'Any dark thoughts on your mind?'

At that moment, I had a few, thanks to him.

'No,' I said.

'You're definitely not worrying over the book of Revelation?'

'Definitely not,' I said. 'Uh, I really should be ...'

'Of course, of course,' Baxter said. 'I'm forgetting my manners.'

He stood up, catching the now empty cup and saucer on the fly as they fell and laying them on the table in one smooth swoop. They didn't even rattle.

'Thanks for the coffee,' he said, 'and the hospitality of the ashtray. And thanks for listening, and for being so open.'

If I'd been open, it wasn't by intent, but I had an uneasy feeling that I had been more open than I'd intended. I saw him out, returned his wave as he sauntered down the steps, and shut the door. Resisting the temptation to lean back against it and breathe out, I nipped to the downstairs toilet and took a spray-can of air freshener to the sitting room. Only after I'd rinsed the shell and the cup and mug and left the sitting room with the door open for the smells of tobacco smoke and jasmine to fight it out did I sit down at the living-room table and breathe out.

Had I just encountered a Man in Black? Or was Reverend James Baxter merely an eager and socially awkward young minister, who had mentioned by sheer coincidence the very verses from Revelation that had been on my mind since Monday? I didn't know, but I knew how to find out. I opened out my phone on the table and selected the footprint of the minister's ID card. It was there all right, but inert, with no trace of the authentication I'd seen earlier, and no warning either. A hasty visit to the local Church of Scotland site, the local Yellow Pages, and then a wider trawl, found no minister of that name. Nor was there any such project as the parochial pastoral ecumenical outreach initiative.

Holy shit, it seemed, had been the right response in the first place.

Naturally, I said nothing about the strange visit when my parents came home. My mother didn't notice the cigarette smell, having no doubt been desensitised by her stint at the relief centre, but my father did.

'Don't add smoking to your liabilities, Ryan,' he told me, and said no more about it.

'That's funny,' Calum said, when I told him about the visit at first break the following morning. 'My old man was up tae high doh last night, poking about on his phone and checking his taxes and VAT and payroll and all sorts. Said a wee nyaff in a black suit and waving a Cooncil card had been nosing around the garage, asking aw kinds ae questions about use ae unauthorised machinery. Da was sure it was some kind ae fishing expedition tae find some excuse tae shut him down. Yi ken what the fucking Cooncil's like, aw Reds and Nats and Greens, nae friends ae the car driver or the sma' business man. Or woman,' Calum added, politically correcting himself. 'So he was dead chuffed like when I suggested checking the cunt out, yi ken, by seeing if the Cooncil card was real by tapping it on my phone. And guess what? It wisnae! Nae fucking trace ae the fucker anywhere.'

'Must have been quite a relief.'

'Well, no exactly a after he's convinced the guy's no fae the Cooncil, he decides tae dae some work in the garden, even though it's getting dark and there's a bit ae a smirr on. Asks me to gie him a hand wi' some tomato frames he wants tae shift. So out I go, and he tells me very quiet like that after seeing one ae they strange lights in the sky it's no unusual tae get a visit like that, best thing is tae say nothing and they stop hassling you.'

'Come on,' I said. 'We haven't said anything anyway.'

'We talked on the phone. You telt yir father. He talked on the phone tae my da. That could be enough.'

I shivered. 'You mean we're being watched?'

'Aye, and our calls and our web searches monitored. How the fuck else wid yir phony minister guy ken yi were thinking about yon verse in Revelation? And we'll only stop being watched if yi shut the fuck up about it fae now on.'

'Who's doing the watching? The Fine? The MoD?'

'Both, my da reckons. Think the MoD disnae know about things like what we saw? They track everything that moves in British airspace. Somebody behind a screen in a bunker somewhere knows what happened tae us on Saturday, and they send someone around tae check what we're saying about it.'

'That's stupid,' I said. 'Why send someone around with a strange manner and a cover story and ID that anyone can see through afterwards, instead of, say, an RAF officer or someone from the Ministry with proper ID, to have a quiet word?'

'Ah,' said Calum. He tapped the side of his nose. 'Deniability. Name ae the game. They dinnae want tae admit they're interested, see? So they stick tae the tried and tested MiB routine. Bit ae bizarre behaviour, hint ae menace, black suit, transparent cover story. That way, nae fucker will believe yi if yi tell them about it. Nae doubt they have a good laugh about it back at the office.'

