I Alien: Memoirs of a UFO Spy

ten years old

1980, I am a child of ten years, and I am an underweight, dirty-looking boy whose destiny is yet to be fulfilled. My neck is filthy, my hair is long, so long I can place it in my ears. My nails are not cut; they too are long and have filth embedded under them. I am walking down the street with an old pram, the shiny polished metal looking better than I. The scrap loaded on the pram is the cargo, the cot section now removed and two wooden boards now replacing the cot. I pretend the pram is a tank.

The pram is transporting an old kettle, an exhaust, some old car battery, and iron, like a scene from some slum in India. I am wearing flared trousers, which my mum bought me from a charity shop, and the other kids down the street are laughing as the clothes are out of fashion.

The scrap merchant is my hope the misery will be erased from my mother. My father was paid Friday and had run out of money by the following Wednesday. Some young men in a car are laughing at me, it pulls up and in chorus they all say, ‘hey, tramp get a wash.’ Then they drive on.

I was called a ‘tramp’ in those days because I had a dark tanned skin look about me; with an unclean neck to match! Nobody ever said anything apart from my grandma, who accused my mother and father of abuse. I was, so it seemed, some kind of child brought up by parents of the Victorian era and I belonged in a workhouse. I certainly looked the part.

Taken in 1975, my parents in poverty with the horrors of abuse around the corner for me.

Into the scrap yard with a pram that squeaked and the look of a homeless child. The unfolding scene presented to the owner made him think I was some ghetto child. I saw car parts piled high. He had a pipe in his mouth. Tweed hat, green coat and a Volvo in the car park. In fact, through my child-like eyes, everyone looked wealthier than my parents and me. A stern glance from the scrap dealer and then a raise of his voice, ‘you have to be eighteen to sell scrap.’

His wife appeared with a matching barking Alsatian dog, looked at me, a scruffy child before her, and announced, ‘He is right, you have to be eighteen to sell scrap, my love.’

With my usual honesty and manners as taught by my monster of a father, I looked at the lady in disappointment and said, ‘Sorry, my mum and dad have no money and no food. You can take the items, but can I keep my pram as a tank?’

She looked at me, looked at her husband and tutted, and the scrap man said, ‘I know love, I know.’

As the gypsy child of the town stood before her, she paused and said, ‘You stay there. At least your pram has wheels,’ she laughed.

She came out again with milk, tins of beans and soup, and some bread, and said (in what my good religious friends in later years would call a miracle; and in those most turbulent of years a few miracles would appear), ‘Take them for your mum and dad, leave the scrap here but take your pram. Not my business, love, but you must tell your mum to cut your nails.’

I thanked her and journeyed back to the filthy house my abusive father had chosen for me to live in.

eleven years old

By the time the 1980s arrived, a recession had hit the country in a time of trade unions being called in and out of strikes. My parents lived through turbulent times economically, attempting to pay their bills as well as feed and clothe me. The height of the ‘Cold War’ and Margaret Thatcher’s Britain is what we faced. For me, life was a matter of survival. Life turned out to be a warzone. I incarnated into an environment full of psychological violence. In 1981, I am 11 years of age, we are children at play and Jane, a little older than me, is about to once again shatter any illusions of being an innocent child.

With no warning, she pulls my hair so hard it easily could come off my scalp. The pain is relentless. I hit her, screaming at her, and by comical irony, she in this strangely twisted moment of violence cried at my blows but still kept pulling my hair!

As I write, a level of upset boils up inside me at the memory of Jane dragging me along the street to her house, my screams ignored. I will never forget the pain and brutality of my childhood, like an invisible entity that followed me. Led into a room with paperless walls. No carpets on some floors and just a bucket in the bedroom. A reflection of the house I also lived in as a little boy.

Our house was built in the Victorian era and a short walk away from the ruins of a derelict paper mill and small dam. The only carpet was in the living room and it was always dirty due to the fireplace spitting out burning embers, sometimes burning me in the process! I would also bathe in a tin bath.

The attic was a spooky affair; the floorboards carried a unique sound, and the bedrooms were always cold because of the lack of heating.

First Close Encounter Incident at two years of age. My father tries to calm me as I see elephants trumpeting. They vanish straight into the wall, though in truth Lord Ganesha had entered the room.

A large cupboard room that I later used for my radio listening hobby.

