IT BEGAN THE WAY IT SO OFTEN BEGINS, so those that tell of it say: with an explosion of crawling, itching and biting, his skin suddenly alive, roaring, teeming, inhabited. A metropolis of activity on his body.

This is not what fifty-five-year-old IT executives from Birmingham expect to happen to them on fly-drive breaks to New England. But there it was and there he was, in an out-of-town multiscreen cinema in a mall somewhere near Boston, writhing, scratching, rubbing, cursing. His legs, arms, torso — God, it was everywhere. He tried not to disturb his wife and two sons as they gazed up, obliviously, at Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It must be fleas, he decided. Fleas in the seat.

That night, in his hotel, Paul could not sleep.

“You’re crazy, Dad,” said the boys.

It must be ticks, mites, something like that. But none of the creams worked, nor the sprays. Within days, odd marks began to appear, in the areas where his skin was soft. Red ones. Little round things, raised from his skin. Paul ran his fingertips gently over them. There was something growing inside them, like splinters or spines. He could feel their sharp points catching. Back home, he told his doctor, “I think it’s something strange.”

Paul had tests.

It wasn’t scabies. It wasn’t an allergy or fungus. It wasn’t any of the obvious infestations. Whatever it was, it had a kind of cycle. The creeping and the crawling was the first thing. Then the burrowing and then biting, as if he was being stabbed with compass needles. Then the red marks would come and, inside them, the growing spines.

One evening, nearly a year after his first attack, Paul’s wife was soothing his back with surgical spirit when she noticed that the cotton swab had gathered a bizarre blue-black haze from his skin. Paul dressed quickly, drove as fast as he could to Maplin’s, bought a microscope and placed the cotton beneath the lens. He focused. He frowned. He focused again. His mouth dropped open.

Dear God, what were they? Those weird, curling, colored fibers? He opened his laptop and Googled: ‘Fibers. Itch. Sting. Skin.’ And there it was — it must be! All the symptoms fit. He had a disease called Morgellons. A new disease.

According to the website, the fibers were the product of creatures, unknown to science, that breed in the body. Paul felt the strong arms of relief lift the worry away. Everything was answered, the crucial mystery solved. But as he pored gratefully through the information on that laptop screen, he had no idea that Morgellons would actually turn out to be the worst kind of answer imaginable.

Morgellons was named in 2002, by American mom Mary Leitao, after she learned of a similar-sounding (but actually unrelated) condition that was reported in the seventeenth century, in which children sprouted hairs on their backs.

Leitao’s son had been complaining of sores around his mouth and the sensation of ‘bugs’. Using a microscope, she found him to be covered in red, blue, black and white fibers. Since then, experts at Leitao’s Morgellons Research Foundation say they have been contacted by over twelve thousand affected families. Educational and support group The Charles E. Holman Foundation claim there are patients in “every continent except Antarctica.”

Even folk singer Joni Mitchell has been affected, complaining to the LA Times about “this weird incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space . . . Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin . . . they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.”

Since Leitao began drawing attention to the problem, thousands of sufferers in the US have written to members of Congress, demanding action. In response, more than forty senators, including Hillary Clinton, John McCain and a pre-presidential Barack Obama, pressured the government agency the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), to investigate. In 2008, the CDC established a special task force in collaboration with the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, with an initial budget of one million dollars. At a 2008 press conference, held to update the media on the agreed protocol for a scientific study, principal investigator Dr Michele Pearson admitted, “We don’t know what it is.”

So, it is new and it is frightening and it is profoundly peculiar. But if you were to seek the view of the medical establishment, you would find the strangest fact of all about the disease.

Morgellons doesn’t exist.

I have met Paul in a Tudor-fronted coaching inn, in a comfy executive suburb west of Birmingham. He arrived in a black Audi with leather seats, his suit jacket hanging on a hook over a rear window. There is chill-out music, a wood-fired pizza oven and, in the sunny garden, a flock of cyclists supping soft drinks from ice-clinking glasses. Paul is showing me pictures that he has collected of his fibers. A grim parade of jpegs flicks past on his screen — sores and scabs and nasal hairs, all magnified by a factor of two hundred. In each photo, a tiny colored fiber on or in his skin.

“Is it an excrement?” he asks. “A byproduct? A structure they live in?” A waitress passes with a bowl of salad as he gestures towards an oozing wound. “Is it a breathing pipe?” He shakes his head. “It’s just like something from science fiction. It’s something that you’d see in a movie or in a book on aliens from another planet. It’s out of this world.”

I nod and scratch my neck while Paul absentmindedly digs his nails into a lesion just below the hem of his khaki shorts. They visibly pepper his legs and arms — little red welts, some dulled to a waxy maroon, older ones now just plasticky-white scar tissue.

