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couldn’t relate my ideas to anything that I had seen on TV or anywhere for that matter. It all seemed to point to a “secret education” coming from somewhere that a boy of my age could never normally access. It would explain much of the bizarre activity going on in my head around that time that was causing me to flunk most subjects. The activity generated within didn’t seem to allow for much relevant information to be fed. It was causing notable failure. At the back of my mind, there seemed to be an unexplainable consolation about my academic failure. It was like a distant a voice telling me not to worry, “You know what you’re really here for.” This went back to the almost arrogant notion of "being selected" and had I ever questioned this calling, I’m sure it would have responded to the effect of “some day it will all make sense.” It was an inbred notion that all of this unpleasant underachievement was just the rocky road to something big. The transition to secondary school and adolescence didn’t bring me any closer to an answer. The bane of under-achievement followed me still and any possible building blocks for an academic career looked pretty unlikely. My unusual interests and pre-occupations were however growing into something. I was becoming increasingly interested in the paranormal and often wondered why I hadn’t come across anything unusual when I was convinced it existed. There was a magazine around at the time called the Unexplained which I read with fascination. Each month I waited in anticipation for the next issue to read up on strange accounts of ghostly experiences and extraterrestrials. Although I never knew where this intrigue came from, I seriously felt I could relate to the stories being told, particularly ones of meetings with strange beings. I tended to skip past the formalities of reports such as sightings and physical evidence and home in on the more intriguing aspects such as the personal experiences. These would entail stories of outer body journeys and actual alien abductions. The stories of personal interaction would never fail to keep me glued to the magazine, taking in every detail. During that time there was the famous case in Yorkshire of a man found dead on top of a coal heap as if mysteriously placed there from above. He had been slain by some unknown burns as if from radiation and to corroborate this story, there was also the case of a local policeman claiming to have been abducted by a UFO around the same time. This account was a fascinating one brought into clarity through hypnosis where the man claimed 19