A few nights ago, it was dead cloudy over Liverpool, but every so often a peephole or two’d open up in the clouds allowing me to catch a glimpse of a swarm of swirling lights - a first for me.

At first I thought they were only normal stars seen through some cloud generated optical illusion - until I realised they were too closely packed together, too similar in size, and too identical in brilliance.

The thing is, I’m familiar with a lot of star-based optical illusions, especially ones involving clouds, so if this particular ‘performance’ WAS just an illusion, then it was a new one on me, because not only did these ’stars’ swirl and mingle about with each other a bit like bingo or lottery balls, but they remained concentrated around the same small area of sky for about twenty minutes, whereas normally, real stars in that sort of period of time’d've subtly drifted and changed their respective positions in relation to the chimney stacks and roof angles I was using as points of reference.

The thing is, I started getting a bit frustrated after a while at only being able to see what the h*ll they were getting up to for only a few seconds at a time; and that’s when it suddenly hit me how they only really seemed to start turning on their swirling about when the size of the opening in the clouds was sure to give me a really good, if brief, view of them.

Realising how odd this was, I found myself murmuring, “It’s like they’re performing for me”; and that’s when it suddenly flashed in my mind how that black dragon thingy I told you about, started turning its head to look back towards its ungainly, distinctly unaerodynamic coiling tail (enabling it, as it now occurs to me, to look sideways on at me, too), at precisely the same moment I finally admitted to myself what I was seeing.

Ditto, my shooting star thingy of a few weeks back: because when I finally realised it couldn’t be a meteor in the process of vaporizing itself, that’s when it suddenly did its little trick of switchblading itself those three extra pointy ‘extensions’ I told you about.

And that’s when it also occurred to me how, in so many of the sightings of them, the inhabitants of the paranormal universe always seem to incorporate these peculiar little party piece add-ons to their big numbers, these little sort of equivalents of Young Elvisesque flamboyant hip-jiggling embellishments or enhancements to their own particular cosmic karaoke performance sessions.

The other day you mentioned your early ‘career’ as a crop circle ‘hunter’, and crop circles can definitely have those odd little sort of over the top irrelevant details I’m wittering on about, sometimes to a degree which almost smack of a bad actor or writer hamming it up with the script in an ill-advised attempt to win themselves the Oscar.

Even a lot of cosmic cattle rustler stuff has ’silly’, ‘trivial’ elements about it which leave you wondering if you’re not so much being told about the gory research antics of alien scientists or even black op operators showing off how smart and above the law they are, as inadvertently finding yourself in the audience of, or even participating in, some bizarre parallel dimension’s equivalent of a 1920s’ Berlin Cabaret performance or a 1960s’ art ‘happening’.

In which case does that make you and Greg the hypothetical parallel dimension’s equivalent of Laurel & Hardknock?

yeah Keel did some great work on all this and I’m certain that without his input we wouldn;t be anywhere near to trying to understand what these “winged things” are.

Some may be genuine crypto mysteries; while others seem really weird in the sense of perhaps not even being physically real as we understand it.

Ken Gerhard’s new book on the Texas (and elsewhere) thunderbird is a great, relevant piece of work.