Pipes!

From UFOs to ghosts... I seem to be on a bit of a mystery gig at the moment. It's entirely Sir Arthur C. Clarke's fault. In the last few weeks, I've watched both his Mysterious World and Strange Powers series in their entirety. If you have the chance, you must see them. For me, they're priceless nostalgia, and the theme music still gives me icy chills. Sir Arthur passed away earlier this year, and is sorely missed, but his work endures. He was also, like Nigel Marven (see earlier post), a great supporter of The Gorilla Organisation.

Anyway, ghosts. No, I haven't seen one, though I can honestly say I believe I have heard one, but that's a story for another time. Halloween is almost upon us, and, for me, it's time to look back 16 long years to the freakiest damned Halloween I ever had. It was all thanks to a BBC programme called Ghostwatch.


Some of you may remember this show. It garnered so much controversy after it aired that the BBC banned it from being shown or released at all for 10 years. It's available on DVD now (about bloody time), and is well worth seeing. Though the thrill of actually believing it was a real documentary has long worn off, it still has its moments. Even just reading the wikipedia entry about it made my room seem unusually cold.

Documentary, you say? That's right. The BBC presented it as a live documentary, using some very familiar and trusted faces, which explains a lot of why it freaked the nation out and caused alleged post traumatic stress disorder in certain children. That's how damned scary it was.

The programme was very well researched and concerned the suffering of a family forced to endure the ghostly terrorism of a long-dead, mentally disturbed man. He got his name, Pipes, due to his habit of banging on the plumbing. He did a lot more than that in the programme, though. His fleeting appearances were some of the cleverest and most spine-tingling moments I've ever seen on TV.

The programme is showing its age now, and some of the actors/actresses turn in some pretty hokey performances, but the strong elements more than make up for it.

I'll definitely be watching this again on Halloween. What will you be watching?

Watch the Skies

Like many science-fiction writers and fans, I've been fascinated by the UFO phenomenon since early childhood. I've even been fortunate enough to see an object in the sky that defied my attempts to explain it (ask me to tell you about it sometime). So I was very pleased to hear that Britain's Ministry of Defence was releasing some long-classified documents this week. The results, though, were a bit of a mixed bag.

The best of the bunch is probably the Alitalia incident. In 1991, when I was in my final year of high school, I heard a report on BBC Radio 1 of a near miss between a passenger jet and a UFO at Heathrow airport. I can't tell you how excited I was that the BBC were reporting it. In my teenage naivety, I was sure the truth was about to burst out. There were reliable witnesses this time (two Alitalia airline pilots in the air and a radar operator on the ground).

How can anyone deny the existence of UFOs now? I thought. Wait till the pilots are interviewed on television. This'll be great!

I rushed home at lunchtime to catch the news again, but the story wasn't mentioned even once. Not on TV. Not on radio. I listened again at dinner time. Same results. Nothing.

That night, my brother phoned a BBC Radio 1 DJ who was known to have a strong interest in UFOs. We were sure he'd have something to say. He did, but it wasn't much. 'I heard about it,' he said. 'Thanks for calling. Bye.' Pretty brusque for a guy who liked the sound of his own voice so much.

Anyway, that was the end of it. The story was squashed and, in a single day, I'd gone from thinking it would break the whole subject of UFOs open to thinking we'd probably never hear of it again.

Now, seventeen years later, the report has been released and we know that the incident definitely happened. Mind you, it's far from the earthshaking event that a seventeen-year-old Steve thought it was. The UFO was brown and missile-shaped (and definitely not a missile in the conventional sense of the word). The pilot shouted a warning to his co-pilot. The object was recorded on radar. And the MoD thought it was worth denying for seventeen years.

Funny lot, the MoD.

The ministry also decided it was worth classifying a letter and drawing sent to the authorities in 1990 by a woman who claimed to come from a planet called Amazon, and who crashed to Earth in the company of other beings from the planet Spectra who had 'ears like Mr. Spock'.


I'm glad they classified that one. Definitely a national security threat.

But releasing the Amazonian's letter and sketch at the same time as the Heathrow near-miss report shows just how smart the MoD really are. It's actually a bit of a masterstroke. You see, the Amazonian stuff is likely to draw a smile or a chuckle from a lot of people. And that's perfect if you want to downplay the significance of the other incidents. It's a very effective way to rob the military and civil aviation reports of genuine impact. I expect this will become standard practice with future releases: throw in a few cooky pictures with the good stuff.

