Posted for the record.

In June 2000 I arranged with the Oxford-based Contact International UFO Research Group to give an exclusive premier of an award-winning documentary video.

As the video had won two major awards at the hugely popular international UFO conference in Nevada I hoped that the sleepy populace of Oxfordshire might stir from their cocktails of slumber and soap operas and venture out to see a free showing of a remarkable piece of film.

Unfortunately the lack of manpower, time and media support conspired to prevent sufficient pre-publicity.

The lucky ones who did come were treated to a genuine piece of startling evidence that yes there is more to life than our programmed leaders and media would have us believe.

For those who are interested in more info on this wonderful work please go to the books section and the ACERN website

As usual a pin-head from the press arrived, shuffled around in a furtive manner and pushed off shortly after the introduction. He then felt qualified to write a slanderous piece on me and a disgusting piece of garbage about the over-worked volunteers of Contact International UFO Research Group. Virtually everything he wrote about me was wrong which wasn’t surprising as he didn’t talk with me before, during or after the meeting. Apparently he waylaid and harassed the group members over a period of days and after they had cheerfully helped as much as they could with his enquiries he set about maliciously attacking them.

If you feel like it you can read this demeaning diatribe below. The reporter???? is Mr Rep Tile -sorry Reg Little -from the Oxford Times.

I was so incensed that I wrote a letter of protest to the editor (Reproduced below). Of course I never had a reply. As they didn’t have the courtesy to print my letter I make no apology for printing their article and my letter here.

 

 

WHEN E.T. FLEW IN TO IDENTIFY FLYING OBJECTS

Oxfordshire’s UFO spotters gather to hear claims of close encounters of various kinds.
By Reg. Little

