Unfortunately I was double booked for the Lancashire Aerial Phenomena Resarch Society conference in Lytham Saint Anne's and the Pagan Federation convention at Nottingam University.The hotel at Lytham was plush and splendid but I had an early call to get a train down to Nottingham.

My old mate Lionel Fanthorpe was also lecturing at the Pagan Fed do (despite being a vicar). He talked about his favourate Fortean mysteries (including the Mongolian deathworm) and answered questions on his oddest experiences (including talking to me about a mutual admiration for lady wrestlers, in the driving rain in the middle of the night in a wood whilst making a documentory about Nostradamus. Don`t ask.) and how he first became a vicar.

I also met a beautiful girl running a stor at the con. She was a pagan, liked Dr who, was a Fortean, and collected comics! She also had a husband. If my luck with women were petrol I wouldn`t have enough to power an ant`s moped round a penny!

I lectured about my hunt for 60 foot snakes in Thailand and then lept on the train to get back to Lytham and give exactly the same talk to LAPIS. One might be wondering what a cryptozoologist was doing lecturing at a UFO conference. Well, those of you who have read my account of the trip in the expeditions part of this website will know about the naga fireballs. These are red balls of light that shoot up from the Mekong river around the 13th of October and are belived to be the breath of the naga. These were suffitently like earthlights to get me on at the conference. The fact that they were allmost certainly flairs I did not mention untill the actual talk (they were paying me and putting me up in a nice hotel after all).

Jon lectured on the chupacabra - an entity that like the naga has less to do with extraterestrials than Eskimos have to do with the Belgian Congo. But the key here was Keelian UFOlogy which in my opinion is the only real UFOlogy (apart from new prototype military craft).

The best part of the LAPIS con was the party afterwards. In this drunken mailstrom I met such met such characters as Gordie Dave, Rob "The Bastard" Whitehead, and Jose Escamilla of "Rods" fame. Nick Redfern also introduced me to his wife to be, Dana, a beautiful Texan girl he had met whilst lecturing in Las Vagas. Now if only I could meet a gothic amazon whilst lecturing in Yorkshire.

Nick, Dana, Jon and I had an extra night in the hotel. It was a much more sedate affair and we watched the "top 100 TV characters" a show that unsuprisingly listed the top 100 TV characters as voted for by the viewing public. To my joy The Doctor (Doctor Who)was voted in at number 5, soundly thrashing Mr Spock.. Come morning Jon and myself headed back to Exeter and Nick and his new love returned to Texas.