Dichotomies

In ‘1984’, Orwell defined ‘doublethink’ as the ability to hold two totally contradictory ideas at the same time and to assign equal validity to both.

When I first read that, many years ago, I thought it absurd. How can that be done? Surely, like Schrodinger’s imaginary cat, the mere internal observation of two contradictory ideas would cause the brain to collapse one of them and choose the other.

Maybe it used to be that way. It seems to me that in the past, people held one belief at a time. They either discarded opposing views, or, if sensible, considered them and then decided whether to keep their view or change it. Maybe there were doublethinkers back then, maybe before the Internet we just didn’t see so many of them.

Now they seem to be everywhere. The Corbyn Party is a hotbed of it (I don’t call them the Labour party any more, they haven’t been that since Blair took over and they’ve gone way off beam since then). The Corbyn party want an election and don’t want an election, they want to leave the EU and stay in it, they want a Brexit with a deal and they don’t want a deal, but they want ‘no deal’ off the table.

That’s like leaving the atmosphere and refusing to accept the vacuum of space. You can’t take ‘no deal’ off the table. It’s never been on the table. It’s what happens when a deal cannot be agreed. It’s not one of the options, it’s the default.

Then we have the youth claiming that Brexit has stolen their future while simultaneously believing the world is going to end in ten years and they have no future. Climate change is going to lead to a massive extinction event. We’re all going to die. Because of man-made carbon dioxide.

When I was a teenager, we were about to get a new Ice Age in ten years… because of man-made carbon dioxide. This magical gas, comprising a total of 0.04% of the atmosphere (and the human contribution is a tiny fraction of that), can cause ice ages and scorched earth simultaneously – and people believe it. They believe both things at once.

They also simultaneously believe politics will ruin their future while they have no future at all. A terrified generation – is it any wonder they are so full of nihilism and care so little for life? They think we’re all going to die anyway. Who did that to them, and why?

The one thing they will never accept is that the change in climate isn’t ten years away, as has been touted for about a century now. Climate change is happening now and it has nothing to do with carbon (they like to call it ‘carbon’, the stuff of pencil leads and diamonds, because they have never been taught that it’s not a gas). It has everything to do with solar cycles.

Those running the scam must have been aware of this. For those who were listening, genuine climate scientists have been warning about this for a long time. Nobody wanted to hear it. To be fair, those genuine climate scientists were shouted down and sometimes fired for telling the truth, but it’s still true.

Why this insistence on nonsense? You can’t tax the sun. All you can tax is human CO2 emissions so they have to be blamed for everything. This time, no tax will stop it. Nothing will.

So many people have moved north and south from Africa, Central America and the Middle East. Encouraged by those running the game. Oh it’s no secret, no conspiracy theory, that the aim is to massively reduce the human population to an easily controllable level. ‘They’ have been very open and clear on this point. They also intend to make Africa a nature reserve and concentrate what’s left of the population in small cities. There will be no travel for the worker drones, they can use the internet to see the world.

Climate change is very likely to kill a hell of a lot of people in the coming years. Especially those who have just moved from a warm climate into the frozen hell to come. They won’t know how to deal with it. They’ll be in flats and houses with no chimneys and they won’t be able to afford heating. It’s going to be horrifying.

All this information has been around for a very long time. Nobody wanted to hear it and now it’s too late. It’s not ‘coming in ten years’. It’s started. This year. Still they don’t want to hear.

We have spent decades preparing for the wrong apocalypse. And still nobody wants to hear it. Too late now, the clearout of humanity is under way.

Now we have another population reduction method. Transgendering children is a remarkably effective way of sterilising the next generation. Even if they transition back, they’ll have non-working plastic bits instead of the bits they were born with. Sure, there are real transgender people but these are rare. They are also, as with autism, on a spectrum.

There are men who like to dress in women’s clothes. Once called transvestites. and regarded as a normal English eccentricity, these men are not gay. They are straight. They just feel more comfortable in a dress and they like makeup. At the other end are those, men and women, who genuinely feel they are in the wrong body and seriously want it altered. It’s become fashionable to ruin your child’s life by pretending they are the wrong gender, long before they can decide for themselves. There are going to be a lot of lonely parents in the future.

