In the thirty-odd years I spent working as a xenobiologist a lot of very strange things have happened to me, but nothing that comes anywhere close in terms of sheer unadulterated weirdness to the events that unfolded last October at the annual INUFOC, held last year in Alberta, Canada. It started the way all these damn things start – 200 to 300 people packed into a third-rate hotel somewhere in the boondocks. I can’t even remember the name of the town – all I remember is that it was a God awful hole in the back-end of beyond, as these places always are. It is some kind of tradition, as far as I can see. The first three days were terribly hard going, unusually dull even for the International UFO Conference. I found myself wishing after the third day that something would happen to save me from having to sit through the rest of the week and enduring as I did so the interminable droning of another two dozen pathologically pedantic self-styled UFO experts, parapsychologists, krypto-parapychologists, xenobiologists like myself, futurologists, conspiracy theorists, and – of course – out-and-out cultists. If only, I remember thinking, I could develop a case of dysentery, dengue fever or turkey flu that would allow me to stay in my hotel room. Or perhaps there could be some kind of natural disaster that would necessitate the premature termination of the conference. At the time, 8:32 PM on October 26th 2016, I could have had no way of knowing just how frighteningly prophetic this thought would turn out to be.

The last two days of the conference passed without event – although involving astronomical levels of boredom on my part just as I had anticipated – and then on the Saturday morning we all woke up to discover that we were in the middle of a tremendous blizzard which had, so far, produced drifts of up to ten feet deep in places. According to the local radio station it was set to continue throughout the weekend which meant that we were all effectively snowed in. It was clear to everyone that no one was going anywhere even if the conference was technically over. I say ‘technically’ because it should be obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about UFOlogists that when you have 230 odd (and I use the word ‘odd’ advisedly) individuals belonging to this most singular breed trapped in a hotel everybody involved is going to carry on discussing UFOlogy just as intensely and just as obsessively as ever – conference or no conference. Arguing more than discussing to be perfectly honest, since my esteemed colleagues are unfortunately very well known for taking their own opinions far more seriously than is good for them, or is actually justified by the evidence available, for that matter, and getting as a result very hot under the collar if a fellow UFOlogist saw fit to interpret their data in a different way, or – God forbid – to dismiss it entirely.

If you really want to rile a delegate at a UFO conference just try questioning their data. Or – even better – try challenging their pet theory about what that data means. A lot of these guys are, in my opinion, major obsessives. Some of them are frankly delusional as well, into the bargain – which doesn’t exactly help matters, as I’m sure you can appreciate. A psychiatrist would have had a field day in this place, I guarantee you. What am I saying? A psychiatrist? We would have needed a coach-load of them. And a few lorry-loads of the strongest antipsychotic medication on the market. The really powerful stuff – the stuff they only use for the real hardcore cases. Anyway, as I was saying, without a very large helicopter, none of us were going anywhere in a hurry and so we all just settled down and got on with it, for the most part with a degree of stoical acceptance that I found quite commendable.

The first few days went smoothly enough – bar a few fist-fights amongst the parapsychologists – and then the first sign of what was about to unfold made its appearance. One of the hotel staff, a maid by the name of Dolores, appeared in the lobby in an obvious state of hysteria. A few parapsychologists were attempting, in typically inept fashion, to question her and get to the root of the problem but were clearly getting nowhere. In fact it was apparent to me that they were actually succeeding in making things worse rather than better and upsetting the poor Dolores more than ever and so I took charge of matters myself. It transpired that this lady had knocked on the door of Room 643, had received no answer, and so had entered the room to make the bed and tidy up and so on, as was her usual practise in this type of situation. What she had subsequently seen had upset the balance of the poor woman’s mind to the extent that she was no longer able to express herself in anything even remotely approaching a logical fashion. As she was stripping the linen off the bed – Dolores explained to me between sobs – she had heard a peculiar rustling noise coming from the wardrobe. Thinking that the guest in room 643 might have been taken suddenly ill and fallen into the wardrobe whilst reaching for a shirt (which apparently had happened before) she ran over and threw open the wardrobe door, only to see something which resembled nothing so much as a giant blue maggot with hundreds of gossamer threads being extruded from one end. The creature was busy weaving these threads into a shiny silvery case which it was in the process of encapsulating itself within.

Before the horrified Dolores could gather her thoughts the giant blue maggot shot out a thick sticky cord of silver fibres and snared her deftly around the waist. Having thus secured her, it proceeded to draw her slowly in towards it, with inexorable force. All of a sudden, Dolores told me, her wits returned to her and she realized that if she didn’t act very quickly she was done for. Reaching down to the leather holster which she had strapped around her calf, she drew a six inch double-edged serrated diving knife which she kept there and stabbed her attacker a number of times. When it relaxed its grip on her she severed the cord with which it had snared her and made a run for it. At this point in the narrative I of course expressed incredulity that she would have conveniently had so formidable a blade so closely at hand – a blade which she surely wouldn’t have needed in the execution of her day-to-day duties as a hotel chambermaid. Dolores assured me however that this was quite normal for maids working in this particular hotel – some girls carried cans of mace, some anti-rape alarms, some had brass knuckles, some knives like the one she was wearing and some even had illegal black-market tasers. Apparently there had been one or two incidents in the past involving male guests and it was now the custom for the girls to take precautionary measures against being molested. In this case such prudent precautions had undoubtedly saved Dolores’ life.

As soon as I had succeeded in getting this remarkable story out of the poor distraught chambermaid I and a number of the younger, more agile delegates made all haste to the scene of the incident, only to discover that the wardrobe was now empty. All we could find to show that Delores hadn’t in fact been imagining the whole thing was a sticky puddle of a pale straw-coloured, unpleasant-smelling fluid on the bottom of the wardrobe, amongst a number of what I felt to be rather garish-looking shirts that had been dislodged from their hangers. After taking several samples of the fluid, and thoroughly checking the room, we returned to Conference Room B in the Roosevelt Suite where most of the delegates (the ones who weren’t still in bed) were gathered and broke the news.

The effect on the assembled UFOlogists as you might imagine was as if someone had just let off a bomb – the room exploded into an unbearable hubbub of feverishly excitable voices, each voice trying to shout down the other. Here we all were, it occurred to me, each one of us supposedly an expert in the field of UFO’s and alien life forms, and all we could do in the face of an actual genuine real life encounter was to argue frenziedly with each other like a pack of hysterical and utterly ineffectual lunatics. To say that I was profoundly disgusted by our collective response to this challenge to our professionalism would have been the most masterful of understatements. And this incident was to prove to be only the beginning. It was merely the foretaste – the appetizer one might say – of what was yet to come.