INVESTIGATIONS into the Michigan Flotilla have progressed to England, UK. The whereabouts of the mysterious 'Ike' as at this time unknown, though one of our agents has heard word of a loyalty group known as 'The Ikettes'; individual members of which are still unidentified as of this writing. However, this branch of investigation led us to make contact with a freelance photojournalist whom we can only refer to in this text as 'Safelight'. Safelight recounted to us a project he undertook a few years back, documenting the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, a project which took him all over the UK for a period of 14 months.
One of the main methods of combatting and containing the outbreak was extensive culling of livestock, notably of sheep, and particularly of breeds which were farmed for their wool as opposed to their meat. Safelight's reportage made no attempt to hide the horror and inhumanity of this method of risk-management and in the text he wrote to accompany his images he continually expressed his digust at the government for forcing the farmers to bear the economic burden of their preferred solution, something which won him the trust of the rural communities.
This trust meant that legions of farm workers were prepared to confide their suspicions of the culling program to Safelight. Many farmers insisted that the structure of their farms meant that contamination was impossible unless intentionally carried out. There were signs of deliberate foul play at many of the infected sites, but most of the media reports centred around speculation from supposedly un-named locals that UFOs were seen in the area, with the hypothesis that biological studies of cattle were the ET's prime motivation for interfering with the livestock.
However, both Safelight and our own investigators could find nobody in these small, close-linked communities who ever claimed to have spoken to the media about such suspected UFO activity. Several individuals, however, told us of a group of Americans who had visited various farming regions of the UK in the previous year - they were intially believed to be tourists but were later understood to have been enquiring about a large-scale transatlantic wool purchase program.
Safelight, based on evidence offered by several senior agriculturists, has proposed that the foot and mouth epidemic was a government-sponsored program carried out to provide a seemingly legitimate pretext to destroy a large proportion of its wool-bearing livestock. Threading such strands of evidence into a theory, it would seem likely that the UK government had become aware of the Soft Michigan Project (31) and was attempting to minimize the raw materials available in the Western hemisphere for the group to exploit, in order to reduce their effectiveness and level of activity. It is obvious that there would not be enough wool in the USA alone for a life-size replica to be reproduced in the country itself, and the project would sooner or later have to buy wool from abroad. Given the UK farmers' dire economic situation, it seems likely that the government was worried that the farmer's would accept the Michigan group's demands and so a pre-emptive strike was taken to undermine the available wool surplus for the next few years.
One of the main methods of combatting and containing the outbreak was extensive culling of livestock, notably of sheep, and particularly of breeds which were farmed for their wool as opposed to their meat. Safelight's reportage made no attempt to hide the horror and inhumanity of this method of risk-management and in the text he wrote to accompany his images he continually expressed his digust at the government for forcing the farmers to bear the economic burden of their preferred solution, something which won him the trust of the rural communities.
This trust meant that legions of farm workers were prepared to confide their suspicions of the culling program to Safelight. Many farmers insisted that the structure of their farms meant that contamination was impossible unless intentionally carried out. There were signs of deliberate foul play at many of the infected sites, but most of the media reports centred around speculation from supposedly un-named locals that UFOs were seen in the area, with the hypothesis that biological studies of cattle were the ET's prime motivation for interfering with the livestock.
However, both Safelight and our own investigators could find nobody in these small, close-linked communities who ever claimed to have spoken to the media about such suspected UFO activity. Several individuals, however, told us of a group of Americans who had visited various farming regions of the UK in the previous year - they were intially believed to be tourists but were later understood to have been enquiring about a large-scale transatlantic wool purchase program.
Safelight, based on evidence offered by several senior agriculturists, has proposed that the foot and mouth epidemic was a government-sponsored program carried out to provide a seemingly legitimate pretext to destroy a large proportion of its wool-bearing livestock. Threading such strands of evidence into a theory, it would seem likely that the UK government had become aware of the Soft Michigan Project (31) and was attempting to minimize the raw materials available in the Western hemisphere for the group to exploit, in order to reduce their effectiveness and level of activity. It is obvious that there would not be enough wool in the USA alone for a life-size replica to be reproduced in the country itself, and the project would sooner or later have to buy wool from abroad. Given the UK farmers' dire economic situation, it seems likely that the government was worried that the farmer's would accept the Michigan group's demands and so a pre-emptive strike was taken to undermine the available wool surplus for the next few years.
