Nigel Stubbingwicke:

Facts About Lies Being Spread About Me

Facts About My Relationship With
the Mozambican Government

My relationship with the government of Mozambique from 1983 to 1985 was based on my expertise in game management, specifically I was employed in the role of herd culling. I was not involved with any of their socialist programmes, nor was I an opponent of President Machel's reform movement, nor did I have any involvement in that mysterious plane crash that took his life. Innuendo to the effect that the above allegations are true is being spread by a rival tracker, less skilled than I, who I will not give the satisfaction of naming here.

I have only ever sought to track the most interesting animals that our world has to offer. Since many of these animals exist only in those wild areas where economic development is low and the roots of civilisation have yet to set firm, I have been obliged in my past to interact with some regimes of dubious reputation, both in seeking access to lands and in gaining sources of valuable information. I have always kept my relationships with these sorts on a purely professional level and have never given them any aid that went beyond animal tracking.

I feel no need to make apologies for the company I keep.

Facts About the "Dinosaur Expedition"

I wasn't going to deign to mention this rot, but the continued barrage of inquiries about it have forced me to put this issue to rest. These people are only interested in publicity for their mad cause, so it pains me to give them any; however, the allegations they are making against me on their web site are libellous and damaging to my reputation as a tracker. So, I will make this as brief and to the point as possible.

Dr Richard Paley—assuming he is a real doctor—is either a liar or delusional.

In 2002, he and his group hired me through an advertisement for an expedition to Africa with assurances that they had a solid lead on a possible living, non-avian dinosaur—a cryptid that has long been rumoured but never substantiated. That much is true. However, it turns out that their assurances were false and they didn't have any real lead. Instead, we wandering around the forest for three bloody weeks while they passed out Bibles and some sort of knickers with a logo on them to the natives.

I was made to believe it was going to be a serious cryptozoological expedition, not some Creationist wild goose chase. When one of them stumbled over a forest elephant and convinced the others that it was a sauropod, I had had just as much as I could take and left them to their own devices. The best I could say about the whole experience is that the cheque cleared.

Here are the facts about that sorry excuse for an expedition:

• We found no dinosaurs. Only a forest elephant. I mean, just look at that picture they're parading about; you can see the bloody trunk!

• Paley did not engage me in 'fisticuffs', much less beat me to the ground. I don't believe the tired old cuckold could fisticuff his way out of a moist paper bag!

• There was not, nor is there now, any conspiracy, global or otherwise, to sabotage Paley or his compatriots or silence any of their daft ideas. That is just pure paranoid delusions. They hired me; I didn't come to them. I didn't even know they were Creationists until after we were already in the wild. And that whole speech that he claims I gave is a complete fabrication that sounds like it came off of some Dr. Who programme. Who talks like that?

• The pygmy village we found was decimated by a non-dinosaur-borne disease, probably polio or some other ailment of European origin—brought to them, one imagines, by raving god-bothers such as Paley.

• He claims that they returned because their time was up—which makes no sense whatsoever; why would their time suddenly just run out then, when they supposedly just found what they came all that way to find? Why not go look for the diseased Apatosaurus carcass that they claim killed off those pygmies?—but the truth is that without me they wouldn't have been able to survive in the wilderness, so they ran back home. That Paley man jumped a metre and yelped 'Snake! Snake!' every time a vine touched him.

And there are undoubtedly many other things wrong with Paley's account that I have missed, but the above is enough to show the man's deceit or mental instability.

I hope this puts an end to these silly allegations and I would suggest that everyone just ignore the likes of Dr. Paley.

—Nigel Stubbingwicke