FOR me it all began with The Phantom Of Blackfriars, a serial that appeared in the New Hotspur comic in 1960.

Even the internet has all but forgotten it, but the horrifying illustrations of the elusive Phantom that topped the story (which I later realised owed everything to Lon Chaney's Phantom Of The Opera) were burned weekly into my eight-year-old brain, and can yet be summoned to mind when all is dark and still around me.

My pre-adolescent taste for the macabre and the supernatural was further honed, in a house otherwise devoid of books, through my devouring of second-hand paperback copies of Herbert Van Thal's series The Pan Book Of Horror Stories. And then, later and more disconcertingly, there was the sound that followed me from house to house. But more on that anon.

The priest visited our tiny flat in Glasgow's Carntyne one day, holding his nose as all visitors did against the acrid stench of the nearby pork-rendering plant which blighted every second of our family's olfactory existence. To my burning shame he was told by my nervous mother that I was a great reader of ghost stories. The ordained man gave me a look, one that excluded my parents and transmitted a secret that combined understanding with, I am certain, a real proprietorial disapproval.

The Catholic education that had been pummeled into me is undoubtedly the source of my ambivalent development. The mass helped to pave an exit for me. It was pure theatre long before I stumbled on its profane shadow. It was transcendental and transformational, the colours and robes and incense and ceremony wafting you up and away to another, better and infinitely more fragrant place.

Wine and bread actually became the blood and body of Christ. This climactic transubstantiation was literally paranormal, long before I ever heard the word.

They taught us stuff like this, the teachers and the priests. They really did. They taught children - innocent, avid, enthusiastic and trusting children like me - that we would burn in hell for all of eternity if we fell under a bus in a state of non-grace, even if our young lives had been perfect until the awful point of ill-defined but easily committed mortal sin. They taught us this and we believed them, for a very long time.

I only really began to understand what our priest's look meant when William Friedkin released his masterpiece, The Exorcist, in 1973. By this time I was at Glasgow University reading English and drama, mad about cinema and still fascinated by the dark side of worlds both real and imagined. I responded to the sinister anti-heroes of Marlowe and Webster a lot more than I did to the limp angels of John Milton. Didn't everyone?

It was no mystery, therefore, this fascination I had with other, darker worlds. I had definitively rejected God and the Catholic Church in my hesitant, revolutionary teens, but the devil and his everlasting, medieval torture chamber remained a real and appalling possibility. Hell was a blatant control mechanism, of course, but it simply could not be ignored. Whatever the odds against it, the risk of hell being real and an agonising prison for me, forever, was just too high. It kept me awake at nights way into my mid-30s before I could persuade myself, finally, to renounce their controlling myths and absolutely, definitively, abjure the baleful reality of Satan.

So how does a 62-year-old recovering Catholic, and a rational atheist, come to be the begetter of the Scottish Paranormal Festival some 54 years after that London phantom so impressed me - a festival which perhaps has much to do with faith and belief, and which might at first glance seem at odds with my own comfortingly godless view of existence?

The easy answer is that the paranormal looms very large indeed as a cultural phenomenon, manifesting itself prominently on the web as one of the most popular areas of interest there, but also in literature, art, music, television and even comedy. Indeed so culturally prominent is the topic it is surprising that there has not been a major festival on a similar theme before now, inside or outside Scotland.

This "acceptable" version of the subject also allows agnostics, sceptics and non-believers to attend the Scottish Paranormal Festival without fear of ridicule or damage to their self-image. The more problematic but equally honest response to the "why?" question, however, is that strange things do still indeed happen in this apparently rational universe, and when they do they continue to fascinate me.

To begin in the middle with definitions. According to Wikipedia, "paranormal events are events that cannot readily be explained by the range of normal experience or scientific explanation … the most notable paranormal beliefs include those that pertain to ghosts, extraterrestrial life, unidentified flying objects and cryptids".

All cultures are full of stories of unusual events, creatures and traditions and even in this rational and secular age Scotland seems particularly rich in legends and happenings which are known internationally. Visitors have long come here in the hope of a glimpse of the Loch Ness Monster or of a green lady haunting an ancient castle. More recently the town of Bonnybridge acquired a reputation as something of a UFO hotspot, and the UFO that hovered over a Fraserburgh farmhouse for five hours in October 2012 cemented our "must-visit" status among ufologists alongside iconic US locations like Roswell and Area 51. The asserted mysteries of The Da Vinci Code also propelled tourists in great numbers to Midlothian's Rosslyn Chapel.

It is a set of cultural memes that we literally trade in, but we are not alone in this. For years now paranormal subjects made by both US and UK companies have dominated our digital channels, with shows on ghosts or UFOs playing frequently on The History Channel, Living TV and other similar stations. Here at home, Most Haunted has long been the market leader, with former Blue Peter presenter Yvette Fielding and her husband Karl Beattie exploring a variety of allegedly haunted locations, all shot with night-vision cameras.