Well I live in Scotland. Not so long ago, all the men here wore kilts and going back further, they’d paint their faces with blue woad to go into battle. I wore a kilt to my son’s wedding. It’s a comfortable thing to wear and the sporran is just the right size for a decent hip flask. Men in skirts hold no terrors for me. But then I’m not a woman. They aren’t creeping into my bathrooms and demanding I wax their balls. I will if they want. I’d use bitumen.

Now we have men dressed as women wanting access to women’s toilets and changing rooms, and taking the prizes in women’s sports – and this is done in the name of ‘women’s rights’. Rapists identify as women so they get put into a prison full of women and what are you going to do when they rape other inmates? Put them in prison? They’re already in there and they are surrounded by captive victims. Why would they ever want to leave?

I’d support them going into a women’s prison. Yes, really. The sentence would include a stay in a secure hospital first, where they get surgically transformed into a woman before they serve their sentence. I have a feeling after one or two of these, rapists won’t self-identify as women any more.

I have strayed from the point here and there, but if you’ve read my babblings for any time at all you’ll know that’s normal.

Now I think about it, there were indeed doublethinkers in the past. There were women who demanded access to men’s clubs but still wanted their women-only clubs. There was once a publisher who wanted to publish only ‘man’ stuff – cars, violence, trousers, that sort of thing – but was shut down by a gaggle of harpies. Women-only publishers thrive.

Blackpool has, I hear, gay hotels where non-gays are not welcome. Bakers who don’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding are taken to court. These bakers, and it’s also happened to at least one bed-and-breakfast place, are targeted. There are other bakers who have no religious issues with baking a cake with two men or two women on top. No straight people have ever bothered to target a gay-only hotel or club.

The whole ‘only white people can be racist’ narrative goes back a long way. Usually attached to thiose who want to kill all white people. They’ll never see it, there’s no point trying to explain.

I live in the middle of nowhere. It’s the only sensible response to all this. I am off grid for water and sewage, I have alternative heating and cooking arrangements, if food supplies ever have a problem I can hit rabbits, pheasant, partridge and sometimes even deer from the living room window. I just need a reliable, non-fossil-fuel electricity supply (solar panels won’t cut it in winter here and I don’t want a bloody windmill) and this place will be right off the grid.

This place survived the last mini ice age and it’s still standing. I think it might be the best place to stay for now. There are horrors coming and there are so, so many people who will enable them. Not because they want them.

Because they don’t have the ability to see the consequences.

It never ends…

I don’t just mean Brexit, although that is verging on the immortal. No matter what Boris does, Jerry Cordite and Jo Swindles will vote it down. There is a way to make use of that attitude, if he’s smart enough to see it and use it. Maybe his pal, Demonic Cummings, can do it.

I know, I didn’t invent that name, but if I was called Dominic and people called me Demonic, I’d absolutely revel in it. I spend my days wishing my surname was De’ath. I’d never use the apostrophe, particularly not on my doctorate. I mean, I have a scythe, black hooded robe, the lot. I’d just need to lose a lot of weight. Almost all of it, in fact.

This place has been silent because I had to go to Wales for my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. I couldn’t miss this, it’s a big one. It’s a diamond anniversary but CStM and I can’t really run to diamonds just yet so we went for practical. They wanted a soup making machine so that’s what we bought. I’m glad my mother mentioned it, I had never heard of such a device so it would not have occurred to me.

It now takes 12 hours to drive to Wales because we no longer have to get through the mess of roads that is Aberdeen. There is a very nice road that goes right around it. It took 13 hours on the way back, I was driving slowly as it got dark and late because we’re in the potential frost and ice part of the year. A bit early this time but it’s not the first time. In the event, we made it alive, which is always good.

Before we left I was engaged in a last minute panic finishing off ‘Well Haunted‘, the ninth Underdog Anthology. It’s done, the cover is professional this time, and if that helps sales I’ll be back to ask the artist for more. It has to help sales to be worthwhile – cover artists don’t work for free (well I do but there’s no point paying myself).

Next I have two more books to get ready before Christmas and there’s a Christmas anthology with a closing date of November 30th. November is going to be a busy month – and there will be visitors in it too.

You know, CStM and I moved to the middle of nowhere because neither of us are particularly sociable and no matter how nice the neighbours are, we aren’t likely to get along with them. We are the kind of people who assemble shelving units at 3 am and cut the grass at 10 pm in summer. So we thought it best if we just live well out of everyone’s way.