'Well, speaking of the office,' I said, 'we've both got his picture on our phones, right? We can search on his name, and on his face-'

Calum frowned. 'And get loads ae false positives, nae doubt.'

For a moment I wondered if he really did have a Council ID card on his phone.

'All the same, it'll narrow it down.'

Excited, I took my phone out and retrieved the ID that Reverend Baxter had given me. Calum laid a hand on my arm.

'Gonnae naw dae that,' he said.

I looked up, surprised. 'Why not?'

'They-' He stopped, shrugged, went on. 'The MoD, GCHQ, NSA, whitever ... they can aw track our searches. And even if we found who the guy wis, whit the fuck wid that accomplish except show the fuckers we're still curious? Leave it be, man. Dinnae gie them a reason tae try something heavier next time.'

I was still not sure I believed anything that Calum had told me a about how he'd got the picture, about what his father had told him, and even about the visit the previous day. Just because he was my best friend, I knew him too well not to suspect him of an elaborate prank, or at least of opportunistic exaggeration. And the explanation he'd just given was, in its free-wheeling circular logic, a small but perfect example of the paranoid style into which thinking about UFOs seemed to lock so many people. But my encounter with the bogus minister had shaken my confidence.

So, to spite Calum and to spike his ploy, I did exactly what he'd suggested.

I shut the fuck up about the whole thing.

8.

Of course, I didn't stop thinking about the whole UFO thing. For at least two weeks afterwards I was obsessed with the topic, in a different way from my younger naive fascination and the (as I'd naively thought) hard-nosed, seen-through-all-that scepticism that had hitherto replaced it. This wasn't just because of my own two (or three, if you count the dream) direct experiences of aspects of the phenomenon, but because a in the three or four years since the last time I'd got lost in that wilderness of mirrors a one particular explanation had gone from a minority to a majority view among the less dogmatic believers and sceptics alike. This was known in the jargon as the Defence Technology Hypothesis, abbreviated to DTH by way of deliberate contrast with the conventional Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis, or ETH.

According to the DTH, the tiny fraction of UFO reports that remained genuinely inexplicable after you'd ruled out hoaxes, camera glitches and misidentifications of the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, satellites, meteors, spacecraft re-entries, balloons, birds, conventional aircraft, lighthouses, etc., were quite likely to be of encounters with top-secret, advanced aircraft (including drones), sometimes combined with radar jamming and spoofing. Furthermore, the stories that the US and other governments were covering up their knowledge of UFOs, and that secretly these governments were in contact with the aliens already, and had a stash of crashed saucers that they were reverse-engineering, and/or alien bodies or captives that they were extracting information from, and all the rest of the UFO mythos, had originated from or been cunningly reinforced (through planted rumours and faked documents) by various government agencies and armed forces, or at least by specific groups and individuals within them. The evidence for this included detailed, documented confessions by former insiders.

In short, the canonical X-files-type government cover-up story was itself a government cover-up story, and what it covered up was advanced aviation technology. Far better that any civilians who happened to glimpse the latest black-budget breakthrough should attribute it to aliens rather than to the USAF. And as sheer disinformation, having your enemies unable to entirely shake off the suspicion that you were in a secret concord with immensely powerful aliens was quite a coup, if you could pull it off. Even more neatly, when the other side a the Russians or the Chinese, say a had figured it out, seen through it, and themselves become convinced of the DTH ... it meant they had to keep taking all UFO reports seriously, because any of them could be an indication of a genuine unknown, but earthly a specifically, American a threat.

A good example of how the myth was kept rolling along is a story that had roiled the believers around about the time I'd first become interested a in fact, if I remember right it was an echo of that very commotion that had drawn me in. The website of a long-standing UFO investigation group in Alberta had received some tantalising emails, swiftly followed by a mysteriously delivered stash of documents that showed every sign of being authentic to the last molecule, from the age of the paper to the font and ink of the typewriter to the remaining faint but detectable traces of the typist's perfume, all of which dated the first tranche to the mid-1950s. A second tranche, from the mid-1970s, was just as minutely authenticable in every way.

