• WHAT I’M CALLED: Michael Soper.
  • MY AGE: 70.
  • WHAT I DO: Researching electroquantics, penning articles and placing them, penning poetry, making DVD books, and investigating UFOs.
  • WHERE I LIVE: New Marston, Oxford.
  • WHO I LOVE: Spouse Meg, son(s), sisters, hazel trees and the denizens of the sky and spontaneous music creation.
  • HAPPIEST YEAR: Totally giving up school teaching of any type (1986).
  • DARKEST MOMENT: Sudden death of son Ben, who was killed on his bike aged 10 after he was hit by a one-legged motorcyclist in 1980.
  • PROUDEST BOAST: Discovery of important new theorem (you can Google ‘useful matrix theorem’) on the properties of numerical arrays. I was the victor with Ministry of Defence spokesman on UFOs, Nick Pope, at a debate at the Oxford Union in 1999. I spoke to millions of people about UFOs on television from BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham in the late 1990s. I have been on TV about 26 times and radio about 60 times.
  • WORST WEAKNESS: The complete inability in the area of sorting varied items. If you stacked up loads of spare parts I could go at it for hours and not be able to tidy it up.
  • LESSONS LEARNED: Never ever seek to persuade a stranger consciously. To seek to compel other people seems to be a total folly.
  • DULLEST JOB: Making up a stock card index file for a plumbing accessory store in 1966.
  • GREATEST SHAME: Lacking the courage to point out that some hoary old religious books from various traditions do actually kill certain types of children. To push those books could be unethical.
  • LIFELONG HERO: Nikola Tesla – the man who invented alternating current transmission. If you look closely, you can see his name on every electricity pylon. Also Michael Faraday – he also helped invent the motor, the electric motor that once, before I even had a name, saved my life. When I was born I was very premature and was put in an oxygen tank with a special motor that purified the oxygen.
  • OLDEST FRIEND: I have one visible and one invisible of unknown name.
  • WIDEST SMILE: Observing how many people seek out another to receive orders from them. They don’t seem to want to do anything different and have their own ideas. If you watch people closely you notice some people never adopt physical positions. Some people will never squat and some people will just not sit down outside.
  • FAVOURITE DREAM: Flying along a conscious beam around our home galaxy, the largest out of 31 in the local group... and more cynically that people might motivate themselves instead of gazing fish-eyed and slack-jawed at the suffering of others.
  • BIGGEST REGRET: Various disastrous job moves and dislocations that adversely affected many factors (though seemed so necessary at the time).