(To beings from Amazon and particularly Spectra, I offer my apologies. Don't take it personally. It's just a blog post, after all. If you're ever in Japan, look me up. We'll have tea and talk about 'Battle of the Planets'. Maybe you were misrepresented. Bring Zoltar with you if he's not busy.)

Statistically speaking, the vast majority of people, when faced with the Drake equation, will concede that alien life in this galaxy is a certainty. It just makes sense. The difficulties of interstellar travel are another matter, but I've always contended that, since string theory allows for 10 dimensions (and M theory allows for 11), only four of which can so far be perceived by humans, any visitors to Earth might actually be extra-dimensional, rather than extra-terrestrial. They may even be both.

In any case, governments are always particularly cagey about things they can't explain, and I can understand that. But no one seriously expects them to have all the answers all the time. Classifying reports like those mentioned above is unnecessary in the 21st century. The days of Orson Welles-induced panic are over. SETI and the Mars rovers rule.

Now, I reckon this blog post is long enough, so I'll end it here.

But remember... Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!

Swimming with Monsters

First off, apologies to you all for the recent lack of posts. Things have been a bit hectic recently. Concerning fiction, I've an imminent short story deadline and a novel synopsis due on the same day, both of which I'm very excited about (and I hope you will be, too, when you read 'em). Can't say too much about the next novel at the moment, but keep your peepers open for an update soon.

Despite all my various goings on, I did manage to watch an absolutely awesome documentary mini-series originally shown by the BBC. It's called Sea Monsters: A Walking with Dinosaurs Trilogy and it absolutely blew me away.


Many of you who live in the UK are probably thinking, 'Eh? Sea Monsters? That was made back in 2003! You're not very up-to-date with your viewing, Steve.'

You'd be right, there. Living in Japan has quite a number of down sides, and missing great stuff like Sea Monsters is one of them. But I was fortunate enough to catch it on one of the cable channels here, and was completely blown away. I'm nuts about nature documentaries anyway, and I've always had an almost compulsive fascination for dinosaurs, monsters and the like. We're talking, here, about a boy who used to hound his parents into taking him to Loch Ness summer after summer, just on the off chance of spotting Scotland's most famous resident. Sea Monsters made me wish I was six years old again. I can only imagine the impact the series would have had on the child I once was (some would contend that I still am that child, of course!).

The series is so professionally written and directed that Nigel Marven and his team manage to immediately suspend the viewers' disbelief (something it has in common with good fiction) and take us on a journey through our planet's seven deadliest seas, each belonging to a period in Earth's distant past. It's a hell of a ride!

If you haven't seen it yet, you owe it to yourself to check Sea Monsters out. You won't be disappointed. Oh, and I'd like to give a big shout out to Nigel Marven himself, who does wonderful work supporting conservation causes such as The Gorilla Organisation. You're an inspiration, Nigel. Keep it up!

A Wintry Tale

This is something of a special blog entry for me. I've just added something to www.red-stevie.com that I think you'll enjoy. Let me tell you about it.

I think it was in the summer of 2005 that I visited Kawasaki City Museum for a special exhibition called Nihon no Genjuu. The title roughly equates to Strange Creatures of Japan, and the museum promised to take visitors into the mysterious world of the country's legendary beasts like never before. How? With the weirdest and creepiest exhibits I have ever seen.

I'm damned glad I went along. What an inspiration! From temples and museums around Japan, the exhibition brought together such eerie treasures as the mummified remains of diminutive mer-people - half humanoid, half fish. There was the severed, three-clawed hand of an oni (ogre). There were the skeletal remains of a karasu-tengu - a dangerous being somewhere between man and crow. There was all this and much, much more.

But it was one particular piece that defined the whole experience for me. It was another mummified body. I must've looked at it for at least an hour, and it was my exposure to that particular exhibit which prompted me to write the first short story I ever sold - a dark fantasy piece called Stray Dog Swordsman on Redemption Road.

Set in rural Japan in the mid-1400s, the story was published in Talebones #31 in the winter of 2005. And now, with that particular issue of Talebones almost impossible to find, I have decided to offer the story for free as a downloadable PDF on this website.

I hope you'll enjoy Stray Dog Swordsman on Redemption Road. Simply click here to open the file, or right click on the picture below and select 'Save Link As...' to save it.


And if you're passing through the woods in winter, and you hear something you shouldn't, grip the handle of your sword, keep your head down and hurry your pace. There are some things it is better not to stop for!