Unfortunately this place is a visitor magnet. Except for Halloween trick or treaters, it seems. None of them have so far made it up the driveway after dark. I wonder if it’s the tiny red glowsticks attached in pairs to the gnarled old trees? Nah, can’t be. Those are normal Halloween decorations. This year I might try green ones.

Still, we have had relatives on both sides visiting all through this year, to the point where we plan to seal the place for December and sit around scowling out of the windows. We have garden ornaments that scowl back.

While in Wales, we had to visit That London. The posh part where the embassies are. CStM had to renew her passport and that can only be done at the Danish embassy in London because they now want fingerprints. She had offered to cut off a finger and send it to them but they wanted all of them. Besides, she would then have to carry the mummified cut-off finger like a lucky rabbit’s foot because that’s the only one that matches the fingerprint. In the end, we decided to just go there and get it over with.

While there, we met Martyn K. Jones, one of the authors in recent Underdog Anthologies, for a quick drink. Also Tom Paine of The Last Ditch blog. I have met very few online people in real life, so few that I have wondered if the entire internet is just me, and everyone else is the creation of a supremely talented impressionist who lives in a bedsit in Truro.

We didn’t go shopping. We were in a part of London where we couldn’t even afford to look in the shop windows. The sort of shops where if you have to ask the price, you really shouldn’t be in there.

Anyway, all the visitors this year have slowed down work. And it’s not over yet. I would blame my granddaughter for attracting them but she is turning out to be as antisocial as me, so I can’t fault her.

At least the Halloween book is done, and the authors should now have their payments or copies. I posted all but one from Wales, since Amazon seem happy to deliver to just about anywhere. I was missing one address but it’s on the desktop computer so I can finalise this job tomorrow. Then it’s on to the next.

I have two authors waiting for their books to be finished and by the end of November I’ll be locked into Underdog Anthology Ten. All of this must be finished in time for me to take a Christmas break. After spending September in a state of knackeredness exacerbated by infected insect bites, I have a lot of catching up to do by the end of November.

After that, I’ll probably sleep a lot.

A clue for the clueless?

I’m assembling the ninth Underdog Anthology and I have some excellent cover art from a talented artist called Gary V. Foss. All the stories are there, all author contracts are waiting to go but those contracts need one detail. The title of the damn book.

I’m looking for something hinting at a haunted well or underground enchanted water but not too specific because a lot of the stories aren’t about that. The theme on this one was decided when it was pointed out to me that the well we get our tap water from is in fact an ancient holy well. Now in ruins, it still trickles out water into a field of cows and it’s been there since before 900 AD. (I will not use CE because it’s silly. I insist on using Anno Domini even though I don’t believe in any Gods). Ahem. I digress.

Okay. Here is the cover art, and you will soon realise, I hope, that I am reluctant to cover this with a load of text. Short and snappy. It’s a wraparound cover, it will have a spine down the middle and I’ll add a frame around it so the printing process doesn’t trim off anything important.

Of course, the wretched barcode is going to be a huge blot on the landscape but there’s nothing I can do about that. Anyway, I’m here to pick your brains, and not in a Trotsky way. You can have your brains back intact afterwards.

Any ideas? Help!

Apocalypse when?

Well, submissions have closed for Underdog Anthology 9. We have 8 authors confirmed and one more still to confirm. Not much editing to do this time, everyone has put in well pre-edited work. I should have this one done by October 10th.

Then two more and then the Christmas anthology. It’s all a bit frantic right now but if it ends up with an easy Christmas, it’s worth it.

It’s all a bit mad in the outside world. The American health nuts want to ban vaping because some idiots used the devices to inhale cannabis oil. Well, let’s be honest – they want to ban vaping because smoking rakes in so much more in taxes. So we are hearing a lot of outright lies now.

The UN are now claiming that toilets won’t flush because of catastrophic sea level rise. The Maldives are still there. The ice caps are still there. There have been glaciers receding and a couple have vanished. Elsewhere, glaciers have grown bigger. I live in Scotland, a country of rolling glens carved by glaciers over millenia. There are no glaciers here now and we don’t really want them back, thanks.

Earth’s climate changes. Always has and always will. Looking at 40 years of weather means nothing at all. There were times in the past when the oxygen concentration in hte atmosphere was so high, spiders could grow to the size of dinner plates. You really want that climate back? There were times when it was so warm there were no ice caps and times when it was so cold most of the planet was covered in ice. Life, believe me, preferred the warm option.

