I interviewed Colin during a brief lull in his busy schedule.

DOC: Why do you describe your website as the “New Fortean Times”? What’s wrong with the old one? And do the editors of the Fortean Times magazine mind?

COLIN: The Fortean Times (FT) began brilliantly, that is to say that as an editor, Bob Rickard was quite brilliant. By contrast, I would rather not comment on his partner, for fear of the law of libel. The trouble began when they were taken over by Felix Dennis publishing. From an A5 format, FT went on to develop into a full-color commercial magazine. I wrote regular full-feature articles for them about Candy Jones, Jack Parsons, and John Keel.

As far as I was concerned the trouble started when a cabal of anti-American skeptics (such as Paul Devereaux, Peter Brookesmith and Mark Pilkington of Magonia Magazine to mention but a few) almost took over the magazine. Article after article appeared putting down anything magical, mystical, transcendental, or New Age. They attacked particularly the Rendlesham Forest UFO story, one notorious woman sceptic (Jenny Randles) actually stated that the things seen by the US base commander and his men were reflections from a distant lighthouse!

Thus did the thin edge of the wedge appear as far as I was concerned.

Things got far worse when Bob Rickard himself went on TV to state that UFOs did not exist, and that Ufology was an American consumerist fantasy. FT then appointed two died-in-the-wool skeptics (Andy Roberts and Dave Clarke) to try and kill all not only the UFO, but the corn circle phenomenon, and all things metaphysical.

How FT squared all this with “Fortean” thinking is a mystery in itself. Fort’s main idea as a very advanced early postmodern thinker was that fact versus fiction arguments were expressions of very different media systems locked in mortal combat. Fort used countless examples of odd anomalous events to show the battles between systems of explanations as a function of real politic.

There was yet another negative tendency. The FT view of Charles Fort was that he was anything but a postmodern politician, completely relevant to modern techgnotic, cyber, matrix, and meme ideas.

Instead of moving forward on this front, the image of Fort in FT eyes was retrograde: In FT eyes, Fort became a lovable late-Victorian uncle, a kind of very English friendly chappie with whole boxes full of amusing beetle-stories and twee Humphrey Littleton public-school bun-throwing glee-club jokes. The Nessie-gnomes, the ageing folklore gurus, and the “urban legend” lefties and depressing social-scientists who formed the core of FT enthusiasms wanted Fort to remain a jolly story-teller whose weird accounts of things were giggling tales to be told after lights-out in the dorm.

The dimensions of Fort’s astounding symbiotic political ideology was quite beyond the mental grasp of FT, whose original editors were by then well beyond retirement age. They were getting tired, and losing the New Age. Like many similar magazines, FT became stuck in a corn-ball analogue milieu, showing no understanding of web formulation regarding artificial intelligence, postmodernism, meme-theory or digital semiotics.

My biography of Charles Fort, “Politics of the Imagination” (with Introduction by John Keel, author of “The Mothman Prophecies”) won the Anomalist Award for Best Biography 2002. This book was ignored almost completely by FT, the editors of which had not written hardly a single significant sentence about Charles Fort in their entire journalistic lives.

My last feature in FT was a postmodern interpretation of the claims that the original Moon Landing was media fraud. I conceived of the two opposed points of view as mediatexts battling for prime time, thus unlocking the accepted paradigm of fact versus fiction.

Such articles as this caused so much outrage amongst the old aunts and knitting circles of FT. I was almost howled off the stage by FT queens and devotees at the 2004 Uncon. Onstage, I was outnumbered by assembled skeptics of the cabal whose influence had almost destroyed FT as a Fortean Journal.

At best they wanted Fort to remain a Victorian fantasist, a mere eccentric who happened to as much fun as Alice in Wonderland. They did not want him and his work to be dragged into a modern scheme of things.

After this event I decided to create The New Fortean Times website. The immediate result of this was the new editor screaming down the phone at me and saying that FT was going to sue me. I told him to go ahead, as I would countersue under the Trades Description Act on the grounds that FT was not a Fortean Magazine. As the award-winning biographer of the said person, I added also that I was well-qualified to debate this issue in court or anywhere else.

