THE SAD TRUTH BEHIND AN MIB STORY

Fortean author Mike Dash has tipped me off about an interesting development to one of the most famous MIB cases in the UFO literature; the case of Dr Herbert Hopkins, from Maine. Hopkins had been the consultant hypnotist who had performed the hypnotic regression for the 1975 abduction case in Maine, involving recalled memories of strange, ‘mushroom-headed, entities. Mike Dash continues the story in his indispensable book Borderlands:

“Perhaps the oddest and most detailed of all MIB incidents actually sprang from the Maine encounter of 1975. About six months after the incident had occurred, a local doctor named Herbert Hopkins was alone in his home when he received a call from a man who claimed to be the vice-president of a UFO organisation. The caller had heard that Hopkins had spoken to Stephens and Gray, and asked if he could call to discuss the case. Hopkins agreed, and within a matter of seconds - far more quickly than seemed possible - a man appeared at his back door. Hopkins let him in, for some reason not even asking his name.

“The stranger, he thought, `looked like an undertaker'. He was dressed in a just-pressed black suit, and when he removed his (black) hat, Hopkins saw that he was not only bald, but lacked eyelashes and eyebrows. His face was white, his lips a vivid red, and he asked his questions about the case in a flat, unaccented voice. At one point, while Hopkins was talking, his visitor brushed his gloved hand against his face and the doctor saw with surprise a red smear appear on the back of the glove. The man was wearing lipstick.

“Then came the threats. First Hopkins's visitor executed a bizarre `conjuring trick', slowly dematerialising a coin the doctor was holding in his own hand, with the comment, 'No one on this plane will ever see that coin again.' Next, Hopkins was told to destroy all the tapes and notes he had made of his meetings with Stephens and Gray. If he did not, the man threatened, his own heart would vanish in the same way that the coin had.'

“As he spoke his last words', Hopkins remembered, 'I noticed that his speech was slowing down. A bit unsteadily, he got to his feet and said, very slowly, 'My energy is running low. Must go now. Goodbye.' The man walked woodenly out of the house, towards a bright light that was shining in the driveway, and Hopkins did not see him again.”

But some new information throws an entirely different light on this account. An internet blog by Hopkins nephew, also called Herbert Hopkins reports that:

“My uncle was, unfortunately, a fantasy-prone individual, craved the center of attention and limelight and on a base level he sometimes just made things up—no matter how hyperbolic—to top everybody else. As brilliant as he was in many areas, however, he was unskilled at fiction.

“And for much of the ‘70s and 80s, he was an alcoholic. Every night was spent alone with a magnum of wine (he made his own wine, too, in a still in the basement). He would stumble up the stairs at about 5am, tripping over the 'invisible dog'. How did I know about the invisible dog? Well, a handful of times when I was sleeping over I would be awake and hear that tripping and the inevitable curse, “goddamn dog!” The real dog, incidentally, was next to me on the bed, staring out at the hall, wondering what the hell the thud had been.“

The bottom line for this particular Man in Black tale is unfortunately pretty mundane. This mysterious being in black, inspired by cheap fiction and alcohol, probably less of malicious intent and more from some sad need for attention, was, alas, a simple lie, one that needs to be corrected for those into serious research in this area.

You can read the full account here:

http://howardhopkins.blogspot.com/2008/01/truth-about-man-in-black.html

The Hopkins family seem to have been a pretty odd crew, and Harold Jnr. Presents another experience from his rather eccentric relatives.

“What seemed kinda creepy to a kid now seems…well, no so much. In fact, it is so full gaps and silliness you have to wonder why some of the legitimate journals on paranormal research would even bother to treat it with any validity.

“The truth is again pretty obvious and simple. But unfortunately mixed with family sadness. Remember the part I mentioned about John not recognizing the couple but bringing them home anyway? At the time, we kids weren’t privy to what went on there, but later John told me. John and Maureen were swingers (is that term even still used?) It was fairly common for other couples to be coming and going about that place. As I kid I thought, wow, they sure have a lot of, um, “close” friends. Yep, close. Very close. So that they might have brought home an alien or two…not such a big surprise.”