Old crates full of beer bottles up in the attic.

Sometimes during the night I would hear strange sounds from the floorboards.

My parents used buckets as a toilet, as the house had no bathroom. The urine smell was strong and as a child all normal for me.

Back in Jane’s house, an equal level of squalor surrounded me tied to a chair, as her older sister, Fiona, walked into the room naked to try seducing me. An ugly incident, all the more bizarre, when their mother walked in all nice and friendly asking what’s going on.

To add to the grotesqueness of their mother’s smile and her bizarre reaction, it did look like a trance had taken her over, the whole affair truly in the land of the insane. I barged past her and ran for my life down the stairs and out, running to the safety of my home. A house of dirt and of threadbare carpets, of damp and strange sounds in the night. My parents who never received enough money and at times went hungry so that I could eat.

I can see myself, seven or eight years old. Children of the same age pull me to the ground, causing my head to be banged against the tarmac. My hair was unwashed, giving a greasy look, and one of the boys in the playground said, ‘my mum says you look like a tramp!’

In those days, Paul, Adrian, and Julian stalked me like prey. My primary school playground in 1978 a harsh and violent environment, and the scream of the teacher above the violent clash complete with nose bleed and black eyes were the only things that split us up.

But the onslaught did not end there and then. The clothes I stood in were also filthy, and we had rats in the back yard of our house. At the back of the house, in the derelict buildings, feral cats to keep the rats company.

My father would take me out to help him chop wood in the wasteland. My hands would be freezing from the cold. When we returned indoors, he would play nice music like ‘The Mull of Kintyre’ by Paul McCartney and Wings, and make me sing for him.

The transition from primary to junior school could be termed a transit exercise from one level of madness to another. All the other kids were smartly dressed, and I never dressed well.

I experienced fights in the playground, and even more violence outside of school life, as my parents argued a lot. My mother also argued with the teacher because I found it hard to cope with. My father also argued with my mother over the bills they could not afford to pay.

My father used to hit my mother, and she would try to cope by often getting drunk. The spectre of abuse still today haunts me from my past, and to survive all this, it took a heavy toll on my psyche in my childhood.

My grandmother would almost throw me headfirst into the bath and I would scream and complain when she would pour water upon my head. She would place a towel over my face to stop the water from getting into my eyes and I suffocated as the water poured over me.

As for my parent’s marriage, pure hatred for my dad from both my mother’s parents. Gran would always refer to my father when speaking to my mother as ‘that bloke you married’.

The relationship between my mother and grandma was just as volatile, as they were always arguing. My father was like some type of psychopath dishing his usual array of abuse upon me. Never did he question his actions. He was repulsive, and there were things that happened that no father should ever do to his son! He had this strange odour about him I will never forget.

During the 1940s my father, as a child, shared a bed with his two adult brothers who were drunk. For me, the internal mental chatter of trying to cope with all this and the forthcoming typical week of school that awaited me built up and so on a Sunday night the dread of going to school would hit me like a storm, and then Monday morning would arrive.

I struggled to draw a straight line, struggled to tie a shoelace, and I could also not add up. I remember one teacher, in particular, who would have me stand until playtime on a Monday, attempting to count the dinner money. Unfortunately, I could not tell the difference between the coins or their values and got shouted at, which made life a misery. This, reader, is the world of education in the 1970s and I would cry and repeat to myself I am a failure and remain as lonely as an island with nobody to turn to.

My grandma would say ‘you never cut your nails, they are always dirty. You will never meet a nice girl as your nails are not clean.’

My grandma was a wealthy woman, my parents continued living in squalid conditions and I tried to struggle as a child of neglect and abuse.

My father was a Scout Master and worked for the local authority. Everyone called him ‘Skip’. He never cared about his own physical appearance and that was reflected in how I looked, exposing me to all kinds of cruel taunts from other children.

My Father, Reg. I wonder at times if he was also mysteriously targeted as in later years we would not get along as father and son. While he showed kindness to others, there was a mysterious negativity that polluted him.

The strange world of madness I occupied became even stranger as time passed. My mother despaired and would on a morning, as I got up for school, be in a dark mood shouting and bawling, a world that as a child I did not comprehend.

