himself
Director of Investigations.

For Dodd the Andrews family were the find of a lifetime. He became
their guru and protector. Using the gaudy terminology of the genre,
he explained each of Jason's symptoms and instructed them what to
look out for.

Above all, he told them they were special, chosen people. Nobody had
ever done that before with the Andrews. It was like the opening of
floodgates. Ann, who had never felt any connection to all this,
suddenly began to remember childish visions, which eventually led to
a whole slew of 'recovered memories', including the miscarriage
induced by aliens.

The family attended UFO conferences and soaked up the lore of it
all. Ann began to see the faces of the aliens herself, drew pictures
of them, and began a diary of invasion. By the time Ritchie stumbled
upon the story the entire family were already well- read in every
facet of alienism.

They became convinced that Government scientists were removing their
dead animals, that the council was conspiring against them and that
strange military activity was taking place in a nearby Territorial
Army base. They began to produce endless anecdotal evidence that
their isolated farm was surrounded by strange forces which had the
power to immobilise their animals and geese into living statues.
After this came a series of mutilations to their horses.

ONE horse was discovered to have a large flap of skin hanging loose.
But there was no blood or damage to the tissue and the animal wasin
no discomfort.

'The vet said he had never seen anything like it,' said Paul
Andrews. 'And he was able to stitch the flap back without sedating
the animal'

At another time they noticed that all their horses had become lame
in the same back leg. 'There were little round boles that seemed to
have been punched into the flesh,' said Ann. 'Again the horses
didn't seem to be suffering.'

The Quest investigators loved all this. Animal mutilation is a major
issue for them. It proves, for them, that aliens are testing for
toxins in living creatures.

One day the family found four dead mice laid out in a neat row near
the gate to the farm, each one with a tiny hole in it's skull. This,
ironically is the only hard piece of evidence the family have ever
produced. And they are very proud or the snapshot of the dead mice.

Ritchie could find no chink in it- because there was none. An entire
family was by now immersed in what the psychologists call passive
group hysteria, and the fact that they could produce not a single
tape recording, photograph of the 'visitors', or physical injury was
explained away by the common response: the aliens were so far
advanced in technology that they could do anything.

Ritchie did try to contact the medical and school authorities, but
got nowhere. She talks of Jason's medical records, but she didn't
actually see them; she only saw the notes which his mother had made
from them.

After months practically living with the family, Ritchie produced
her 80,000-word blockbuster. She, too, is now part of their world
her next book will be into other aspects of alien intervention.

It may be impossible to expose an illusion-but it is easy enough to
see the essential silliness that lies at the heart of it. All you
have to do is spend some time with the boy himself sitting in the
tiny wooden shed at the farm where some of these strange events
happened, I put him through his paces and the whole charade began to
collapse.

In two hours of questioning he rarely gave a full answer. Within
moments of our interview beginning both his mother and Jean Ritchie
were jumping in.

When I quoted specific incidents In the book, in which he talks in
great detail, he faltered repeatedly, and each time the two women
moved in with answers: 'Don't you remember, Jason, that was the time
you saw the one you called the Monk,' says his mum. 'The one with
the hood.'

'You saw the Instruments in his hands, didn't you Jason?' suggests
Ritchie. Again and again, under prompting, he tried his best. 'Yeah.
uh, like I remember seeing the Monk, with a sorts hood thing. I
sensed he was wise, you now ... oh could see something in his hand.'

Again and again he missed his cue. Did you feel any pain when you
woke with the scars in your body? He looked blank for a moment, then
finally decided to ignore the question. We looked at each other in
silence. I felt sorry for him.

Eventually he began to run out of answers of any detail at all. From
then on his only reply to any of my questions was: 'I, uh, don't
remember things too clearly. That's why I always run into my Mum's
room and tell her to write it all down. She knows it all.' And he
looked at her pleadingly.

Did you hear them speaking? 'You think you hear things. Sometimes I
hear some funny voices ... coming from somewhere ... like, uh, I'm
thinking things in my head ...'

Jean Ritchie breaks in, reminding him that they use telepathy. This
was allegedly the same boy who, in the book, can give this kind of
descriptive detail. 'There is a pattern to the bad nights, the
nights when things happen to me ...

'I've got a very good alarm clock, a state-of-the- digital one, and
it always stops at 3am. That's the time it happens... I always try
to go back to sleep, in the hope that nothing will happen, but then
I see something almost out of the corner of my eye.

'It rises up through the floor. It's a big one. There's only ever
one a big one. It's about 5ft 4in tall, just a bit shorter than me.

THE head is large, with big black eyes on a slant which go round the
side of the head, and a very small nose and mouth

'It's thin, and it has the long, dark fingers that I remember from my
baby days ... I'm aware of the little ones. I never see where they
come from, they're Just there ... They scuttle around. busy, busy,
busy, they never stay still.

'Sometimes they bring some other creatures with them. I call them
koalas because they are small and furry like bears ...'

When he began to look at the floor in silence, I had had enough.
Leaving the dilapidated little farm, I was rather glad that the
family were coming into their small fortune. They are nice people and
they almost certainly believe by now that they are telling the truth.

But I had a bad feeling about Jason. He is now locked forever into
his role as Britain's most famous alien abductee. Each day he will
have to face derision and hostility at a school where he once
suffered pain and rejection. And already, inside his extended
family, there is agrowlng anger at the publicity.

Jean Ritchie is central to all, of this. She is a talented writer
with the ability to give the stamp of authenticity to any story.
Whether she really believes this spider's web of nonsense or not is
something that only she knows.

But it is entirely due to her that two things will happen. A hard-up
and likeable family will become moderately rich and be feted briefly
on the celebrity circuit before being spat out and forgotten.

And a rather lonely young boy, who has shown evidence of emotional
and behavioural problems, will become a kind of freak show.

ABDUCTED, by Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie, is published by Headline
Book Publishing Ltd at 16 pounds 99 pence.

[UK 7]******

Source: Daily Mail newspaper
Publish date: Saturday 21st March 1998

Private rocket nosedives after four seconds above Dartmoor

By Nick Constable

A PLUME of thick smoke over Dartmoor bore testimony yesterday to the
short flight of Starchaser III.

Amateur rocket scientist Steve Bennett had seen his dream of
launching a British space mission end in only four seconds.

His rocket managed a mere 200fh before a major malfunction. Instead
of soaring 15,000ft into the skies, the 4401b-rocket veered crazily
into the side of a heather-clad valley on a military firing range.

The 2Oft-long craft - the result of two years' work and 70,000 pound
in sponsorship - bounced twice before exploding.

It scattered flaming debris and rocket fuel across a wide area of
tinder-dry grass. Fanned by a stiff breeze, flames spread across
several miles of moorland. Mr Bennett, 33- year-old director of the
Space Technology Lab at Salford University, led students who
attempted to damp down the flames before the fire brigade arrived.

Soldiers from the nearby military camp at Okehampton were brought in
to help fight the fire.

All civilians were moved away from the crash area because of fears -
that artillery shells buried on the firing range might explode. The
occasional bang could be heard as live ammunition caught fire.

By last night fire officers, who could not venture off the roads for
fear of explosion, had decided, to let the fire burn itself out.

With hindsight, Mr Bennett said it would have probably been a good
idea to have had the fire brigade standing by. He said his party did
have a couple of fire extinguishers. Police said they were 'very
surrised' that the fire brigade had not been alerted beforehand and
talked about Mr Bennett 'footing the bill' for the fire-fighting
operation.

-[continued in part 4]-