Read the full account here:

http://howardhopkins.blogspot.com/2008/01/more-mib-weirdery.html

I seem to recall that this incident featured in one of John Keel's reports in Flying Saucer Review. It also appeared in dramatised form in a remarkable play called All Along the Watchtowers, performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. There is a review of it somewhere in the crumbling back-copies of Magonia. I’ll try and dig it out and put it up here.

Again, thanks to Mike Dash for this tip-off. Borderlands is an excellent book and you should have a copy:

AAA - AMBIGUOUS AUSTRALIAN ANOMALIES

Tony Healy and Paul Cropper. The Yowie: In search of Australia’s Bigfoot. Anomalist Books, 2006.

Healy and Cropper’s account of the Yowie ‘phenomenon’ or ‘experience’ or whatever shows just how complex many anomalous personal experiences really are. They present a wealth of ‘testimonial’ evidence that people have encounters with both large and small ‘apelike’ creatures in Australia, a country which is thought to have no truly native placental mammals; the dingo having been introduced by man. Not only is it difficult to see how any large primates could have got there, the descriptions of the Yowie with their huge canines don’t really fit with anything in the fossil records.

For all the eyewitness testimony, not one body has been found anywhere, despite a fearfully high level of road kill, and the general massacres of people and animals carried out in the colonial period. The authors also point out that similar accounts are found in many parts of the world, but not one skeleton, not one fossil nor piece of totally unambiguous physical evidence has been found anywhere ever. This might be accounted for if these were such rare creatures that they almost never encountered, but the large number of reports seems to suggest otherwise.

The main physical evidence presented are tracks on the ground, but even these are contradictory, some are five toed, some four and others three. There are other strange features of the Yowie experience, the extraordinary, over the top fear witnesses can experience, senses of presence when nothing can actually been seen, horrible overpowering smells. In some cases Yowie reports go alongside reports of phantom felines, UFOs and even poltergeists.

For many Magonia readers all of this will be familiar, the same ambiguities and lack of conclusive evidence applies indeed to reports of 'phantom felines', lake monsters etc. to say nothing of UFOs, ghosts and the like: to say nothing of actual reports of fairies and other things too bizarre ever to be the subject of an organized hobby.

Healy and Cropper consider all sorts of explanations, the psychosocial, the paws and pelts, and the frankly paranormal. They tend to the latter, but paranormal explanations still don’t really fit. If these things are supposed to be material objects that have somehow fallen into our world from some parallel m-brane a trillionth of a millimetre away in some higher dimension, wouldn’t one still sooner or later get killed in our world, if they are non material (whatever that is supposed to mean if not somehow hallucinatory) then how come they leave material traces. If they don’t and the traces are just an assortment of marks which have got associated with the experience, then we don’t need to invoke paranormal explanations at all; if they do then by what mechanism (by the way things which produce physical effects and traces are by definition physical and need to be accommodated into the descriptions of physical reality).

In our present state of knowledge I tend to the view that some sort of psychosocial approach is the best we have. People have experiences which they interpret or remember as encounters with “the others”, the nature of which is determined to at least some extent by the surrounding culture. People draw into that experience things coincidentally in the environment such as marks on the ground, and assume that they are physical evidence. The ‘Yowie experience’ like the ‘UFO experience’ and the ‘ghost experience’ may be triggered by a great variety of different things (some of which might involve what for want of better words might be called uncatalogued or unassimilated aspects of nature).

MAGONIA EDITOR IN SUNDAY NEWSPAPER SEX SENSATION SHOCK HORROR!!!

Scrabbling through an envelope of old cuttings, I came across this little gem. It comes from the Sunday Sport, from some time in 1984 when my book Evidence for Alien Abductions was published. For the benfit of readers outside Britain, the Sunday Sport is the sort of sensational tabloid that makes the National Enquirer look like the New York Times on one of its more sober days.

