Grant

You only have to take, you know, a road accident that maybe is witnessed by six people.

And you're going to get within those six witnesses discordant elements, different memories.

But you'll also get common ones, of course.

And so I'm in a slightly different position from some people because most people who have an awareness of this story have watched something.

have watched the documentary or one of the TV treatments or something on YouTube, for the most part, you're only seeing somewhere between maybe four, six, 10 witness testimonies.

But for me, I've now got both in my head, but importantly, within my data, my spreadsheet, where I keep all of the information that's been kindly shared with me by the witnesses,

142 accounts from 142 people who saw the UFOs and 197 accounts from 197 people who saw the circles, the trace marks, the things that were apparently left behind by these objects in the grasslands, in the paddocks nearby.

And so for me, documenting that initial contact with witnesses and I've always said to people as much as possible please

put it in writing what you remember and send that to me and send it as an email or as a Facebook message.

And that hasn't always been possible.

A lot of the initial gathering of information by me was done over the telephone and I'd be furiously writing my notes down as people talked to me and I held the phone with the other hand.

But documenting that information initially has given me the opportunity to be able to then compare it with what witnesses have said later on when I've had further contact with them or when they've been interviewed maybe for a second time or a third time.

And so very occasionally there will be something that seems a little bit different, but it's been very rare.

For the most part, the story has been very consistent, and given the large number of people involved, incredibly so.

And of course you always have the possibility of contamination, of memory, of a witness thinking that they're remembering something from the time, but actually they're remembering something they've heard from somebody else.

Or they're actually remembering something that they saw on TV six months ago.

And so there's no way of avoiding those things completely.

The main way of handling is to be aware of it from the beginning and to be always cognizant of the fallibility of human memory.

But as I say, that fallibility, that phenomenon is there with every single human story, every single retelling.

It's not just peculiar to UFO stories.