Ziggy Stardust and the Councillor from Mars

This morning got off to an otherworldly start as Radio 4’s Today Programme announced that it was the fortieth anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which in itself was a reasonably prosaic statement of fact, but later I felt compelled to check the date of the paper twice to ensure that it was not already April Fools’ Day. Why? Quite simply because of some alleged weird goings on in Whitby.

Now, Whitby may be renowned for its associations with Captain Cook, Dracula and more recently its annual Goth festival, but now it may have another addition to its hall of fame: Simon Parkes. Simon Parkes, if you were to believe his testimony, did not arrive in the town on a ship that would have been familiar to either Cook or Stoker, but on a craft of an altogether different type, one that was out of this world.

It has not been made clear whether Councillor Parkes (for he serves Whitby under the Labour flag) possesses living relatives or a wife, but if his poor mother is indeed living today, one can have nothing for her other than profound sympathy, for Parkes believes that his “real mother” is a 9ft alien. The Metro states:

Parkes believes a 2.7m (9ft) lifeform stood next to his cot when he was a baby and ‘two green stick things’ appeared.

‘I thought “they’re not mummy’s hands, mummy’s are pink,’ Mr Parkes said in a YouTube video.

‘I was looking straight into its face. It enters my mind through my eyes and it sends a message down my optic nerve into my brain, saying “I am your real mother, I am your more important mother”.’

Oh dear. Poor Mrs Parkes (the one with pink hands rather than “stick things” that is). When she no doubt was trying to look after her son as he suffered from chicken pox at the tender age of three, he remembers not this maternal affection but a

2.4m (8ft) ‘doctor’ dressed as a waiter [which] offered to help after Mr Parkes’s mother left him at home, it is claimed.

Three years later his ‘real mother’ took him on board an alien craft.

‘The reason why extraterrestrials are interested in me is not because of my physical body but what’s inside – my soul,’ he said.

Mr Parkes, a Labour member elected to Whitby town council in North Yorkshire last month, says his beliefs have not interfered with his work.

‘For many of the people who don’t experience it, it’s very hard to accept.

‘We are taught to only see and believe what we can touch, but it’s acceptable to believe in religion,’ he said.

‘I’m more interested in fixing someone’s roof or potholes.’

He added: ‘I get more common sense out of the aliens than out of Scarborough town hall. The aliens are far more aware of stuff.’

Is this man really a councillor in Whitby, or is this whole story some Brasseye style stunt? Still, as he points out, his beliefs are no more absurd than those sanctified by religions of various sorts, which can be said to differ from his beliefs insofar as they are collective rather than individual delusions, sanctioned by time, tradition and social consensus. If he does a good job at sorting out problems with roofs and potholes, then perhaps his eccentricity can be overlooked. After all, it could be argued that his beliefs are little further removed from reality than those of the Labour Party with respect to many matters.

Another report in today’s Whitby Gazette would almost seem to suggest that there’s something odd in the town’s water, such as LSD perhaps, for not only has it highlighted the sighting of a large black cat-like creature (not in itself beyond possibility; for another recent report see The Shepley Lion) on 29^th February, but also a UFO the following night

by a Staithes resident, who did not wish to be named, but claimed to have spotted a UFO in the skies above Port Mulgrave.

She said: “I was coming out of Boulby Potash last night and had just pulled up at the junction.

“I saw orange lights going round in a circle and I said to my daughter in the back of the car ‘Blimey that’s a UFO’.

With all of this weirdness going on, the locals of Whitby must be looking forward to the normality of this year’s Goth Weekend. That said, David Icke and his followers must be disappointed that Councillor Parkes has not chosen to ‘confirm’ their paranoid interdimensional Lizard Conspiracy Theory. How will the local Labour Party react?