One of the biggest controversies to muddy the waters of British ufology in recent years came when veteran political activist and anti-fascist campaigner Larry O'Hara exposed ufologist Tim Matthews as Tim Hepple, a man with a complex history of activity in extremist political movements. Here I try to make sense of the maze of rumour and counter-rumour. 
The Pelican has been wondering, somewhat disingenuously, how it is that different accounts of the same UFO incident can give the reader very different impressions as to what really happened. Take the famous incident of 17 April 1966 when Dale Spaur and Bamey Neff chased either a UFO or the planet Venus depending on which version you read across part of Ohio and into Pennsylvania.
A few years ago, I took part in a Study Day organised by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) on the topic of “The Paranormal and the Media”. As the publicity material for the session pointed out: “The relationship between the media and psychical research has always been rather ambivalent. On the positive side, the media provide a valuable means of educating the public.
“This pattern … with a discredited case being tenaciously supported by an increasingly convoluted set of claims and counter claims has already been well-established in the Fortean world… If the following for such cases continues… it is likely that it is the needs of the audience rather than any persuasive arguments in the cases that keeps them alive…” – Neil Nixon [1]