YOU'D BETTER BELIEVE IT!

By Hugh Thomas

They say there was once a man who went all round the world, believing everything he was told wherever he went. When he came home, he wrote a book about his experiences. It was called Gullible’s Travels. Such a character is Matthew Williams, a personable young Welshman who’s a modern day Gullible if ever there was one. Matthew was the visiting speaker recently at the Bristol-based British Flying Saucer Bureau’s monthly meeting. Despite the grandiose name, they’re a small group of armchair ufologists, sleeveless jumper wearing pensioners stuck in a 1950s time warp. Unlike the stalwarts of BFSB however, Matthew is an exponent of the new wave of British ufology. For the new breed, the subject began around 1990. Matthew is an evangelising disciple of modern UFO messiah Timothy Good: now there is a grand name for a guru. Good is the professional musician who’s written a series of fat best sellers on ufology. He tours the country’s municipal halls preaching to the nose-ringed faithful at eleven quid a throw, telling them The Government Knows About UFOs. Crashed ships, alien autopsies, off-worlders in the UN: you name it, he believes it, and he wants us to be true believers too. Believing things is the hallmark of the new ufologist: no place here for scepticism, healthy or otherwise. In the course of his evening’s presentation, young Matthew intimates that he believes not only in flying saucers and alien abductions, but also in out-of-body experiences, clairvoyance, spiritualism, telepathy, ghosts, and probably a few other things I’ve forgotten too. Later I take advantage of a lull in the question session after his talk to ask: is there any fringe belief at all to which he does not subscribe?

Yes, crop circles, he says. He reckons a lot of the experts in that are only in it for the money. Perhaps catching an uneasy shifting in some of the audience - after all, we are near Wiltshire here - he modifies his position. OK, he says, there probably was a phenomena (sic) there originally, but it’s now hidden by all the mess made by money grubbers and hoaxers. Ah, that’s better: you can hear the audience relax again. They can keep believing. For a moment he was sounding like one of those terrible sceptical people, those cynics, people without an open mind. Matthew’s own belief began when he was driving from his Mid Glamorgan home one night and received a welcome in the hillside from a strange triangular light across the valley. Losing sight of it, he didn’t even bother to look in that direction on the way home again. A week later though, it all came back to him “like a bucket of water being thrown over me”, and that was it. He looked up the Good Book and was duly hooked. Matthew talks of his life before UFOs, doing hand brake turns in supermarket car parks with his mates. Life had no meaning, he says. Now it has. He talks of coming out of darkness into light, and he edits a magazine called Truth Seekers’ Review. Again I try my luck with a question. Given the foregoing and other signs - the meeting is in a Friends Meeting House and he stands in front of us well groomed in his best suit, like one of those Mormon missionaries - has it occurred to him that what he’s caught up in here is actually a religious movement?

Matthew is unfazed. He hints that these things are all connected. UFOs, God...life, the universe, everything. A woman in the audience pipes up. Does he realise someone is guiding him? There is a golden aura round his head. Oh yes, he nods, she is not the first to say this. Talking to me later, one local ufologist is frank about how he got into the field. “I lost my faith in religion when I was young, I started looking round for some explanation for how things are, and I found it in the flying saucers.” An older couple, until recently happily touring crop circles as their main summer months pastime, relate a similar tale. They got into crop circles after being professional wrestling fans - then it was all debunked by the News of the World. He cheerfully admits to a long line of disappointments, traced right back to discovering as a child that Santa Claus wasn’t real. His wife says she was brought up a convent girl. But back to Matthew. He spends much of his time now hanging round the perimeter fence at West Country military sites like Rudloe Manor, hoping to get arrested by the MOD police like his hero Good. Matthew and his chums are convinced that it’s all going on in the underground tunnels below Wiltshire: the Truth is Down There. He distributes a map to the audience at the end of his talk. He’d even hired a light aircraft to fly over the place to help him draw it, “unusual air shaft buildings” and all. And if you’re still not convinced, there’s the evidence of the strange people seen walking dogs around the military base. Strange, because they’re all wearing similar clothes: green wellies, green wax jackets - almost as if they were all issued from the same store. BFSB’s members are duly impressed by Matthew. Crowding round him at the end like overage teeny boppers, they snap up Truth Seekers’ Review like there’s no tomorrow. Gullible? You’d better believe it.

The above article was first published in Humanist News

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