Famed for headlines such as 'London bus found on the moon', the Sport has always shown an interest in the UFO topic, with stories in the nature of 'UFO turned my son into an olive' (yes, that was an actual 'story'!), and I wasn't too surprised when I was button-holed by one of their reporters during the interval of the BUFORA meeting which I was invited to speak at after my book was published.

I knew the Sport had form on this, so tried not to give too many hostages to fortune, but obviously slipped up on this. I presume the case referred to is the famous Tujunga Canyon case, investigated by Anne Druffel.

After grilling me for about five minutes the Sport's man announced "I've got to go and see a paedophile" and tore off out of the meeting room! Not a parting line I'd recommend to everyone!

BUT IS IT ART ...?

Acknowledgements to the UFO UpDates list for bringing this item to my attention. Have a careful read of it, then let me know what you think. I have a few comments of my own at the end.

Source: Spiegel OnLine - Germany
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,606956,00.html
Thu, 12 Feb 2009

Third Reich From The Sun
Artist Explores Myths of Nazi UFO Technology
By David Gordon Smith in Berlin

Did Hitler develop top-secret flying saucers? One Polish artist is looking at myths of secret Nazi technology in a new exhibition at the site where the notorious V-2 rocket was developed in the German coastal city of Peenemünde. The Nazis weren't defeated at the end of World War II. Instead, they fled to Antarctica in a flying saucer constructed by Nazi scientists, where the SS continued their struggle against Freemasons from a secret base in the German colony of New Swabia. The Americans would later launch the Antarctic expedition Operation Highjump in 1946 in a bid to capture the Nazis' flying saucer technology.

That, at least, is one version of events. Such far-fetched theories about Nazi flying saucers are deconstructed in a new exhibition by Polish artist Hubert Czerepok which opens Thursday at Peenemünde Historical Technical Information Center on Germany's Baltic coast. "I'm concerned with questioning official versions of history, which are not always true," says Czerepok. "I'm interested in asking which version is really true." The exhibition is entitled Haunebu, one of several names for the alleged flying saucer project, which are also referred to as Reichsflugscheiben ("Reich flying discs"), Vril discs or V-7s. According to believers, the disks were up to 71 meters (230 feet) in diameter and could reach speeds of up to 5,000 kilometres per hour (3,100 miles per hour).

Peenemünde is an appropriate location for exploring such topics, given that it was where the German V-2 rockets were developed during World War II; some ufologists believe the Haunebu project was an offshoot of the V-2 program. In fact, many aspects of the UFO conspiracy theories in circulation are inspired by real events relating to the V-2 -- such as the idea that the Allies seized the flying saucer technology at the end of the war and took the Nazi scientists to the United States to continue their work in secret. However, there is no historical evidence that any flying saucer program ever existed.

Between Fact and Fiction
One of the strands that feeds into ufologists' fertile imaginations is a peculiar structure located outside the village of Nowa Ruba in Poland's Owl Mountains, a part of the country which belonged to Germany up until 1945. The mysterious construction consists of a dozen concrete pillars arranged in a circle with a ring around the top. No one has ever been able to come up with a definitive explanation of what the Nazis used it for -- prompting ufologists to speculate it was used in the alleged Haunebu project.

"There's no other structure like it," says Czerepok, who has visited the site, which was featured in a BBC documentary. "Some believe it was some kind of storage facility or an ammunition factory. Others believe it was used for an anti-gravity engine." A large-format photograph of the structure forms part of the exhibition, which also includes a scale model of a Nazi flying saucer and what are alleged to be photographs, some clearly doctored, and design sketches of the UFOs.