We are now told that a rise in temperature of one or two degrees will kill us all. Really? Then every Brit who went to Corfu for their holidays died there. None could possibly have survived that much of a change in temperature.

It’s all complete crap and have you noticed how panicked the Church of Climatology is at the moment? It’s because their controllers know what’s really coming and they have to push their agenda very hard indeed before it arrives. Not long now. By January, all those demanding the closure of power stations will be demanding they reopen. Too late. The time for discussion has passed. Reality has arrived. Governments have been preparing for the wrong Armageddon.

In politics, we have the panicked shrieks of globalists as they see their plans fall apart. They are doing all they can to bring down their opponents. I mean. look at the current attack on Boris the Prime Monster in the UK. Some woman claims he squeezed her thigh 20 years ago and the press is pushing it as if he’d dismembered a baby and walked around town using its head skin as a hat. All I see is, ‘if that’s all they have on him, he must be pretty clean’.

It’s happening all over and none of it matters. This civilisation is done. We have men pretending to be women so they can get into women’s prisons where they rape women. Nobody is allowed to question it. We have weekly riots in France that nobody is allowed to report on. We have so much fail, this civilisation simply cannot survive.

In a story called ‘Pandora’s Lost Luggage‘ I used the idea of a previous, long forgotten civilisation destroyed by a god called Moros, but now I wonder…

Maybe they didn’t ‘go back to the stone age’ as I had thought. Maybe they really did wipe themselves out entirely. Maybe it will happen to us too.

We don’t need to go back to any stone age. There are already people on this planet living that way. Isolated tribes in South America who have no contact with the outside world. The island off India where the natives kill anyone who comes within range. Other places too. The seeds of our replacement are already sown.

It’s said that humanity originated in North Africa (I know, it’s disputed, but it really doesn’t matter where that first small tribe started). Maybe in a few thousand years, historians will tell their people that humanity started in South America. Without ever realising that they weren’t the first, but that they were the only ones left. Then they will marvel at the remnants of structures ‘created by the primitive ancestors’. We have that now – who built the pyramids and the Sphinx, when it is clear that they predate the Egyptians? How about those Inca walls that we can’t even replicate now?

Maybe it’s a cycle. We get so far then wipe ourselves out, and another remote tribe gradually explores the planet and starts the cycle again. How many times can it have happened?

And is it happening again?

The Orchestrated Man

The world seems full of lunacy lately. In America, Tango Don has declared that flavoured steam is evil and his minions have taken this to mean they can ban vaping in their states.

Well, some people have become sick, some have died, from using cannabis oil in dodgy street vape juice. Nobody has died from vaping coffee, blueberry or roast chicken flavoured steam. This hysteria has crippled a lot of small businesses and hammered the most effective alternative to smoking that has ever been devised. Why? Well, money of course. If they aren’t smoking cigarettes, the state loses a hell of a lot of taxation.

Therefore the harm reduction must be stopped. To hell with the ‘health of the nation’. There’s cash involved.

In the UK, Boriswise the Clown has been accused of breaking a law that was spontaneously created three weeks after he broke it. Now there are calls for him to resign, including from Smoky Nige, which surprised me. I thought he wanted Brexit? Also Monochrome Man, the Forgotten Prime Monster who is best known for shagging a Currie, has been lifted from his formaldehyde bottle to demand Boriswise apologise for doing something that Monochrome Man did for far more devious reasons. Support for Boriswise grows by the day.

Well, Boriswise seems all funny and jokey on the outside but inside there are signs he plans to revive Tessie Maybe’s ridiculous surrender deal in a new cover. Oh yes, Georgie, they all float down here.

If he does that, the Tory party will be a footnote in the history books, assuming the EU Empire even allows their inclusion in those books.

So, did he see it coming? He should have.

He sacked so many Tories from his government that he knew he was in a weak position, but then with those Tories voting against him anyway it didn’t really matter which party they were in. Even so, he is very much in a minority government and is likely to lose every vote.

He must have known they’d come up with some law to stop him going for ‘no deal’ Brexit, but had he already realised that EU law makes what he has called the ‘surrender’ law irrelevant? We’re still in. EU law still overrides anything Parliament says.