Most Haunted is currently enjoying a new burst of energy on the (some would say aptly titled) Really channel, but accusations of fakery have dogged them for a long time. When the frequently possessed medium Derek Acorah found himself channeling a female spirit on one of their vigils it produced one of the truly great laugh-out-loud moments on live television. The spirit was expressing her love for another departed soul though Acorah's agency, causing him to utter piercingly the immortal assertion that: "Mary loves Dick! Mary loves Dick!" The crew members were all shaking beside him, but not with fear.

Although we in the developed nations live in an increasingly secular environment, belief in the paranormal is also on the increase. According to a recent National Geographic survey, 77% of Americans "believe there are signs that aliens have visited Earth", and according to a recent Harris poll, 68% of Americans believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

This dialectic goes back a long way. Darwin's theory of evolution was a hammer blow for the God-centred established churches, but it was followed by a huge upsurge in interest in the occult in the last quarter of the 19th century. People's minds were unsettled by the seismic shift the naturalist brought to everyone's view of the world and Madame Helena Blavatsky and her kind were the beneficiaries. Similarly the slaughter of the trenches 100 years ago saw a massive upsurge in attendance at spiritualist churches after the first world war.

This interest in the occult fluctuated until we discovered the ability to eradicate ourselves permanently from the face of our planet, which coincided with the protest movements and alternative cultures of hippiedom, embracing the full gamut of alternative belief systems from witchcraft to alien salvation.

Recently we have arrived at an interesting point where half the world seems to believe that God is long dead, and the other half in various fundamental ways wants to kill that half who don't believe in their version of God. At the same time science is heading in some seriously spooky directions, with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider leading some researchers to fear a rip in the fabric of the time/space continuum which might allow the invasion of other-dimensional beings.

Quantum physics, string theory and pure mathematics are simultaneously pointing seriously in the directions of multidimensionality and an endless infinity of multiverses, theories that bend the mind trying to grasp even the basics of such enormous concepts. As a non-scientist (does it show at all?), a recent Horizon programme which suggested with a very straight BBC-science face that we might all be part of an unimaginably massive computer simulation had my feeble brain reeling in fear and wonder. As Sarah Connor says at the end of Terminator: "God, you can go crazy thinking about all this."

One of the most compelling and indeed comforting aspects of my own favourite subject area, ufology, is the substantial evidence proffered by those who have studied the phenomenon that alien craft are not only visiting us, but also looking out for our own poor, undeveloped species. I recently met Captain Robert Salas, who famously claims he witnessed at first hand aliens deactivating US nuclear missiles on March 16, 1967, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, which housed Minuteman nuclear missiles.

Salas told me: "The US Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases," a phenomenon which has been replicated on numerous occasions at various nuclear installations around the globe. I also met Larry Warren who was a close-up US military witness to a very similar event in Rendlesham Forest adjacent to the RAF Bentwaters nuclear base in Suffolk in the winter of 1980 - a case which has come to be known as "the British Roswell".

And this is where I have to say something fundamental to my own way of seeing things. If you meet someone sane and friendly and intelligent who looks you in the eye and tells you something that is so out there as to be unbelievable in conventional terms, then what do you do? I think you have to go over the evidence and come to a conclusion, which might be one which does not fit "rational" explanation. I have met many, many people who claim to have seen ghosts and UFOs, and I do not automatically either believe or disbelieve them. But when these witnessings are experienced by some of your best friends, or in a group, then it becomes easier to believe the unbelievable.

There is a wonderful moment in James Fox's film I Know What I Saw, when he is interviewing former governor of Arizona Fife Symington. He was in office in 1997 when thousands of people witnessed spectacular lights (some of them saw several low-flying, enormous craft) in the night sky over the state, an event that became known as the Phoenix Lights. Symington had produced a "culprit" at the press conference the following day, an "alien" who was led in wearing handcuffs. The stunt backfired, and many of his constituents were outraged at what they saw as a mocking of their real experiences.

A decade later Symington (who had saved his friend Bill Clinton from drowning when at college) stopped Fox's questions in mid-flow to confess: "I saw it too." He then says he has no doubt it was an alien spaceship.

I also saw something I could not explain two years ago: pulsing static lights over Loch Lomond's dark Conic Hill that I witnessed with my wife and which defied rational explanation. In the same area two close friends also saw a daytime UFO close up, and one of them has had several solid ghost sightings.

That sound? It was like Chinese finger-cymbals in the air, and I first heard the chiming in the room where the priest had sat. It was not long after my mother's death from cancer, when I was 14. My father, a postman, had as usual gone to bed early and it was the only time I had to myself in the house. After that the sound appeared regularly, always when I was on my own, and it followed me from house to bedsit to flat to several other UK cities for decades before fading and ceasing entirely.

I do not believe in life after death. But strange stuff happens. Go figure.