Czerepok, who says he has always been fascinated by urban myths and conspiracy theories, was inspired by works by the sensationalist Polish historian Igor Witkowski. He also found a wealth of material on the many Web sites devoted to Nazi secret technology. Some of the sites go into extraordinary detail about the supposed Nazi UFOs, featuring information about specifications and test flights. "The Vril 1 Jäger (Hunter) was constructed in 1941 and first flew in 1942," reads one site. "It was 11.5 meters in diameter, had a single pilot, and could achieve speeds of between 2,900 kilometres (1,800 miles) per hour and 12,000 kilometres per hour!" The sites are illustrated with -- inevitably blurry -- photos, artists' renditions and technical drawings which purport to show the advanced technology described. The authors also discuss at length the role of supposed Nazi secret societies such as the Order of the Black Sun or the Vril Society.

"I've met people who really think it's true," says Czerepok. However, the artist insists his aim is not to poke fun at people who believe in the theories. "The project deals with history, which is not like science," he says. "Instead, it consists of several small narratives." He feels artists often occupy the gray area between fact and fiction. "As an artist, you are in a position to reconstruct things which did not exist, things which are not certain." In the past, theories about a Nazi UFO program gained particular traction in Germany's radical right, neo-Nazi communities. But Czerepok isn't concerned about his exhibition becoming a magnet for the neo-Nazi fringe. "It's not a show dedicated to them and I am not trying to get their special attention," he says. "It's an exhibition about history, which has been seen by some people as science fiction and by others as true historical facts. It's open for all possible interpretations and different audiences."

Does he believe in UFOs himself? "I'm kind of in between. You have skeptical days and days when you believe in things. As they say, the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." The exhibition "Haunebu" runs at the Peenemünde Historical Technical Information Center from Feb. 12 until April 19, 2009.

Now, I’m sure that the artist Hubert Czerepok has no sympathy whatsoever for the Nazis, and this artwork is a serious critique of the sort of crazy ideas that have circulated on the fringes of the UFO world for decades. Kevin McClure wrote a very forceful denunciation of some of these ‘theories’ which appeared on the old Magonia website, and I shall have to see about getting them uploaded onto the new site. I do wonder though whether having a display like this at the Peenemunde is a good idea, as I fear it may be used by some fanatics to justify their own twisted versions of history. A phrase like "I'm concerned with questioning official versions of history, which are not always true … I'm interested in asking which version is really true" has a particularly unfortunate resonance in the terms of twentieth-century German history!

I’m probably being paranoid here, and I can’t imagine the German authorities would allow anything which might give succour to Revisionist historians, particularly at such a sensitive location. Czerepok says he isn’t concerned about neo-Nazis being attracted to the exhibition: “I’m not trying to get their special attention”, he says. But I worry that he may get it anyway.

The Nazi-UFO myth is of significant historical importance and needs to be examined an de-legitimised. It’s just that I think this may be better done in a rather better way that an art installation at a historically sensitive site. Having said all that, I’d still be fascinated to see the exhibition!

What do you think?

Kevin McClure's 'Nazi UFO Myth' artices are now online HERE

POLITICS AND THE OCCULT; SCIENCE AND ESP

Gary Lachman. The Politics of the Occult: the Left, the Right and the Radically Unseen. Quest Books, 2008.

Following in the footsteps of James Webb, author of The Flight from Reason and The Occult Establishment, Gary Lachman traces the connections between occultism and politics from the days of the Rosicrusians onwards.

For much of this period, "occult" movements embraced radical or progressive causes, dreaming of various utopias, and laying, usually half baked, plans for their achievement. Some of the topics discussed here will be reasonably well known, others are much more obscure. For example to today the Moravians are a fairly standard nonconformist denomination, my old father's boss in the 1950s and 1960s was a member. Once they practised communal living, there was a Moravian settlement at Fairfield near Manchester. Lachman reveals they once had some very strange spiritual practices indeed, which I won't go into as some of you might just have eaten before reading this. Lachman also examines the sexual politics of Swedenborg, a topic airbrushed out of history by his followers.

Mixtures of "left" and "right" radical traditions persisted in these esoteric milieus, for example there are the connections between Nickels Roerich, the mystical explorer who went in search of Shambhala and dreamed at one point of creating a joint Soviet-Shambhalan power block, and Henry Wallace, who was FDR Vice President in his third term, and who later stood as a Progressive candidate for the US presidency in 1948. Roerich's dream was rather impractical for two reasons, one was that the Soviets weren't interested, the second was that Shambhala alias Agarthi (under numerous different spellings) didn't exist.