The Gin Miller was always going to spend other people’s money in court after court to try to prove he broke a law. In the end they had to invent one, a law that puts the judges’ authority higher than both Parliament and the Queen. He must have known the Supreme Court would act as they did, since he knows who is on it. Video of him after the fact seems to suggest he’s unfazed by being spontaneously criminalised. Most people would be furious, or at least concerned. He’s acting like he expected this. I’d go so far as to say he’s acting as if he planned it.

He has twice asked to go to a general election and both times been voted down. He’s going to try again. He knows he won’t win it, that’s the point. They call him ‘dictator’ but he keeps offering an election. What do people see, out in the real world?

We have a Fixed Term Parliament Act that means he can’t call a general election unless the House of Conmen agree to it. If he resigns, it does not trigger an election. A new Prime Monster is appointed and with the Tory party now just a rump, it might not be a Tory. This is why the remainers demand he resign, so they can appoint a ‘caretaker PM’ for the rest of this Parliament. That ‘caretaker’ will lock us into the EU and by the time we get to another election, there won’t be one. We’ll be spending Euros, our kids will be conscripted into the EU army and the Mother of Parliaments will be an overpaid and toothless council office. With fewer powers than our councils have at the moment.

All this is not speculation. Guy Thermostat has been very clear on all these points. If we remain we will have to adopt the Euro within six months, the EU army is going to conscript the 18-30 age group and there will be no more autonomous UK.

Yeah kids, that Club 18-30 holiday isn’t going to be as much fun as it used to be.

Quite what any army is going to do with multi-gendered twerking rainbow unicorns is anyone’s guess. They won’t touch guns or knives, their weapons will be online insults and the terrifying milkshake mortar. That rainbow camouflage, well, you might want to rethink that after a battle or two against the Chinese People’s Army. But hey, there’s always the chance the enemy will die laughing.

Boriswise looks calm and collected and is taking no nonsense from the rage-faces across the playpen of parliament. Did he set it up? I would have. Hysterical, enraged people are very easy to lure into even the most blatant of traps. They take the bait even when that bait has spotlights on it, a fanfare and a huge sign saying ‘Hook inside!’ They really do. It works so much better if you’re the one who enraged them in the first place. I could tell of the times I sent scientific opponents on wild goose chases so they could ‘steal my ideas and get there first’ but that’s a much later post 😉

All Boris has to do is stay calm, not resign, but keep offering a no-confidence vote and the resulting general election. They dare not take it, but the public see a Prime Monster really trying to let the people have a say, up against an establishment determined to silence both him and them. The longer they refuse an election, the stronger Boriswise gets.

It all hinges on whether he wants a real Brexit or some form of Tessie Maybe’s vassal state nonsense.

Well, Boriswise? Do we float?

Or sink?

I have a dream…

…that one day, in the distant future, humanity will once again discover the principles of science and apply them without emotion and without the influence of money. That there will come a Real Scientist who will throw the money-grabbers from the laboratory and – wait. This is getting a bit messianic.

Well that’s not too surprising. As soon as ‘the science was settled’ it stopped being science. It became religion. Like any other religion it needed an Armageddon that could only be averted by obeying (and paying) the High Priests to appease the god of the day. It also needed a Saviour.

I know, you’re immediately thinking of Little Greta and the Church of Climatology, in obeisance to the unquestionable word of the Green God. It’s so much more.

The vapers will tell you of the ‘scientists’ who claim that vaping is worse than smoking and drinking combined. To any rational mind this is utter bollocks but people in ‘respected scientific positions’ have said it so it must be true.

I was once tasked with a menial job for my qualifications, it was a few years before I gave up on science altogether because of the increasing silliness of it all and because of an idiot in charge. I had to check the antibiotic effects of four different antibiotics that were included in pig feed. The project was set up by a different idiot (believe me, it has become so much worse since then) so each antibiotic had a zero sample.

Later I was quizzed by no less than the Head of Research as to why I had not checked all of the zero samples. My response of ‘Well zero of compound A is the same as zero of compound B…’ was met with a shouted ‘I know that!’. Something that told me at once that, no, he didn’t. I later discovered that the Head of Research had absolutely no understanding of statistical analysis, but that’s another story.

Myself and my boss at the time were called into a meeting where an epidemiologist had come up with a great idea he wanted to explain to us. His idea was, in fact, something we call ‘gradient plates’ and which had been in use even before I started my first degree. We were frowned upon for pointing this out.