Back to the playground violence, and Friday at school would once again erupt into a ferocious battle. I lunged forward with my long uncut nails, from weeks of neglect, striking the bully Simon in the face. Why the teachers did not observe all this is beyond me. Another friend, Clive, would often call me a tramp as I looked so dirty.

My long nails were now my weapons of defence, scratching the faces of other children in reaction to being bullied. The horrors of my father’s parenting and the neglect of both my parents were my constant companion, and so my nails were now machine guns.

‘Look at my nails, Dad!’ I would say, ‘no bullies are going to stop me!’

My dad would glance, nod his head in agreement and continue watching television. I did not exist, as far as his father-to-son communication indicated. Insanity stalked him.

My grandmother would look in horror at my nails and cut them, tutting and wondering what the hell my parents are doing. I did not understand any of my worlds and thought this all normal. In the playground, my nails were like a medieval weapon in battle. On Monday morning, Clive’s mum brought him to school with his face all scratched. Before the headmaster, I stood on that morning to explain what I did to him. I blurted out why with shocking honesty, in front of the class, ‘this is war!’ I was like a soldier child in a psychological war and floating in a sea of neglect. The innocent smartly dressed children, whose parents had more money than mine, were looking back at me. The strategy of the headmaster was to embarrass me in front of the class. All this had dramatic recoil for the headmaster who, hurtling like an express train, headed to a bizarre incident of me making him speechless. I recall being a hard little bastard back then, surviving from day to day against the onslaught of life and abuse which I perceived as normal.

I would not tolerate the injustice before me even at such a young age. A silence came over the room as the headmaster held court, intent on embarrassing me. In my mind all adults had blindness as to what I was going through, as he started to ask why I had scratched Clive’s face. As a reflection of history of my life when dealing with the years of abuse I had suffered, an ice-cold calm came upon me. The headmaster looked up and asked the million-dollar question, whilst a silence transcended upon the classroom. ‘Anthony, you have scratched Clive’s face quite badly. Why did this happen?’ he said in a calm tone.

‘It’s because he called me a nigger and a gypsy and said I never got washed; he also says my mother has big boobs.’

Not quite realising what I said in the presence of an adult, the reaction of the headmaster was silence! Stunned. A mute silence flooded the air. The class did not dare laugh at the breasts remark, which I had boldly blurted out.

Staring at me pitifully, the headmaster had a look of horror in his eyes, followed by a strange shaking of his head, ashamed of the whole affair. He tutted loudly. His look of speechless disgust I cannot forget. Slowly taking off his glasses and polishing them, he asked me to make sure my mother cut my nails and that he would need to speak to her. The headmaster did not say a word more and asked me to exit the classroom.

The headmaster spotted my brilliant ability to read and act and had me reading stories to the other pupils. He had me read out in front of the whole school and said ‘marvellous expression, Anthony!’ His wife, a supply teacher, also noted I had an ability to dance, but such joyous moments of learning would be short-lived as my whole psyche cracked, surrounded by a sea of insane parenting and lunatic schooling environments.

Back in the school warzone, it was brutal and persisted with a normality that was far from normal. The teacher, Miss Hunt, looked down upon me as I lay injured with a broken arm. I will never forget her words! ‘You stupid boy! What are you doing down there?’ Miss Hunt thought the injury a sprain, but I was a child nearly collapsing in pain, and yet she seemed oblivious to my broken arm. I went to the hospital; the doctor recoiled in horror that the teacher had let me stay in class for 3 hours in agony with a broken arm. Delirious, I eventually got to the hospital via public transport. They gave me an anaesthetic and its impact hit as I saw imagery of the injection shooting up my arm like a speeding train. My visual decoding mechanism kicked in, I saw the flash of a galaxy, and it staggered me and made no sense.

uncle barry

I played with anything that resembled a space rocket, drew spaceships, pretended my bedroom and the twin tub washer acted as the control panel of a giant craft traveling through space.

‘I speak to the aliens,’ said Uncle Barry who lived in a village near my town. I often wondered if my Uncle was having some communication with the aliens, but perhaps the vodka caused it.

Barry’s garden looked like a transport museum and for some reason he seemed to think UFOs were flying over his house.

Having read up on Tesla, he decided to build a receiver and transmitter via the number 19 radio set, an old World War 2 transceiver. Barry enthused that if the transmitter was powerful enough they could transmit into space and the aliens may hear us. Barry waffled on about space-time but due to his persistent interest in vodka, on the day, I never got a proper introduction to space-time. The drink appeared to enhance his creativity, or so he said.

