15
I
AN ENCOUNTER ON THE MOORS
magine the scene: it’s early one cold winter morning in the north of England. You are walking across a wild stretch of ancient moorland when the sight of something both incredible and terrifying catches your attention—a dwarfish creature striding along the old landscape. For a moment or two, you freeze. Then you remember you have a camera with you. Wasting no time, you quickly snap a picture of the unearthly thing, right before it vanishes. Panicked and amazed, you exit the area at high speed. But that’s not the end of it. In the days ahead, you are hassled by none other than the British Ministry of Defense: they open a file on you and even dispatch a couple of Men in Black to intimidate you into silence. And as time progresses, you realize that you may have been abducted by aliens and subjected to the now-familiar missing time phenomenon. This may all sound like the plot of some unlikely conspiracy-driven saga of fictional and sensational proportions. It’s anything but. The story referred to above is nothing less than incredible fact. And it all revolved around a retired English police officer whose story sounds like it came straight out of an episode of The X-Files. If only it had been fiction.
