In which The Author has a letter printed
in the regional newspaper
In ‘A Letter From the Editor‘ I mentioned that I used to be a prolific letter-writer to the local press. This one was published in the South Wales Echo. It appeared on my day off, so I didn’t know it had appeared until the following day. Apparently the lads in Mulligan’s laughed so loudly when they read it that Jeff and Laurie were surprised I didn’t hear them from my house.
Your little jibe (Editorial, 21 September) about buses running on time made me wonder about the parallels between UFO sightings and bus non-sightings.
Both UFOs and missing buses are frequently reported by a wide cross-section of the public, regardless of their age, gender or religious background. Both phenomena used to excite a great deal of interest by local newspapers and TV stations, but are now largely disregarded. Reliable witness testimony is usually met with disbelief, if not outright scorn, by the bodies concerned with their official investigation. UFO abductees and bus passengers often set up support groups in order to compare notes, and offer each other help and counselling in recovering from their traumatic experiences. In both cases, the government has stonewalled any calls for an enquiry into the phenomenon, claiming simply that it doesn’t exist.
Some American theorists have suggested that UFO sightings in the 1980s were in fact test flights of the radar-invisible ‘Stealth Fighter’, and were therefore denied by the Pentagon on the grounds of national security. Is it possible that Shamrock Coaches have developed a ‘Stealth Bus’, invisible to all forms of detection, including the human eye? I think we should be told …
An Autobiography in Random Chapters 