So Barry drunk wired up the contraption and for some reason that I am not clear on, two great separate radio valves were deployed by Barry to rip into the time continuum. Vodka brought the Einstein out in him, and so the big moment came when Barry applied the power. Lever pulled down, an almighty bang, and Auntie Rita came screaming out the door that ‘the fuse box had blown up!’ Perhaps the aliens had sabotaged it, we shall never know.

parenting

As a child, the beatings from my father made life suicidal for me. Returning from my friend’s house one Sunday night, I walked through the door. ‘Skip’, or to be more correct, my Dad the pillar of the community, was furious with me. A parental example of rotten teeth and his appearance looked bad. Yet, had I stolen something. What was the crime? Talking on the CB radio at my friend’s house, I had been arranging a date with a girl and quite a conversation! My dad was listening via his own CB radio and told me of his concern, as soon as my friend went out of the door. My good old Dad, the psycho bastard, leaped off the sofa. Hitting me around the head repeatedly, Dad showing parental concern as only he could that the licensing regulator may have heard. His son proved to be an embarrassment for him; my father’s actions were evil.

Sometimes my mother would dash into my room alarmed at my tears. As a child, I would be awoken from the themes of sirens and nuclear attacks. The odd vision of a galaxy kept continuing to appear in my mind. Back in the 80s the Cold War was ever-present, yet in later years these nuclear visions would still persist and haunt me even at the time of writing.

I recall vividly at age 7 being jolted from scenes of a nuclear detonation, the blast, the cloud, carnage projected into my mind by some dark comical filmmaker. In later years, nuclear war and UFOs would blend together to present what I refer to as ‘The Warning Narrative’. UFOs, we must understand them and have the strategic boldness to realise a threat is a warning to mankind, and 2014 is the year when the doomsday vision would be transmitted across my mind by those beings from another universe.

school

The constant bullying at school snapped me. In one of many incidents, I was either pushed onto the ice followed by a bizarre screeching noise made by my bully, or my fingers would be beaten with a ruler by other kids. In my junior school the horrors continued; adults failed to notice.

A child of poverty in a world of repulsive acts so young. At 2:30 pm one Friday afternoon I am smashing Glenn’s head into the tarmac by sitting and bouncing on him.

Glenn had started this war by hitting me. He’d been bullying me for weeks and was now wandering around in a daze after his head collided with the tarmac.

Next, I coldly and calmly dealt with Philip who was now crying because I body slammed him onto the concrete. I was enraged by them and red mist had taken over my mind. In the coming years many others, both human and non-human, would also attempt such actions after attempting to attack me.

Glenn had now gone from wandering in a daze to screaming hysterically, hand on his head. A disturbing picture, like some sort of gladiator arena, is painted and what is sad, what makes me tearful, is we were innocent children exposed to something that had corrupted us all, but this was the only life I knew.

Philip was lucky on that day to escape injury. He also had been teasing me for weeks. The school bully, who never went near me, started attacking another boy in frenzy. By a comical irony, the school bully became sick of me being bullied! An unlikely alliance; I was going wild so that these children would not hurt me anymore. A bizarre sight to behold; possession had taken over us. Lunacy at playtime ruled us.

The bell went and we all returned to the classroom. The teachers were all oblivious to the riot as they were all in the staff room, but within twenty minutes this playground battle would be discovered.

The tutor I hated with a passion, and who terrified me, bounded into the classroom because one of his favourite pupils had been caught up in this battle with punches let loose in the playground. This teacher had his favourites, and he walked into my classroom wearing his usual blue tracksuit.

‘Can I have Anthony in the hall, please?’

The idiot dragged me into the hall and spun me around like a rag doll, throwing me hard against the wall. The teacher shouted at the top of his voice and the louder he got, the calmer I became.

Somehow, during the massive telling-off in the school hall about our battle, which included his threats of police being called, all the kids remained silent. I became invisible and stayed quiet.

‘Sir’ (Paul) excelled at reminding my mother that my face did not fit. ‘Mrs. Topping, can I just say your son will amount to nothing,’ he said to my mother.

‘I would be proud if he swept the streets,’ my mother replied.

