Welcome to Blather, in particular all the people who signed up having found this weekly slippery soapbox through ‘Cool Site of the Day‘ on Tuesday 7th October. In response to last week’s defence of defamed marsupials, the Rev. Syd Jesus stepped in with an immortal Raymond Chandler quote, which was: ‘as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket’. Also spotted was some delirious 1920’s journalism mentioned in Bernard Heuvelman’s ‘On the Track of Unknown Animals‘ (ISBN: 0710304986), describing a brontosaurus which was apparently running riot in Africa (which prompted many expeditions to find the damned thing) as having a tail like a kangaroo. Quite a brontosaurus, especially when one realises that the sum of the description led one to believe that it looked more like a triceratops. With a kangaroo’s tail.
This week I’m afraid that I see fit to launch into a timely if somewhat hopeless diatribe against tabloid newspapers in general, and that pinnacle of quality journalism ‘The Sunday Mirror’ in particular.
Out here on the ‘Blather Lighthouse’, where this blatherskite is currently sojourning, print media is a seldom seen delicacy, notwithstanding the fact that much of it is, in fact, stomach churning fare. My dear mother, bless her sharp eye, recently used that dinosaur of communications, the facsimile machine, to send me a cutting from the aforementioned gutter press publication. I have no idea how she came across the article, but I do have a private detective on the case, who shall be submitting a report after the weekend. The article was entitled ‘Aliens in Co. Roscommon’, was dated 21st of September 1997, and showed ‘aliens’ with the caption ‘ALIEN NATION: One of the “space people” who landed in the US 50 years ago’. Shall I go on?
According to the Mirror, ‘UFO expert’ and ‘clairvoyant’ Rory Thornton, who runs a ‘clinic’ in Newcastle Co. Galway, maintains that the Irish Government have been covering up the crash of an extra-terrestrial craft near Boyle, Co. Roscommon, in May 1996. Mr. Thornton has gone to such lengths as even comparing the crash to the alleged cover up of the controversial ‘Roswell Incident’ of 50 years ago, and he seems to be of the opinion that the ‘Roswell Coverup’ is established fact, rather than a swamp of glutinous information.
Apparently, this spacecraft ‘got into trouble’ before hitting some trees and ‘bouncing into a lake’. Without a smidgen of an explanation as to how these spacemen, or, as he calls them, the ‘Sunasians’ got their machine working again, Mr. Thornton says he’s in regular contact with them using telepathy. The article veers off into an off-the-rack ‘The aliens are worried that we’re running our planet into the ground’ scenario, which is reminiscent of the ‘Create Your Own Conspiracy Theory‘ website. The icing on the fruitcake comes in the form of this wonderful quote: ‘They are are like humans. In fact we are the aliens to them’.
Mr. Thornton’s allegations concerning Irish Governmental conspiracies are rather interesting, especially when one considers the spate of dirty laundry which has recently been aired in Dáil Eireann and Dublin Castle. According to Mr. Thornton, an anonymous Boyle Garda (Irish policeman) maintains that the local Gardai were told to ‘keep their noses out of it’ by Government officials who were on the scene of the supposed crash. Over coffee and whiskey last night, author and lighthouse visitor Peter Costello wryly pointed out to me that it may have been Mr. Ray Burke trying to sell passports to the ‘aliens’. For those of you who are unaware, Mr. Burke was Irish Minister for Foreign affairs until Tuesday 7th October, when he resigned amid allegations of his having sold passports to wealthy Saudi Arabian bankers in return for $20 million pounds of industrial investment. Incidentally, Mr. Burke was not in government when the Boyle incident took place.
People in Boyle seem to be adamant, if one can believe the Sunday Mirror, ‘that something big happened there that night’. Several US military Jeeps were also allegedly seen in the area, but as some of you may remember, this isn’t the first time that Blather has discussed the diplomatic intricacies of letting foreign military personnel wander about Ireland, officially or otherwise.
In fact, this isn’t the first time I’d heard about the ‘Boyle Incident’ either, the tale came to my notice via the grapevine almost a year ago, and supposedly propagated by an anonymous Boyle Garda (presumably the one mentioned above). It told of ‘something crashing’, pieces of debris everywhere, the general area being overrun by the security forces and the arrival of a few large cars, supposedly containing unnamed politicians and US embassy representatives. I heard no more about it, but the story did get round, and with surprisingly minimal embellishment, until three weeks ago, when the Mirror got hold of it.
So, if anything happened, what could have happened? Let us, for a start, discount the extra-terrestrial hypothesis, and consider the implications of something even as trivial as a drop tank from a US military aircraft falling on Irish soil.
This might drag Ireland’s so-called neutrality into question, hence the presence of politicians, US embassy officials etc. at the ‘crash scene’. It wouldn’t be the first time that something of this nature has taken place, even without the inclusion of any cross-border trespasses in the cauldron of conspiracy. Many years ago, a large object buried itself in the side of one the Wicklow mountains, in eastern Ireland. It was mentioned on early morning radio, and it was hypothesised that some sort of of unmanned drone had wandered out of a British military testing area in the Irish Sea. Some ‘British officials’ allegedly appeared and took it away with them, and not another word was heard. Or so the story goes.
None of this, of course, leaves us any the wiser, but it does make one wonder whether someone decided to start this rumour a year ago and let it propagate wildly. Then again, perhaps there was some legitimate reason for an area around Boyle to be cordoned off, and speculation has run wild in the meantime. I shall be keeping my snout primed and my eyeballs polished for any further developments of this amusing enigma.
Tune in next week for a possible report on Blather’s invasion of Copenhagen.
Dave (daev) Walsh
9th October 1997