Right up until the first world war, occultist movements had been as much 'progressive' as 'reactionary', but in the following years, the revolt against modernity led many into reactionary directions. Here Lachman pinpoints the role of groups such as the Synergists and the Traditionalists who rejected democracy, liberty and equality pretty much lock, stock and barrel and ended up in bed with Hitler. Lachman particularly concentrates here on the roles of Carl Jung, Mirciea Eliade and Julius Evola. Jung gets a cautious acquittal but the other two are clearly guilty of deep involvement with fascism. Eliade hid his radical-right past in his later years as an American academic and 'historian of religions', but his private views do not seem to have changed, while Evola remained an unashamed Nazi.

Today there are all sorts of radical 'restorationist' movements in the world, and in many ways jihadist 'Islam' is the true successor to the European radical right, and I put 'Islam' in scare quotes, because as much, if not more, of this movement's ideology and philosophy come from European as from traditional Islamic sources. This, like synarchism or those who dreamed of Shambhala, looks towards the creation of a hyper-totalitarian state which will abolish the contradictions of modernity.

This is a fascinating and important book, though not a perfect one, one gets the feeling that too much is being squashed into too few pages, and it lacks the research in primary sources one might wish for, and there are some source notes to less than reliable sources. It is perhaps best seen as a map for future explorers to take. Nevertheless it is a book, which had he lived, our colleague Roger Sandell would have much appreciated.

Diane Hennacy Powell. The ESP Enigma: the scientific case for psychic phenomena. Walker and Company, 2009.

Powell is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, with a training in neuroscience, and is therefore better able than many to be aware of the various problems integrating 'ESP' into modern neuroscience-based views of consciousness. We would expect someone with her background to examine the problem in a scientific fashion.

Well she does treat her own subject of neuroscience in a scientific fashion, with discussions of some recent research, the results of damage to specific areas of the brain, the possible role of dreamlike states in the production of out-of-the-body and near-death experiences etc. There is much of interest in these portions.

When it comes to the evidence for ESP and PK, the tone seems very different, for while her boggle factor is clearly more sharply set than many in this field, clearly excluding macro PK and seance room phenomena, much of her discussion in this area is anecdotal and shows little appreciation of the complex psychological, social and cultural background of much of this testimony. Worse still is her rapid descent into the kind of promiscuous paranormalism, in which the likes of Edgar Cayce, Peter Hurkos, Carlos Casteneda, Fritjof Capra, David Bohm , Rupert Sheldrake and Harold Burr all rub shoulders with one another, and with discussions of relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, chaos theory, interconnectedness, eastern world views, reflexology and iridology. All that is left out is Uncle Tom Cobleigh and his old grey mare. The assumption seems to be that if enough enough ingredients are thrown into the pot something tasty will emerge.

Part of Powell's problem is that she is, like many in this field, essentially looking for anomalies to use as ammunition against the dreaded materialism, because she cannot see how anything as special as consciousness can arise from a material brain. I rather suspect that this is more of a cultural or aesthetic problem than a scientific one, and one that ultimately comes from the class structure of classical Greek civilisation, where the pure, sacred world of the mind, the province of gentleman philosophers such as Plato, was contrasted with the grubby, profane, polluted world of matter, the realm of subaltern groups such as women, artisans and slaves.

This Hellenistic world view was incorporated into early Christianity and some of its offshoots, and has greatly influenced Western thought ever since. This tendency to try and separate consciousness from brain activity leads her into more problems such as "we do not know how the desire to drink creates the brain cell activity" which sets up the chain of nervous action which leads to the lifting of a glass. From the monist point of view there is no problem, because the decision to the pick up the glass is the product of the brain activity, and the "desire" is the experiential part of that activity.