Two elegant, elderly ladies had just introduced themselves to E.T. “So I hear that you were abducted?” one enquired sweetly.
For E.T. it is the same wherever he goes, everybody wants to know exactly how he ended up with strange finger marks and red circles all over his body.
“It happened while I was in Perth,” he replied casually. “But we do not use the word abducted anymore.”
The room above the Inner Bookshop off Cowley Road, Oxford was beginning to fill up with Contact International members. For a group that specialises in “unravelling the great UFO enigma” they all seemed surprisingly down to earth. Sitting at the back was Ms Linda Dellow, who works as a cook at Tesco, then there was Mr Carl Howard, a mechanics student at Oxford College of Further Education, who had come with his uncle. Busily moving between the rows of chairs was the group’s long-serving membership secretary, Mrs Fran Copeland, of Kennington, who works as a book-keeper for small businesses. Under her arm were bulging files and folders, but these told of sights and sounds that would be altogether alien to your average accountant.
On the floor, the treasurer, Mr Geoff Ambler, was trying to unlock the mysteries of a seriously old video machine.
Only the public relations man, Mr Michael Soper, looked refreshingly eccentric, with a bushy moustache, worthy of the man who took Oxford’s most well-known UFO photograph outside the New Marston Co-op back in 1977. The picture was even featured in the Marston Millenium exhibition.
Mr Soper, too, was preoccupied by the marks on E.T.’s body but I was already close to cracking the mystery. Ellis Taylor (for a long time his name could not be used for “security purposes”) had spent the night with his attractive girlfriend, May, in the middle of a desert. When he threw back his quilt in the morning, his body was covered with finger marks with a large red mark on his right buttock…
Before I could suggest an altogether simpler explanation than a close encounter with occupants of inter-planetary craft, Mr Soper was putting me right about the real facts of life.
“You must realise that it may seem like it’s imagination but these marks are known to these people who investigate these things.”
“And, of course, Ellis had been groggy for weeks afterwards,” I pointed out helpfully.
But by then the treasurer had called for order to introduce the guest from afar, though apparently not as far as some may have hoped.
“So allow me to hand over to Ellis Taylor, E.T. I hope you are not too disappointed to find out that he is human,” joked Mr Ambler-well, at least I assume the editor of the group’s Awareness magazine was joking.
The story of the abduction was to be briefly delayed as the treasurer remembered to deliver an impromptu OX-files review of what has been going on in, around and above Oxfordshire. “We have been busy with UFO’s in the last few weeks. One report being investigated is at Syresham, just over the border in Northamptonshire.
“Less good news on the crop-circle front. The local group is not functioning well. I try to get around-but with petrol priced at 85p a litre-anyway, there was a strong showing at Aylesbury and Astel, near Burford. Garsington proved to be a false alarm.”
Looking around at the 15 people listening intently, it was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that Contact International counts itself as the UK’s third biggest UFO group, behind the British UFO Association and Quest in Yorkshire. Created in 1967 in Wheatley by the UFO enthusiast, Earl Clancarty (the author Brinsley Le Power Trench), today it has a membership of 250.
The group was bequeathed by Clancarty one of Britain’s most impressive UFO libraries (housed at an unidentified house in Abingdon) and over the years it has collected details of more than 80,000 cases, including a full account of Oxfordshire’s most famous “abduction” on June 19 1978.
The story of how three adults and two small children driving in a car near Faringdon were intercepted by a large spaceship has been featured in such classic UFO books as The Janos People: A Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind by Frank Johnson. But that’s hardly surprising when you remember that the family were taken aboard for nearly an hour during which time they enjoyed a short trip in the immense flying saucer and saw on film how the Janos people lived.
The story goes that after passing through Stanford in the Vale, the family noticed a bright light in front, which seemed to be travelling at the same speed as their car. It was only some time later that the members of the family all experienced “dream recall” of an adventure in a spacecraft. But John, his wife Gloria, their children Natasha (then aged five), Tanya, three, and John’s sister Frances, were able to give enough detail to fill a 200-paage book.
Today, Mr Soper, a former electrical technician at the Churchill Hospital, has the job of taking calls from UFO spotters. They are often put in touch with him by grateful police officers, who may not share his eagerness to record full details about bright balls of light or the pending colonisation of earth.
Often the distraught callers seek to unburden themselves in the early hours of the morning.
“Yes, I do receive some of the weirdest calls,” Mr Soper told me before I could even ask. “Not so long ago, I took a call from a man who called to inform me that he had seen animals copulating on the moon through his telescope.
“But then there has been a Cumnor couple who saw something like Concorde standing on its tail and gleaming with magnesium lights and an Otmoor girl who, while out with her boyfriend, came across a flying saucer hovering over a haystack.
Somehow you know that Mr Soper would have given them all the polite and sympathetic hearing of a true believer, for he too has had his own precious unidentified flying-object experience, which still burns brightly more than 40 years later. He had been walking in the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire when he saw something oscillating above a Valiant bomber.
“At the time, I was very interested in aviation and I knew it was too fast to be a plane,” he recalled. “So I started to read up about UFO’s.
“Mrs Copeland, the membership secretary, began passing me pages of completed hand-written reports detailing more recent sightings. She first became involved with the group 18 years ago after seeing two big squares of bright light one bright June morning as she drove along the Oxford ring road, when she was then training in an accountants office.
She has never managed to convince her husband, who remains a total UFO sceptic – a pity given that the size of the membership has slipped significantly from a high point of 800 20 years ago. The problem would seem to be that Contact International is effectively being hi-jacked by the Internet.
“We produce a magazine to keep everyone up to date about the UFO scene,” said Mrs Copeland. “But now there is such an enormous amount of material going straight on to the Internet.” Some 3,000 websites at the last count and growing.
World Ufology may be taking off as never before, it just seems that meetings above bookshops on wet Thursday nights are rather closer to the age of H.G. Wells than to the cyberspace revolution.
It turns out that even the shabby Inner Bookshop room is a bit of a luxury. “We normally have to meet in each other’s homes,” admitted Mr Ambler, a stamp dealer. “We have not held any big events since 1997, when we hosted a big conference at the Exeter Hall in Kidlington.
“We ended up losing money on that. I managed to get this room cheaply and just wait to see who turns up. There are usually a couple of strange faces.
“Mr Taylor, the Oxford-born Australian, had not proved to be the big draw that the Wheatley-based Contact International group had hoped for.
“The question remains whether they were, in fact, crease marks on his skin from the sheets or something more profound,” said Mr Ambler afterwards. “I’m not entirely sure. We have to be an objective organisation. I do not believe in abductions as physical events. I see them more as something that takes in the mind.”
Somehow it seemed the wrong moment to run my bad taste ‘night of passion’ theory past him.
It was still raining heavily as the small group finally dispersed down the wooden steps, after politely thanking Mr Taylor for giving them an exclusive viewing of his hour-long video, never before shown outside Australia. Slightly disheartened, the Contact International UFO researchers may have been, but on their way home you knew they would still be looking up to the sky.
Oxford Times
28th July 2000

 

 

My letter to the Oxford Times

The Editor
Sir,

It is with much regret that I note the passing of journalistic integrity within the pages of your formerly illustrious and honourable pages.