I, as a child, had undiagnosed learning difficulties and in the years ahead ET visitation would make adjustments accordingly for this. ‘Sir’ had his favourites, and terrified me; at ten years of age, I could barely dress. ‘Sir’ filled me with mortal dread and panic even at the thought of trying to tie shoelaces, so I did not bother, and ‘Sir’ would shout at me in a crescendo of noise and I would nod my head in terror. ‘Sir’ and my father were alike, my father would shout and bawl because I could not fathom how to tie my dressing gown.

Sunday had a particular dread for me, the start of a full week in ‘Sir’s’ company. During physical education, when ‘Sir’ became at his worst as the kids performed sports in the hall, would shout and because his loud voice meant you could not understand him, he would shout louder.

‘Sir’ called me ‘Topping’ and all you could hear is a load of incomprehensible shouting from him ending in ‘Topping’, followed by further shouting because I could not understand what he said the first time, ended by ‘do you, Topping?’

In tears, I screamed back at him, ‘what do you mean, why do you do this to me?’ which seemed to bring a further barrage of shouting from him that caused my mind to crash.

I did not understand a word he said, as I reflect on that moment during PE in the hall, until Kevin pointed out what he wanted me to do. I remember hissing at him ‘you are a fucking idiot’ under my breath; his negative impact on me as a struggling child was dreadful. Another degrading stunt by him was to embarrass the child by standing them on top of a chair if the drawer of books was untidy. This included emptying the drawer they used for school books upon the floor. He was unhinged and not fit to teach, yet the other adults seemed to think he could do no wrong and that included the parents.

I recall ‘Sir’ always picking on the naughtiest of children; schooling of the 70s and 80s was like this and I recall the teacher called ‘Sir’ taking a boy into the dining room, pulling his trousers down and hitting him across the bottom! I can recall the cries of the little boy now.

My mother would drag me screaming off to the school gates, my grip on the railings like that of a man not prepared to let go, as the headmaster came dashing out to see why there were hysterics at the school gate. I had strange goings-on during those nights, sightings of Green beings, the balls of light. UFOs that were soundless with no lights flying over the squalid house. This was all of a mystery to me. Through young eyes, I tried to comprehend my world and the galaxy that kept flashing into my mind, all of it beyond my comprehension.

The transition in 1981 to Selby High School was like entering a more aggressive zone of violence. Every day of attendance was a long day at war with other boys and girls, not education, but a long 5-year slog with other kids of my ilk to get through the weeks.

On my second day in the 1st year, a baptism of fire came my way courtesy of a 4th year student who looked at me and called me a tramp. I was sent to school scruffy and had a look about me that made me look brown, which stalked me and invited ridicule. My uniform was unclean, my trousers did not fit.

I retaliated, hitting him as hard as I could; he did not like that and promptly smashed my head into the door whilst kicking me in the testicles. I was in agony, writhing on the floor whilst the pupils laughed as they walked past. My blazers slashed with a razor blade or my school case also slashed would form part of a typical week of hell. The hurt and upset of what should have been wondrous years in education remain a tearful memory. From itching powder to being kicked to the ground, this is my world as a child. The other kids lived in a universe of smart clothes and their parents had nice cars, whilst I would wander back to the cauldron of abuse and neglect. I excelled at drama lessons and was also a great dancer.

Bullied so heavily, my mother kept me off school. I was in a horrendous state of depression. Nothing seemed to change, with muscles bruised in my stomach area after beatings, and yet despite this, other moments seem frozen in time. Time is what these experiences are all about as you will read later on, perhaps wondering at each scroll of the page how the hell I managed to live through this…

In the 80s, break dancing became all the rage and my crew won competitions. Being part of my Break Dance crew, Sunday was rehearsal day for us, and so we went to ‘Kans’, a local disco, to practice; great fun. I became accepted by the other children as I could dance and win competitions. We decided to move out into the street and perform. We had a crowd and even the police approved.

A good idea, they said, and like some caricature from the Victorian era, my father turned up to take me away. Bothered that Nancy and Henry from the church would see me doing this on a Sunday, ‘the Lord’s Day!’ he proclaimed. ‘I am the Group Leader of the scouts. What would the vicar think...?’ he said.

Doing anything with girls triggered another trip into the world of madness from my father.

Ironically, my father was a gifted hands-on healer. He healed the sick, and I am convinced now after over forty years at the sharp