Of course it is hard to imagine how patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the human brain can give rise to conscious experience, but if you really think about it, it is not any easier to really understand how activity in fields, energies, astral bodies, unextended mind-stuff or whatever can give rise to conscious experience. All that makes it appear so, are the cultural prejudices described above.

as with many such writers, Powell really does not do justice to the many complexities and disputes within this field, and barely touches upon the sceptical critiques of many of the topics and personalities covered. The approach to parapsychology is not really scientific, and I doubt that this book will convince many agnostics let alone sceptics, though it may impress some arts graduates with little background knowledge of science or the history and intricacies of parapsychology and psychical research. -- Peter Rogerson

VISIONARY EXPERIENCES

I wonder just how many anomaly researchers are familiar with this condition? Thanks to UFO UpDates for drawing this to my attention:

Daily Mail, 3rd February 2009 http://tinyurl.com/crr9ur

Ghostly Faces And Visions Of 'Little People': The eye disorder that leaves thousands fearing they've lost their senses. By Morag Preston

Following his wife's death six years ago, David Stannard has become accustomed to spending quiet evenings alone at his home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. So it came as a surprise to the 73-year-old when he looked up from his television one evening to discover he was sharing his living room with two RAF pilots and a schoolboy. 'The pilots were standing next to the TV, watching it as if they were in the wings of a theatre,' he says. '

The little boy was in a grey, Fifties-style school uniform. He just stood there in the hearth looking puzzled. He was 18 inches high at most.'

Mr Stannard's guests never said a word and vanished after 15 minutes. That night, he says, the walls of his house, which had always been white, looked as though they had been redecorated in patterned wallpaper with a brickwork effect. The next morning he was caught off-guard again when he found a fair-haired girl standing on his sofa. She also appeared to be from the Fifties, but was life-size, wearing a short skirt and pink cardigan, with chubby knees, white ankle socks and ribbons in her hair. '

I watched her for a while,' he says. 'She didn't move much. Then she was gone.' It would be easy to dismiss Mr Stannard's story as the bizarre imaginings of an elderly mind. Fortunately, he knew he wasn't losing his mind; neither was his house haunted. A few weeks earlier he had been registered blind, though he was still able to watch television if he sat at a certain angle. He'd been warned that as his eyesight deteriorated, he might experience visual hallucinations in the form of Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS).

'I was lucky enough to know what it was,' he says, 'otherwise I would have thought I was going bonkers.' An estimated 100,000 people in the UK have CBS, but many won't realise it because the condition remains something of a mystery. The real number is probably higher because sufferers are often too ashamed to talk about what they have seen for fear of being considered crazy.

The late historian Lord Dacre of Glanton, formerly Hugh Trevor- Roper, was unusual among CBS patients in that he talked openly about what he jokingly referred to as his 'phantasmagoria'. He would see horses and bicycles racing, and whole landscapes whizzing by as if he were on a train. On one occasion, he found himself trapped in an apparently endless tunnel.

Hallucinations tend to have common themes: simple geometric patterns, disembodied faces with jumbled features, landscapes, groups of people, musical notes, vehicles and miniature figures in Victorian or Edwardian costume. They can be in black and white or colour, moving or still, but they are always silent.

The condition was named after Charles Bonnet, an 18th-century Swiss natural philosopher whose grandfather had seen people, patterns and vehicles that were not really there. Bonnet was the first person to identify that you could have visual hallucinations and still be mentally sound. The condition can affect anybody at any age with diminishing eyesight. Even people with normal vision can develop it if they blindfold themselves for long enough. But most people who have CBS have it as a side-effect of age-related macular degeneration - the most common cause of blindness in the UK.

It is thought that up to 60 per cent of patients with severe vision loss develop CBS. Crucially, CBS is caused by lack of visual stimulation rather than mental dysfunction. Usually, on opening our eyes, the nerve cells in the retina send a constant stream of impulses to the visual parts of the brain. If the retina is damaged, the stream of impulses reduces, but - rather than lie dormant - other parts of the brain become hyperactive. So when the brain isn't receiving as many pictures as it is used to, it builds its own artificial images instead from the areas we use every day to process faces, objects, landscapes and colours. What you hallucinate depends on which part of the brain these increases are located.

