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wasn’t important or he was trying to hide something. This was obviously his first meeting with CES and I was sure I hadn’t seen him from anywhere I had worked. As we spoke, I could feel a useful friendship forming that would take precedence over any suspicion. I didn’t hesitate in introducing him to the other two founders, but he appeared to have more of a leaning towards me. This would be the start of a strange liaison that at times appeared to be one sided because there was so much he wouldn’t disclose, but I didn’t feel like probing. Although he certainly demonstrated an interest in my affairs, which I found strange considering our age difference. It wasn’t so much my thoughts and feelings that interested him, it was more a case of why. Why do you have a certain opinion and what brought you to that conclusion? appeared to be his angle. Finally when I asked if he would like to get on our regular mailing list, he eclined, insisting that he could pick this information up at meetings. Again there was that avoidance over his address, and I only gleaned that he lived local after he’d given a rough idea of where he would be travelling from. We just left it agreeing to see each other at the next CE5 event and his position remained one of “I'll call you.” As we departed in the car park, watching the old man cross the road and disappear into the night, the three of us remained quizzical as to where he was ever coming from. We drove home that night in Paul’s car each discussing our surmises as to whether his strangeness pointed to age, paranoia or just the eccentricity that sometimes comes with the esoteric territory. In the back of our minds we suspected that we had seen the last of the elusive Gideon as many eccentrics have been known to lose interest before moving onto a new subject. On the contrary, he had become our most consistent guest and would arrive at every venue 20 minutes beforehand. The strange thing was that his interest in the group still seemed to have focused upon me. That wasn’t to say he was interested in me personally, it was more to do with what I had to say on the subject that kept him enthralled. I continued to find this unusual with our generation gap and particularly when there were a range of books already the subject written by experts older and wiser, most of which he claimed to have read. The absurdity of this relationship was that he and his angle were as equally fascinating to me. It had reached the point of suspicion where I thought he might have been a type of envoy from a government organisation sent to investigate UFO study groups, but then what was so suspicious about our newly formed little club and why focus on me? This suspicion alone was 58