The documents told a remarkable story, one that turned several aspects of the traditional UFO mythos on its head. In this version, there was indeed a long-standing ET presence in the solar system, and in the late 1940s one of their craft had crashed in the United States. Two of the entities within (Greys, naturally) had survived. An ultra-secret, top-level committee of various agencies and armed forces of the US government had held the luckless occupants hostage until regular communication was established a couple of years later, and the aliens had fessed up in exchange for the captives' safe return.

They were scientists. They had a base under a crater on the far side of the Moon. They had come from a solar system twenty-seven light years away, about a million years ago, and (rather as Calum's father had allegedly told him) they'd been observing us ever since, out of the pure scientific interest that was the main motivation of their unthinkably long lives. They had travelled between the stars in a vessel that had a speed of, oh, about 1 per cent of the speed of light. Their short-haul craft, the classic flying saucers, had been seen and interpreted in various ways, throughout history. In the twentieth century, and particularly during and after World War Two, their observation sorties had been stepped up in response to humanity's increasing mastery of rocketry and nuclear energy.

They were no threat, really, and they'd always expected that we'd discover them some day.

Pressed to give details of exactly how they'd been observing humanity, they'd explained their technique of capturing random individuals, implanting tracking and monitoring devices in their bodies, wiping or muddling their memories of the encounter, and releasing them back into the wild.

At this point the representatives of the secret intelligence agencies had pricked up their ears.

Was there any chance, the spooks had asked, that you could do some of this for us? To, uh, some not so random individuals? Ones we select for you?

Well, said the aliens, that's a big ask. It would disrupt our careful, controlled, scientific observation programme, and we're not quite finished with it yet. Besides, we have ethics. We have guidelines. The folks back home check up on us. There are committees and everything.

The spooks, shocked by such scruples, had been left at a loss. At this point, the man from the US Navy had leaned forward.

Suppose we could give you an incentive, he said. Suppose we could make you an offer of something so worth having that your supervisors would forgive you a little, teensy-weensy deviation from the guidelines?

Well, replied the aliens, it'd have to be one heck of an incentive.

How about, said the Navy man, anti-gravity, space warps, and faster-than-light travel?

That puts rather a different complexion on things, said the aliens. Tell us more.

At this point the USAF, the Army, the Government, and the CIA representatives had requested a brief adjournment. The aliens had duly trooped out, back to their cells or pods or whatever, and everyone had turned on the Navy man.

What, they wanted to know, the fuck was he on about?

Oh yes, he'd said. The US Naval Laboratory had stumbled on space warps in 1943, while working on some crackpot scheme for making ships invisible by bending light around them. The Navy's scientists had taken the experimental results to Einstein, he'd done the math, and it had all checked out.

So why, everyone demanded, the fuck don't we know about this?

That's above my pay grade, said the Navy man, but my guess it's all about security. I mean, you don't want the Reds to know we have bases around Alpha Centauri, do you?

Alpha Centauri? yelled everyone who knew what Alpha Centauri was.

Sure, said the Navy man. Sending a ship to Mars or the Moon would be hard to hide from the Russkis, whereas no telescope on Earth could see planets around other stars. And anyway, with faster-than-light travel and all, why the heck not?

Wonderful, said the USAF guy. With anti-gravity aircraft, we could really sock it to the Russkis!

Nu-uh, said the Navy man. Who said anything about aircraft? What we have are ships!

What about the flying saucers? They're aircraft!

Yes a naval aircraft, because they take off from ships.

What! This is- Let's leave that till later, gentlemen, said the man from the Government. We can sort that out when we've made our arrangement with the aliens. Our most pressing need isn't better aircraft than the commies'. We already have better aircraft. What we don't have is reliable intelligence about what the commies are up to. If the little grey guys can give us that ...

So the deal was struck. The aliens carried out abductions, implants and tracking for the CIA, in exchange for advanced space technology from the US Navy. They were pathetically grateful to have regular, rapid travel between the solar system and their planet around Zeta Reticuli. They were happy to have teams of scientists and military personnel accompany them, and more than happy to show them around the home world (physically largely desert, socially boringly communist, overall as exciting as a kibbutz in Utah). By now, there were US and allied colonies a officially, naval bases a dotted all over the sky, to about a hundred light-years out.