Along with many other Oxfordshire ex-pats I remember the Oxford Mail and Times with great fondness. I was an avid reader and regular customer for over 20 years. As a former resident and businessman in Oxfordshire for 36 years I built up many friends within all sections of the community.

Mr Little’s wink-wink nudge-nudge garbage was insensitive, offensive, ill-informed and misleading.

May I suggest that your writers at least research their subjects and interview their victims before exposing their ignorance on paper? There are very many books, videos, and newspaper articles written by far more qualified and respected individuals than Mr Little. Mr Little did not speak one word to me and neither did I to him. I was only at The Inner Book Shop to provide the people of Oxford with a free opportunity to view an award winning documentary. That the advertising had been inadequate was a shame because as those present will attest the content is informative, exciting and inspiring. It is a pity that your journalist decided to miss it.

If Mr Little had asked I could have spoken to him at any time over the past month as I have only just returned home. That it took all of this time to print this nonsense without any attempt by Mr Little to verify his gossip with me speaks volumes.

The photographs and the marks on my body have been seen by professional people like doctors, scientists and nurses but unlike the ‘cracked’ theory of Mr Little’s they admit that they cannot explain them.

I have never had any abduction experiences in the desert let alone any ‘close encounters’ with my girlfriend there.

I am not an Oxford born Australian. I was born in Australia moved to Oxford in 1955 and returned in 1990. My father’s family are Oxonians.

Statistically there will be other people in Oxfordshire who have been through similar experiences as I have; who will also be frightened and confused by what is happening to them. People in this situation need to feel that they can talk about these traumatic episodes in their life without ridicule. An informative and more sympathetic approach by the media will help us to understand this phenomenon far better than any mischievous scribblings by sensation seeking pseudo journalists.

May I recommend a list of reading material for Mr Little (If he has no interest in the subject he may not wish to read it – but then he shouldn’t write about it either).
Abduction Professor John Mack (Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard)
Alien Investigator Tony Dodd (Retired police sergeant)
Alien Agenda Jim Marrs (Prize-winning journalist)
Alien Base Timothy Good (Prize-winning journalist)
Abducted Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie (Experiencer & PWJ)
The God Hypothesis Dr Joe Lewells (Professor,Captain US army,etc)
The Uninvited Nick Pope (GB Government UFO collator & researcher)
Hundreds of books have been written on the subject.
Yours sincerely,
Ellis C Taylor

© Ellis Taylor
Reproduced from my former website, Looking into the Dark Places.

 

Not surprisingly, I never had any written response; what I did get was a blacklisting on every shade of media in Oxford when I tried to publicise Oxford Talks – the talks I ran there a few years later. “It’s as if your talks have been D-Noticed”, the exceptionally connected media spokesperson for Contact International said to me. But I have always spoken out honestly about what I have seen, and what I have experienced; and I will continue to do so. There are many who don’t like that – and not just within the gag media.

The image that the Oxford Times created to head their article, in hindsight, is a very interesting one:
Unfortunately my original copy is in storage and the original page went walkabout. I will be digging out the original when I can but for now, many thanks to John Hanson for forwarding this copy of the header to me.
Related video: Interviewing ET (about 3 years later) – Ellis Taylor talks about his encounters with otherworld beings in a 2003 interview on Australian TV. Also interviewed is Mary Rodwell, director of the Australian Close Encounter Resource Network.

The usual media sceptical ignorance (both seeming and poorly disguised), along with, shall we say, ‘creative editing’ in the programme of induced audience perception.

One trick the media uses to attempt to discredit an interviewee and what he or she is saying is to re-record the interviewer asking questions that may or may not be the same who is also adding different tones, gestures, facial expressions and body language. This is done to make the interviewee’s reactions to the questions seem out of synch, even if slightly and thereby subliminally agitate the viewers’ perceptions of what they will or what not accept as valid and trust-worthy. The interviewer here was re-recorded and edited to suggest the slant they have to abide by. In fact the interviewer, far from being sceptical, related paranormal experiences of his own to me – off camera.

Half an hour after this interview was aired I was telephoned by someone posing as a television producer from another station who said that “they were in the area – could they come and see me?” How did they get my number and how did they know where I lived? From experience I know that TV companies don’t work like this so I telephoned the station and they assured me that it wasn’t them. Several other strange (some ambiguously sinister) incidents followed this interview…but they had been happening anyway.