Paul has seen an array of experts — allergy doctors, tropical-and infectious-disease specialists, dermatologists. He has visited his doctor more times than he can remember. None of them have given him an answer that satisfies him, or offered an end to the itching. His most recent attempt was at a local teaching hospital. “I thought, Teaching hospital! They might want to do a study on me. Last week, I took them some samples of the fibers on a piece of cotton wool. But they discharged me. They said there was nothing they could do.”

Everywhere Paul goes, he carries a pot of alcohol hand-gel, which he has spiked with a traditional Middle Eastern parasite-killer called neem oil. In between his four daily showers, he steam cleans his clothes. The stress of it all leaves him exhausted, short-tempered. He has difficulty concentrating; applying himself at work. “It affects my performance a bit,” he says.

“What does your wife think?” I ask.

His voice cracks.

“Frustrated,” he says. “Sick of me being depressed and irritated. She wants her normal life back. And sometimes, without any progress coming along, I get depressed. Very depressed.”

“When was your lowest moment?”

He breaks eye contact.

“I don’t want to go into that.”

He stares into his half of ale, scratches his wrist and says, eventually, “Pretty much feeling like ending it. Thinking, could I go through with it? Probably. It’s associated with the times the medical profession have dismissed me. It’s just — I can’t see myself living forever with this.”

“Have you mentioned these thoughts to your doctor?”

“No, because talking about suic—” He stops himself. “Things like that . . .” Another pause. “Well, it adds a mental angle.”

Paul is referring to the pathology that clinicians and Skeptics alike claim is actually at the root of Morgellons. They say that what people like him are really suffering from is a form of psychosis called delusions of parasitosis, or DOP. He is, in other words, crazy.

It is a view typified by academics such as Jeffrey Meffert, an associate professor of dermatology at the University of Texas in San Antonio, who has created a special presentation devoted to debunking Morgellons that he regularly presents to doctors and who told the Washington Post, “Any fibers that I have ever been presented with by one of my patients have always been textile fibers.”

It is thought that it is spread, not by otherworldy creatures but by the Internet. As Dr Mary Seeman, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, explained to the New York Times, “When a person has something bothering him these days, the first thing he does is go online.”

Dr Steven Novella of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe agrees: “It is a combination of a cultural phenomenon spreading mostly online, giving specific manifestation to an underlying psychological condition. I am willing to be convinced that there is a biological process going on, but so far no compelling evidence to support this hypothesis has been put forward.”

But Paul is convinced. “It is absolutely a physical condition,” he insists. “I mean, look!”

Indeed, the evidence of his jpegs does seem undeniable. Much thinner than his body hair, the fibers bask expansively in craterous sores, hide deep in trench-like wrinkles and peer tentatively from follicles. They are indisputably there. Morgellons seems to represent a mystery even deeper than that of homeopathy. Its adherents offer physical evidence. Just for once, I wonder, perhaps the Skeptics might turn out to be wrong.

In an attempt to find out, I am traveling to the fourth Annual Morgellons Conference in Austin, Texas, to meet a molecular biologist who doesn’t believe the medical consensus. Rather, the forensic tests he has commissioned on the fibers point to something altogether more alien.

IN THE SPRING OF 2005, Randy Wymore, an associate professor of pharmacology at Oklahoma State University, accidentally stumbled across a report about Morgellons.

Reading about the fibers that patients believed were the byproduct of some weird parasite, but which were typically dismissed by disbelieving dermatologists as textile fragments, he thought, “But this should be easy to figure out.” He emailed sufferers, requesting samples, then compared them to bits of cotton and nylon and carpets and curtains that he had found about the place. When he peered down the microscope’s dark tunnel for the first time, he got a shock. The Morgellons fibers looked utterly different.

Wymore arranged for specialist fiber analysts at the Tulsa Police Department’s forensic laboratory to have a look. Twenty seconds into their tests, Wymore heard a detective with 28 years’ experience of doing exactly this sort of work murmur, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this.” As the day wound on, they discovered that the Morgellons samples didn’t match any of the 800 fibers they had on their database, nor the 85,000 known organic compounds. He heated one fiber to 600°C and was astonished to find that it didn’t burn. By the day’s end, Wymore had concluded, “There’s something real going on here. Something that we don’t understand at all.”

In downtime from teaching, Wymore still works on the mystery. In 2011, he approached a number of commercial laboratories and attempted to hire them to tease apart the elements which make the fibers up. But the moment they discovered the job was related to Morgellons, firm after firm backed out. Finally, Wymore found a laboratory that was prepared to take the work. Their initial analyses are now in, but the conclusions unannounced. More than anything else, it is this that I am hoping to hear about over the coming days.