Graham Birdsall - 10 Years On

It's hard to believe that it is 10 years to the day that Graham Birdsall, the editor of Britain's UFO Magazine, died. Graham was a great friend who was taken far too early.

 

I first encountered Graham back in the mid-1980s, when UFO Magazine was not the glossy, newsstand magazine that it became in the 1990s. Back then, it was called Quest, and was a self-published, photocopied journal - times soon changed, however!

 

Graham was a very generous and enthusiastic person, who opened many doors for me when I started writing for the magazine and, later, when I began writing books. For that I will always be very grateful.

 

I have a lot of good memories of Graham, one of my favorite being sat in his house, late at night after a gig somewhere, and eating fish and chips and discussing football.

 

He is still very much missed. I'm not sure where I took this photo of Graham, but it's a good one to remember him by.

 

Spaghetti and a Space Girl

Just a few days ago, I did a radio-show in which I mentioned that from the early-to-mid-80s onwards I wrote a lot of articles for magazines, fanzines and newspapers that finally folded and - as a result of them having been written on my old, fairly useless word-processor of the day - have pretty much vanished into oblivion.

So, I said to the host, unless you have copies of - as just one of many examples - Quest, the mid-80s version of the later UFO Magazine published by the sadly missed Graham Birdsall and his brother, Mark, many of those articles are gone for good.

It was this show that prompted one emailer to ask me why don't I dig out those articles that have survived and put them out as a collective anthology, which would allow people to see at least some of them?

Well, I have actually already done that!

It's a 2011 book called Space Girl Dead on Spaghetti Junction and includes examples of my writing from way back in 1982 to the present day and covers very hard to find old articles on everything from UFOs to Bigfoot, rock music to Hollywood scandal, TV shows banned by the BBC to foot-and-mouth disease, and much more!

You can get hold of Space Girl Dead on Spaghetti Junction - and all those still-surviving articles from yesteryear - right here!