My final boss took early retirement. He said ‘When we started we were chasing kniowledge. Now we’re just chasing money’. That was 15 years ago. Look at the state of it now.

This is all in the distant past.

Yet we have people saying that ‘scientists have said this so they must be right’ even though science is never ‘right’. Science is never ‘final’. Science is absolutely never ‘settled’.

The general public think all scientists are Spock, working with pure emotionless logic. No. Scientists are human and in any human profession there are shysters and money-grabbers. The problem is that the shysters and money-grabbers are the ones who make the news.

I spent my entire career in science. And yet I am told by those who have never studied science to ‘do some research’. It’s all I’ve ever done and I’m told to do it by people who don’t even know how.

I’ve been sent ‘proof’ of global warming based on ice caps since 1979. I asked why they didn’t want to go back past 1979 and I got a graph of ‘global warming’ from 1880. The end of the Little Ice Age. That was when the Thames froze over. You want to go back to that?

Not that you have any real choice. Humanity’s effect on climate is so tiny as to be irrelevant. We are not as important as we like to pretend. One volcanic eruption pumps out more of the magical ‘greenhouse gases’ than all of human history. I know it’s hard for some people to accept but we just don’t matter at all.

Oh, and the whole ‘greenhouse effect’ was debunked decades ago, even though it’s still around in fashionable pretend-science circles.

Remember the ozone hole? CFCs? Acid rain? Miami underwater by 2000? Remember the New Ice Age of the Seventies, caused by rising CO2? How can you still be falling for this scam? All thse things stopped when funding ran out, and not one of them ever came true. Yet the New Lie is still potent.

Yes, we have a problem with non-recyclable plastics and pollution in general. Nobody can deny that. Yes, we should do something about it before Mother Nature slaps us and tell us to clean our room.

This has nothing to do with climate change. Not a damn thing. It is an entirely separate issue.

Pollution is something we could deal with if the political will was there. It’s not though. Instead they call it ‘climate change’ knowing full well that this is something inherent to the planet and which we can do absolutely nothing about. So the thing we have no possible control over is used to avoid doing something we can control. And there is a whole congregation of the Church of the Green God to support it.

The climate changes. Always has and always will. Holding remembrance services for glaciers is astoundingly silly. Claiming you can change it by installing communism is frankly insane. Nature does not care what we do. Nature does not care about us at all. We are one species among many and Nature has eradicated most of the planet many times and started again.

The ones that survive are the ones that adapt to change. The ones who deny change go extinct.

We are not a special species. Adapt or die.

Oh, and don’t forget to give the glorified weather forecasters more money on your way.

Flying saucery

I have sometimes wondered about buying one of the little drone things with a camera in it. It could be fun to take some aerial photos around here and I’m far enough away from anyone else that even when I inevitably crash it, it won’t bother anyone. A couple of things put me off.

My son used to be really into radio controlled helicopters. You know you need insurance for those? Not for the model, but for the damage it can do, which can be spectacular and potentially fatal. Insurance doesn’t cover the model, it covers the costs of getting a shattered rotor blade out of someone’s car door or chest.

Crashes always ended up with a three-figure bill. He’s a homeowner and father now, such expenses are no longer a good thing to have on your home budget and he doesn’t have a lot of spare time anyway.

The cost of crashing a little cheap drone is probably a lot less, but how many crashes before I get the hang of it? It could soon add up…

I once had a go at a radio controlled plane at one of my son’s club’s open days. Fine when it’s going away from you but you have to reverse your hand movements when it’s coming towards you and that’s not easy at all. You have to watch the plane, not the controller. I did learn one important thing. If you crash in farmland, try to crash in a field of sheep, not cows. Sheep will run to the far side of the field from the crash. Cows will come over to investigate the new thing and when they’re done, there’s not likely to be much left to salvage.

The little drones I’ve looked at won’t do much damage if they crash into something. They probably won’t even break a window and if they hit someone, it’ll be a few scratches at worst. There is another problem though.

Unlike the model plane which only goes in one direction, these things don’t have a clearly defined ‘front’ when viewed from the ground. You can make it hover, great, but which way is it going to go when you next press ‘forward’? Unlike even a helicopter there’s no way to tell until you move that lever.

