Milton Keynes

This article may be Overly British

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Milton Keynes station, as seen by most visitors.

The same photo, viewed through a reality revealing filter.

In places the OMG! field wears thin, producing strange distortions such as this prison block

“its not a place....its a state of mind”

~ Noel Coward on Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes is commonly believed to be a New Town in the South East of England. It is reputed to be located roughly mid-way between Oxford and Cambridge and to have a population of around 215,000. However, the truth is somewhat different. Milton Keynes is, in fact, a mass hallucination caused by mind-control experiments by the Ministry of Defense in 1967.

Urban Design

The Milton Keynes Oscillatory Mind Garbler, or the "OMG!", was produced by the spraying of psychotropic drugs into the atmosphere above Stamfordshire. Why the field eventually settled and intensified over Milton Keynes is not fully understood, although it is thought to have something to do with quantum. Another theory states that it was deliberately released from the production site at Bletchley, home to a large secret government base which has been fully disguised by the illusion as a harmless cryptography museum. The direct action of these drugs was then modified and controlled by the use of countrywide directional broadcasts of intense radiation and pulsed subliminal broadcasts. A side effect of this process was a release of inhibitions that was the direct cause of the 1967 Summer of Love and flower-print flared trousers¹.

The combined effect of these processes is to produce a solid appearing and detailed hallucination shared by the whole UK population. The effect is strong enough to also affect broadcasts from inside the contaminated area and residual effects of the radiation would also have an effect on tourists to the town². From all tests and surveys it seems that the field is fully stable and the whole population has been successfully convinced of the reality of the town. Outside of the UK there seems to be little suspicion of the reality of Milton Keynes, although the testing team were hard pushed to find anyone who had heard of it in the first place.

One scientist involved in this experiment has claimed that the broadcasts were aimed at convincing the UK population that they should not buy "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", as part of the government's attempts to divert the subversive effect of The Beatles. But this has been denied by others who insist that the illusion of Milton Keynes was the real aim and the experiment was a complete success... honest.

Cultural Experience

The Sgt. Pepper's theory has some merit however, given the success rate of other experiments of this type performed by the Ministry. Their most successful test started in 1979 and dissolved dramatically just ten years later. This experiment, which had the aim of convincing the UK population that Margaret Thatcher was not a heartless bitch, appears to be the pinnacle of the OMG! tests, and yet was showing cracks as early as 1983.

Other tests, including an attempt to blind the population to a massive theft of all their shillings in 1971, and to convince TV viewers that Bruce Forsyth was funny, failed dramatically. Rumours that a second generation Oscillatory Mind Garbler, making use of the Wavefinding Transmutation Function entered testing in 1994 and has been in operation since 1997, have never been confirmed.

Where Am I?

Although the hallucination of Milton Keynes is solid and almost completely unbreakable, there are hints that the town is not all it appears. The main one cited is the absolute impossibility of its road system. It is logically impossible that any town could have so many roundabouts, and the tendency for some individuals to totally fail to find the way into the town has occasionally raised suspicions. Another hint is the number of the junction of the M1 that supposedly serves the town - junction 13½, and the fact that the town is supposedly on the West Coast Main Line, despite it being significantly inland.

Further suspicions have been raised by the growing realization that nobody important has ever been born in Milton Keynes. A weather presenter on GMTV has claimed to have been born in the town, but her claim has widely been rejected on the basis that "weather presenter" and "important" are mutually exclusive.

Another clue is found in the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. An article about Errol Barnett, an anchor for Channel One News ^[1], says that he was born and raised in Milton Keynes and grew up in Arizona. The impossibility of being raised in one place, while simultaneously growing up in another, seems not to have occurred to Wikipedia or, it seems, to Mr Barnett himself.

Other clear signs that Milton Keynes cannot be real are the implausibility of its public "art" (see also concrete cows) and the Milton Keynes Dons. Some literature claims that a film, Superman IV, was filmed in the city, with it standing in as Metropolis - this is clearly a hoax as there was no such film as Superman IV.

Notes

1. That's "pants" if you are in the US. Whereas "flower-print flared pants" in the UK are called "boxers". And "flower-print flared boxers" in the US are called "hard-assed queens"
   
2. If there were any.