DOC: Is your Combat-Diaries.com website a one man war against conventional society and the encroaching political correctness?

COLIN: It is war alright, but not as we know it. Before the digital age the cerebral culture was almost exterminated by a rising culture of pop, poo, and pudding.

To answer this question more fully, let me give you a mercifully short biographical note.

Once I was a playwright. I wrote good plays and had them performed at major London venues (two toured, and one was produced at the Royal Court Theatre). But alas, I am an incorrigible right-winger (back bench of the Tory party, nothing to do with Adolf Hitler!) and theatre began to be almost completely dominated by an “alternative” sector comprised of communists, left-liberals, and a those of a sexual persuasion I am politically gagged from insulting.

Mainstream theatre did not interest me; it was the same as it always was: an old sleepy dog by the family fire whose social comedies and general expression were positively pre-electric.

The result was that because of my views I could not get decent productions. Certainly no stage director knew anything about the burgeoning world of new technology. The film directors did, but then the possibilities of the impoverished low-key British film world were almost zero.

Theatre gazed somewhat askance at the burgeoning cyber age, and even today theatre cannot express the characteristics of the Web culture. It stays as ever it was: intellectually static, frozen in latter-day neo-Edwardianism and with a left-liberal milieu almost a century behind techgnotic culture and the postmodern cerebral dimension involving technology of any and every kind.

As an Oxford-educated plain-cake Midlander and ex-mercenary soldier, I had little in common with the usual camp types met in Theatre.

The worst thing was the pastel shades of the dying A&F (Arts and Farts) culture. On a sample pre-Web-Sunday morning, the “quality” press offered such delights as the memoirs of a woolly-jumper 50-year-old school prefect (homosexual, of course) who wrote terribly English “novels” about Jack and Jill in Hampstead. These sighing works (always looking back, never forward), were usually about one of the many thespian uncles arrested for odd behavior in public lavatories whilst dressed in women’s clothes.

It was whilst I was moving out of this degenerate, dead and dying culture, that one day, my girlfriend told me she had just bought something called a Mac LC (MK 1). From that moment my entire world changed as she showed me the magic lantern of the Internet, although with only 4Mb of RAM, at times it was not without some difficulty!

For millions, such early contraptions as the Mac LC were escape-hatches into another world. The last cerebrals clambered aboard the Web life-raft. Wounded injured, they bathed their scars and left the world to break its teeth on poo, pop, and media pudding. Somehow I had been dragged out from the jaws of cultural death.

I bought a Mac LC the next day and scrambled out from a British grave like a revived corpse. With the early Web as inspiration, I went on to write three successful biographies of George Adamski (”Looking for Orthon”), Charles Fort (”Politics of the Imagination”) , and Captain Edward Ruppelt (”An American Demonology”).

DOC: But are you winning your war against political correctness? What hope have we got against its creeping mediocrity and staleness?

COLIN: The Web (and to a far lesser extent newspapers such as the Sun) are the only outlets who are fighting political correctness. My own Combat Diaries is an anarchist/situationist site in which we feature porn and madness, radical politics and visionary expression with no holds barred.

I don’t know in an absolute sense who is winning, but the Combat Diaries now has three to four million hits per month (if one includes the whole of the United States), so we must be doing some good. One of my main influences is The Surrealist Manifesto (1924) by Andre Breton, the text of which can be seen here.

DOC: What’s your position on UFOs and aliens? I’ve personally seen quite a few UFOs. But my position is: nothing is literal (not even us) and reality is weirder than we can imagine, even in our most surreal nightmares.

COLIN: Yours is the view of Charles Fort, and my view as his biographer. I have seen a UFO, I lost time during that experience. I have written this up to be published in a future edition of UFO Magazine, for whom I am a feature writer.

Visit Colin’s site at:
www.Combat-Diaries.co.uk