I have radio controlled trains. Much more sensible. Speed control forward and back and they are on rails so they aren’t going to surprise me by spontaneously deciding to go in an unexpected direction. It doesn’t matter if they are moving away from me or towards me, the lever only controls speed.

This does have relevance to the title, which is something mostly studied by people whose wardrobe looks like this –

I’m being a little unfair. I cannot be certain that no UFO sighting is of an alien craft. I could argue ‘well why have they never made contact?’ but a little thought tells me a likely reason. Imagine you arrived here after crossing interstellar distances, with all great intentions to make contact with the monkey people on this new world. Ten minutes of any major news channel and you’re going to engage reverse gear and floor it, right?

There was a time when ‘cigar shaped UFOs’ were all the rage. That was back when zeppelin test flights were floating over rural areas. No internet, few phones, limited news of any kind. Nobody knew what they were. They were ‘unidentified flying objects’ to ground observers, but the people in them knew exactly what they were.

In the UK, we had a spate of sightings of mysterious black triangle ships that never showed up on the nearby airport radar. Naturally, anyone reporting one was dismissed as a crank. Then the new military stealth planes were revealed – black, triangular planes that didn’t show up on radar. Just like that. There must have been test flights, right? As it was secret those test flights would have been at night.

How do you keep a new military advance secret? Well, you make it obvious and deny it exists. Let the Forteanists claim it as a UFO sighting. Few will take it seriously and those that do will be those who think it’s an alien craft. It’s wonderfully deflected into tinfoil hat territory even though the military know those people really saw something.

Towards the end of the second world war, the Nazis were working on some interesting flying designs. Let’s gloss over Dornier’s clearly drug-fuelled flying insanities. They had the rocket propelled Me 163, whose major drawback was its propensity to spontaneously explode. In jets, apart from the well known Me 262 there was the Horten 229, which didn’t get into service before the end of the war. Lucky for us, really. It had the same Junckers Jumo 004 engines as the Me 262 but it ran rings around the earlier plane.

The Nazis also worked on disc-shaped aircraft although there seems scant evidence to suggest they actually built one, much less flew it.

What would be the point of a flying disc? Aerodynamically it would be horribly unstable unless some serious gyros were installed. It would have no aerilons, no tail, no easy means to control its flight.

The alleged German designs were just disc shapes with a cockpit in the middle and a definite front and back, with jet engines at the back. The disc shape seems iirrelevant in this case.

However, a sharp military mind could have seen potential.

Remember that toy drone, with its equally spaced lifting propellors? Make it a disc and replace those propellors with louvred jet engines such as those on a Hawker Harrier. All of them under the disc, no engine at the ‘back’.

The Hawker Harrier is a plane. It has a very clearly defined front and back, When it’s hovering, you can hazard a good guess at which direction it’s going to go in when it fires up the main engine. A hovering disc, however, gives no such clue. Like the little toy drone, which way will it go if you press ‘forward’?

Imagine a fighter aircraft that can make turns the way a house fly does. Ninety degree turns in the air. A disc with a central cockpit able to rotate, and louvred jets that rotate with it. You don’t turn the thing, you just change its direction of travel. If you paint a dot on the ‘front’ as you see it now, when it makes a 90 degree turn to the left, that dot is now on the right side. There is no ‘front’ nor ‘back’, the ‘front’ is whichever way the cockpit is facing now.

The g forces could be horrifying, of course, but if it could be made to work, how can a modern jet fighter chase something that can turn like a fly? An observer seeing it hovering could have absolutely no clue as to which direction it’s going to move in next. Don’t you think the military would be interested in something like that?

Don’t you think they’d be experimenting?

Perhaps that’s what the Roswell crash was about. Not little green men but an early attempt to get one of these things going. Maybe that’s what really happens at Area 51. Sure, the air force have not so far unveiled any kind of flying disc but the aerodynamics must be horrible and controlling something using only jets must be difficult. It’s not an easy project but if it could be made to work it would be well worth the effort.

I think the rim of the saucer would have to spin, to give it a frisbee-like aerodynamic. That just makes it harder to control the jets and harder to change direction, since the whole damn thing is now a gyroscope. Are these problems insurmountable? I have no idea but I bet they’d take a hell of a lot of trials to figure out.

I won’t be at all surprised if, one day, the military reveal a new, saucer-shaped fighter plane.

I also won’t be too surprised when nobody asks how they managed to spend decades testing it without anyone finding out.