The USAF, meanwhile, had to be content with getting the aliens' obsolete, pre-anti-gravity flying saucers to reverse engineer from, out at Groom Lake. They'd fumed about this, but the Navy had been adamant that starships were ships, dammit, and therefore their own flying saucers were carrier-based aircraft. Anyway, the USAF had got the Stealth bomber and God knows what else out of the deal, so in the end they'd accepted the situation, albeit with ill grace.

It took the aliens until the 1970s to fine-tune the spatial distortion tech to the point where they could lift people straight out of their beds from under the covers and space-warp them directly aboard the saucers without regard for material obstacles. After this breakthrough abductions went, so to speak, through the roof. From then on there was no stopping them, and nothing to stop the CIA finding out everything it wanted about anything and anyone on Earth.

The documents were a work of art. Besides the apparent physical authenticity of the forgeries, plenty of rabbit holes for the conspiracy minded were scattered unobtrusively in the text. For instance, the documents alluded to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, and hinted at the involvement of Aleister Crowley, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard, all of whose names appeared in transparently disguised form. There was a passing reference to the (in 1943) young naval officer John F. Kennedy, as being in on the truth but a possible long-term security risk because of his (in 1955) political ambitions. There was even a brief mention in a footnote of a plan to build a trans-Atlantic guidance system concealed inside tall twin towers on Manhattan Island.

Within months, the whole preposterous farrago had been debunked. In the meantime, according to some in a position to know, the rumours about it, and the hard, public evidence of frantic efforts by the US authorities to recover the documents and suppress and discredit the story (thus, of course, multiplying its credibility) had wound up the Russians and Chinese something wonderful, to say nothing of what it did to the French.

I finished reading the most recent summary of that particular story one midnight. After I'd closed the site I found myself wondering how much of it I'd known before. A quick scan back through my data stash confirmed that in my embarrassingly naive pubescent fumblings with the UFO mythos a few years earlier I'd encountered an earlier draft of the tale from before its dubious provenance had been exposed. Thinking back, I recalled being particularly excited by the idea that human beings were already out there among the stars, some of them riding in our very own starships, others perhaps taken there centuries or millennia ago by the real aliens, the Greys. I'd even seized on the latter possibility as an explanation for the Nordic-looking 'Space Brothers' reported by the early-1950s flying-saucer contactees.

Was this, then, the origin of some of the details of my dream? It seemed all too plausible an explanation. I shut down my screen and pushed my chair back carefully so as not to wake anyone. I backed down the stair-ladder for a final pee before turning in, pondering all the while. As I crept back up the creaking steps with the sound of the re-filling cistern like a torrent in my ears, I had a sudden thought that made me freeze at the top of the landing, then scurry to the illusory shelter of the duvet with a shiver between my shoulder blades.

What if the story were true? What if it wasn't disinformation at all, but perhaps an unwittingly leaked truth hastily covered up by making it look like disinformation? In that case, my experience might have been more real a and more deceptive a than I'd thought. The Space Brother and the Space Sister might just be US naval personnel, and their tale some bizarre psychological ploy. The detail that I'd found myself wearing my clothes when I was in the ship indicated that the experience couldn't have been entirely as it had seemed a or did it? If they had technology that could warp me from under a duvet and through a solid ceiling and roof, surely they could warp me into my clothes as well!

At this point I told myself very firmly not to be ridiculous, and went to sleep.

On subsequent late nights of fruitless research the disturbing thought returned, but by and large I kept my thinking rational, and well within the bounds of the Defence Technology Hypothesis. The DTH made a lot of sense to me, as did the distinct but compatible a and likewise well-supported a hypothesis of ESB: electromagnetic stimulation of the brain.

In laboratory settings, magnetic fields had been shown to induce a strong sense of invisible presences, feelings of limbs being tugged, and religious and spiritual experiences whose content depended very much on the subject's prior expectations and beliefs. Some UFOs did seem to be natural plasma phenomena less well understood even than ball lightning, and it was quite possible that encounters with such things could induce the sort of weird hallucinations that go down in UFO lore as 'high strangeness incidents'. It was also possible that some of the advanced aircraft and drones postulated by the DTH had strong electromagnetic fields of their own, so they too could generate high strangeness episodes during or after the encounter.

