IN the wake of a “deeply unsettling experience” with a clown, an Abergavenny man is urging others to be vigilant around “people with bulbous noses who wear badly fitting clothes and laugh a lot!”

“Putting Pennywise and John Wayne Gacy to one side, I always thought that clowns were relatively harmless,” explained semi-professional paranormal investigator Johnny Turnip.

“Don’t get me wrong! I’ve always found them really annoying and probably the end products of deep-rooted childhood trauma, but I always viewed their stupid costumes, manic behaviour, and desperate need for validation as something to be pitied rather than feared. But then I met Peter Paleface, and it changed everything.”

Turnip told the Chronicle that after he and the boys were escorted to Hangar 18 by “some dodgy-looking deep state operatives,” they were introduced to the “high-ranking clown with a lot of clout!”

“Once Tyke had landed his Black Hawk outside this big warehouse-looking facility, this bunch of serious-looking military dudes wearing black balaclavas and carrying guns screamed at us in a surprisingly high-pitched manner for alpha males, to get out of the chopper and lie on the ground!

“My first instinct was to tell them to, ‘Do one!’ But Tyke, who’s a veteran of this sort of thing, said, ‘Hold your tongue JT. We’re dealing with trained killers. We’re outgunned and outnumbered. Patience is our only real weapon here. When the time is right, we’ll make our play. In the meantime, follow my lead and wait for the signal.’

“And with that, Tyke bounced out of the Black Hawk and strutted towards the balaclava boys with that big Tom Cruise smile of his and said, ‘Come on, fellas. Let’s play nice. I’m sure we can work something out.’

“The men with the guns weren’t playing ball, and one of them screamed, again, in a manner reminiscent of a choir boy who’d been necking the altar wine, ‘On the ground all of you, or someone’s getting pumped full of hot lead.’

“As Puerto Rico Paul pulled a camp face and hissed, ‘Promises, promises!’ We stepped out of the chopper and joined Tyke, who was lying prostrate on the floor and grinning, not so much because he had a plan but because that’s what Hollywood heroes do in such situations.”

Turnip told the Chronicle that after being frisked for weapons, he and the boys had sacks placed over their heads and were frogmarched into the warehouse.

“At this point, I was starting to get a little anxious!” Confesses Turnip. These tactics weren’t from the leprechauns' playbook. This was proper secret service black ops stuff. We were being taken into the belly of the beast, and the beast had state funding written all over it. I feared me and the boys were about to be ‘disappeared!’”

Turnip explained that after the sacks were ripped from their heads, they were immediately herded into a cage and locked up like livestock, “almost as if we were from Powys or something!”

“I don’t know what we were expecting,” Said Turnip, “But our stint at Hangar 18 was a real eye-opener.

“Everywhere you looked there was dead aliens of all shapes and sizes. Some were locked in cages like us, and others were lying strewn on what looked like operating tables. It was a terrible sight.

“And then someone mercifully pulled the lights, and everything went black. As we sat there in the suffocating darkness and unnatural silence, I heard Puerto Rico Paul sigh, ‘Well, that’s another fine mess you’ve got us into!’ Before lighting a fag.

“As I gazed at the little glowing dot in the darkness and wondered if smoking was allowed in Hangar 18. My thoughts were interrupted by a sudden drum roll of the sort you get at the circus. And then a spotlight lit up the ground directly in front of us before a voice announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please put your hands together and give a big Hangar 18 welcome for the shaper of realities, the filler of content, the prompter of prompts, the envy of the envious and the king of clowns!’”

Turnip explained, “Just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder, a clown with raven black hair and a death white face coated with the sort of heavy black makeup that was popular with fat goth kids in the eighties, cartwheeled into view like a hyperactive toddler who had been at the E numbers.

“He wasn’t one of those clowns that went in for bright colours. He was wearing a bulbous black nose, and his costume was kind of a black and white checkered jumpsuit. It didn’t seem to fit him very well; the hems of the trousers and cuffs of his sleeves fell short by a good couple of inches to reveal his bony white arms and legs. He was as thin as a skeleton and about seven feet tall. He definitely wasn’t the sort of clown that would be able to get into a clown car comfortably, that’s for sure.

“Once he was in the spotlight, he made this weird flourish with his arm and took a bow. The only thing is he stayed bent up for what seemed like forever, and his body was silently shaking as if he was laughing at some private and insane jest.

“It sounds like some sort of bad joke now, but at the time, the presence of this clown was freaking us out big time. It could have been something to do with being taken captive by state-sponsored psychopaths and being locked up in a cage in the dark, surrounded by alien corpses, or it could have just been the fact that sometimes all it takes is circumstances to finally realise that there’s nothing funny about a clown!”

Turnip added, “As the tension in the cage reached breaking point, it became too much for Big Tony, who let out a primal scream and roared, ‘Who are ya!’

“It was the spark that lit the touch paper. Taking Big Tony’s lead, we all found our voice in the darkness and joined in with the chant of ‘Who are ya!’

“It felt good to cast aside our fear with some tribal bonding. Tyke got particularly carried away and jumped up at the cage like he was a lab monkey who refused to be experimented on any longer, pressed his face to the bars, and lent his famous voice to the chant.

“As we pointed at the clown’s bowed body and continued to chant ‘Who are ya!’ Over and over again, our collective voice was instantly silenced when he raised his head and grinned in a way that could only be described as satanic.

“If that wasn’t enough to trouble a man’s bowels, the fact that his eyes appeared to be glowing black with both a predatory intent and an unnerving blankness caused Tyke to slowly climb down from the bars like a scalded dog, and the rest of us to instinctively recede further into our cage away from this clown creature.

“As we shuffled backward, the clown slowly crept closer like some corrosive element eating away at the distance between us.

“With its haggard, sunken, and corpse white face pressed to the bars, the clown licked its black lips and seemed to penetrate our souls with its insect-like black eyes. Obviously amused by what it found there it started to laugh, but not in a jolly way. His laughter conjured up terrible images of two cats fighting in a bag.

“Once the laughter had died, he raised one of his painfully thin goth hands, and said in a voice that reminded me of empty feelings and North Wales, ‘In answer to your question, my dear, dear darlings. I am Peter Paleface, and your future is mine!’”

To be continued…..