But why only a proportion of patients with macular degeneration experience hallucinations is still unknown, or why younger patients with macular degeneration are less likely to have CBS than older ones.

Dr Dominic Ffytche, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, is a leading expert on CBS. He has been at the forefront of a campaign led by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and The Macular Disease Society calling for eye doctors to warn patients with macular degeneration that they may develop CBS. He says: 'In our experience, forewarning and knowledge of the possibility of hallucinations helps patients cope when they occur. It allows them to realise this indicates a functional problem with their sight and not a problem with their mind.'

In 2003, Sandra Jones, 54, a former TV producer, thought she was losing her mind when she started seeing faces looming towards her out of nowhere. Having visited various massacre sites, including Rwanda, as part of her job, she assumed it was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. 'Part of me thought this was payback time,' she says. The faces would swirl off the pages of the book she was reading, or appear in front of her computer screen. It would happen three or four times a day, usually when she was feeling relaxed or trying to get to sleep.

'Some nights I couldn't lose them and I would only get an hour's sleep,' she says. 'Closing my eyes wouldn't help, so I'd get up and clean my house just to keep moving. I got the feeling that if I was tired, it would help me fall asleep, which would then free up my mind.' She didn't dare tell friends or anyone at work for fear of jeopardising her job, and found out about CBS only after researching her symptoms online. Earlier that year she had been diagnosed with Sorsby's fundus dystrophy, a rare genetic eye condition which causes early onset macular degeneration, but nobody had warned her that hallucinations might be a side- effect.

'The unpleasant feeling was of not being in control,' she says. 'Once they are identified, they are not a problem.' Hallucinations can last from only a few seconds to several hours. In a minority of unlucky cases, they are continuous throughout the day. Patients usually have several daily before they taper off to once a week, then once a month. For 60 per cent of patients, they will stop entirely after 18 months. There has not yet been a long-term study, but some patients report having them for at least three years. Part of Dr Ffytche's research involves looking into ways patients can stop the hallucinations. 'There won't be a single recipe for everyone,' he says. 'But hallucinations tend to occur when you are in a state of drowsy wakefulness, so you want to rouse yourself.'

As the condition is caused by a lack of stimulation in the visual part of the brain, one of the techniques he is investigating is stimulating the fingertips. This is based on the fact that studies of brain scans of sight-impaired people reading Braille show increased activity in that area. The theory is that even feeling a dice with dimples could bring visions to a halt. Other techniques include holding your breath; turning on a light if it is off, or vice-versa; standing up if you are sitting down; and moving your eyes.

In extreme cases, medication is used. But the drugs can have side-effects such as tremors, drowsiness, sickness and diarrhoea. Dr Winfried Amoaku, chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and a specialist in macular degeneration, says when they come to visit him, patients do two things: first, they request that nobody else is in the room before mentioning the hallucinations, then afterwards they breathe a sigh of relief.

For Mary Orr, 84, from West Kilbride, the final straw was seeing the walls of her house covered in white fur. In desperation, she started to claw at them. 'It was then I thought: "I can't live like this," ' she says. After months assuming she had dementia, she was referred to a psychiatrist who recognised the signs of CBS straight away and told her to see an eye doctor. It explains why she still sees pink squares and snakes rising out of the pavement, but Mary is resolute that the worst is behind her. As she says: 'It's the fear of not knowing what's happening that you can't live with.'

The Macular Disease Society, www.maculardisease.org, 0845 241 2041; Royal National Institute for the Blind, www.rnib.org.uk, 0303 123 9999.

TO INFINITY... AND SLOUGH

Not much you can say, really, about this headline from the [London] Evening Standard, 4th February, except tough luck ending up in Slough after after travelling all that way. But then again, they might feel at home: very little atmosphere.