This, I reckoned, was what had happened to me. I could even explain to my own satisfaction why I'd had a weird mental state and a disturbingly real dream afterwards and Calum hadn't. I didn't quite believe his tale about his forebears, but I did suspect it had a grain of truth. Most people whose ancestors moved out of Africa in prehistoric times have a few per cent Neanderthal, Denisovan and other not-quite human genes in their DNA. One thing we can be fairly sure of about Neanderthals: they didn't have much in the way of religion. They buried their dead in ways that can be interpreted as evidence of a belief in an afterlife a a handful of flowers, a smudge of ochre a but that's all. They left no trace of worship: no shrines, no images, no sacrifice sites. They didn't have the god gene. There's a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy, and it's the same part that responds to electromagnetic stimulation with hallucinations, often of good or evil presences.

If Calum's paternal ancestors happened to have more than the usual share of Neanderthal genes a and one glance at him or his father was enough to raise the thought, even with a smile a then perhaps he was missing the god gene, and therefore the brain module that it usually built. His temporal lobe would be less likely than mine to respond to electromagnetic stimulation from a close encounter with a UFO a natural or artificial a with trances, dwams, hallucinations, moments of religious mania and strange, vivid dreams.

So far, so rational. I could have left it there. I should have. I didn't.

Instead, I worked out my own conspiracy theory in that obsessive couple of weeks. My very own paranoid explanation. My way to make sense of what had happened to me, and what hadn't happened to Calum.

It was this.

The DTH, it seemed to me, needed to be given another twist, taken to another level. The twist was that if the US and its allies had aircraft and UAVs that stimulated the god module, then they must know that they did. They could hardly not know. And in that case, wasn't it possible that they didn't just write it down as a sometimes useful side effect, but they actively exploited it?

Perhaps having a UFO experience wasn't, by a long way, the commonest response to an encounter with a UFO. Over vast areas of the world, people who got an electromagnetic kick to the god module wouldn't meet aliens. They'd meet angels, or demons, or departed saints, or, for that matter, gods or God. These same vast areas were precisely the ones over which the US was striving to maintain its influence. Most of the opposition to that influence was articulated as religion where it wasn't articulated as godless communism. Quite possibly, having prophets and visionaries pop up with new and disruptive revelations in, say, Iran or China, was very much a win for the US.

Something similar might be going on, or at least being tried out, in the secular West. Right across Europe and North America, we'd supposedly been on the brink of revolution for as long as I could remember. Somehow we'd never gone over that brink, nor had we stepped a or been pulled a far back from it. The crisis had never been resolved. It just went on and on. The revolutionaries did their worst, and every now and then there would be riots or marches or general strikes, and then it all fizzled out until the next time.

What if the US and other Western governments were experimenting with inducing religious and/or UFO experiences in their own populations? As a distraction, perhaps, or as a way of dividing their populations before they could unite against the endless depression? It seemed a risky tactic, I had to admit, but then so was arming jihadists, and they'd been doing that for decades, blowback be damned. The real beauty of my conspiracy theory was that it took the riskiness into account: some elements or factions within whatever agencies were behind this scheme were worried about the dangers of religious or cultist extremism, and were subtly subverting the project, perhaps by varying the electromagnetic effects to stimulate other parts of the brain than the god module.

That was why my encounter had induced a vision (rooted, perhaps, in my earlier speculations) of a Space Brother and a Space Sister in old style Star Trek uniforms with a message to match: rationality, science and secular humanism. They'd said that message was for me. For all I knew, they could be right. I might be the only one it had reached.

I suppose I already had a wish to believe, despite daily evidence to the contrary, that some at least of the rulers of the world were rational, knew what they were doing and meant well. I conjured a romantic image of a cabal of beleaguered liberal humanists under deep cover in the deep state, a secret band of brothers (and sisters) who strove to use their power for the greater good.

With the world to choose from, they had chosen me.

Why they would have chosen a sixteen-year-old schoolboy to be the great teacher of the stunning revelation that we needed no revelation was a question that, to my credit, gave me pause. Rather less to my credit, it didn't give me pause for long.

I figured they knew what they were doing.

That embarrassing conspiracy theory I mentioned earlier a elaborate, tenuously supported, self-centred and self-serving?

This isn't it.

9.