Duration 3.30

Obsian Fallicutt had a theory that the VUE was an expensive elaborate hoax perpetrated by AJ Hitchcock to give some credibility to the unsettling and unsatisfactory ending of his film The Birds.

Obsian is registered as a speaker of Katan with a six-part heart. Like his wife, he is accredited as a sufferer of Dreams-of-Water, Category Three. Obsian is also allergic to direct sunlight, a disability alleviated for the most part by his obsession with the cinema which normally keeps him safely in the dark.

After seeing The Birds one wet afternoon in a Leeds cinema, Obsian had left his job as a designer of artificial horizons and he joined a film laboratory as an optical engineer to examine more closely the technical expertise needed to produce cinematic illusion. With his wife, Obsian plunged into a thorough programme of research, viewing all the ornithological film material he could lay his hands on, not missing a reference, however tenuous, in order than he might be fully equipped to make a definitive examination of Hitchcock's film.

He visited the Lleyn Peninsula, discovering almost at once from clues in the Hitchcock film a farm outside Aberdaron called Fay Mar, the name of the boat in the Hitchcock film where the first bird attack had taken place. The farm was run by an American Holiday Consortium traceable to a Minneapolis Hospital, and then to the Hitchcock Estate.

Becoming an accomplished bird identifier, there was one species in the Hitchcock film which Obsian had always failed to identify. It looked like a hybrid of rook and seagull. Obsian christened it an Alfred and hoping to evoke a response from the Hitchcock estate, he wrote off asking if this composite bird owed its existence to the specifications of the director or a property manager.

After a delay he was answered by a scriptwriter's wife that her husband could not answer any questions, having seriously suffered from the effects of the VUE, but she knew that the bird Obsian referred to had been given a Latin title in the studios, Corvus frugilegus atlanticus. She added that her husband had once gone to the Lleyn Peninsula to look for locations. She intimated that Obsian ought to continue his research. Encouraged, Obsian now spent all his free time pursuing his theory. Using the laboratory facilities, he began to build up an illicit library of films with ornithological themes. And he instituted a massive and elaborate frame-count with a new 35mm copy of The Birds. Obsian worked such long hours, Raspara thought he was being blackmailed by FOX, the Society For Ornithological Extermination, and she suggested he might like to change his name to avoid persecution. Obsian was amused, and said it was too late to contemplate such a deception for it was obvious by now that he was being closely watched.

Two years ago, Obsian began to make frequent visits to California without his wife, and six months ago, he applied for a permanent resident's permit. He is now living in a luxurious apartment at Bel Air, and is ostensibly receiving an income from his editorship of a screen magazine called 'The Hoopoe', whose rare issues appear to be concerned with birds in feature film making. Raspara has discovered this magazine is financed by the Hitchcock estate.

The Falls