What Planet Am I On? (10 page)

Shaun’s X-Files

On 31 January 1998 people all over Santiago observed several humanoid figures descending from the sky to hover above the city. The figures seemed to come down like paratroopers would before opening their parachutes, but then some floated in the same position, some moved in a horizontal direction and some even moved back upwards. None of the figures opened a parachute to stop their fall, but their movements defied gravity. Captured on video by various witnesses, the case caught the imagination of the country and to this day it remains unexplained.

Back in Santiago the next morning, we are off to
investigate one of Chile’s most bizarre UFO incidents, which happened in the skies over the capital itself on 31 January 1998.

I’d arranged to meet Rodrigo Fuenzalida, director of Chile’s leading civilian UFO group, AION, who had agreed to take me to one of the key locations relating to the incident, on the outskirts of Santiago, and talk me through the footage. Rodrigo looks a bit like a Chilean ufologist’s answer to Indiana Jones. He has an Indiana Jones-type hat and a kind of safari jacket, and he takes himself quite seriously. We are following Rodrigo in his jeep and he has trouble finding the place at first, which wasn’t promising. When we get there, he points in the sky to where the incident happened and then starts showing me footage on his laptop, but I can’t see a thing, so we go back to his motor, out of the sun, and watch it in there. When I can see it, I can’t believe my eyes. It’s bonkers. One of the strangest, most mysterious things I’ve ever seen in my life.

The best way I can describe it is like a
Star Wars
stormtrooper, stood on a pogo stick, under a woman’s hairdryer, descending out of the sky. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what it looks like to me. It must have been absolutely mental to have seen it with your own eyes when it happened.

I watch it again and again with Rodrigo, and every time I watch it, it just seems even more unexplainable. ‘It really does look like they’re dressed in
Star Wars
gear, like a
Star Wars
stormtrooper,’ I tell Rodrigo, and he laughs and agrees.

‘Yes,
Star Wars
in Chile!’

‘Can you imagine being stood here,’ I ask him, ‘and seeing this thing coming down out of the sky looking like a
Star Wars
stormtrooper on a pogo stick? It must have looked like Darth Vader was going to come down out of the sky.’

I really haven’t seen anything like it before in my life. We’ve all seen plenty of pics and footage of UFOs, or alleged UFOs, but I’ve never seen anything remotely like this stormtrooper tackle. It reminds me a bit of the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, when that dude in a spaceship and a jet pack flew into the stadium. Every kid who watched that thought they would have one by the time they grew up but it never happened, did it? Bit like those hoverboards from
Back to the Future II
– where are they? It was 2015 in the film when all the kids were knocking about on hoverboards, so presumably they’ll be about in time for next Christmas.

One of the reasons this case is unusual is the sheer number of witnesses, and their accounts are intriguing. Some motorists reported seeing some of the figures vanishing into the clouds, whilst those on the ground described other figures disappearing down into the city, never to be seen again. All very mysterious.

It’s a very famous case in Chile and Rodrigo said there was a public poll done, and 70 per cent of the Chileans thought that whatever was captured on camera was extraterrestrial.

We later checked with CEFAA, and Eugenio Ford, the guy there who was in charge of looking into the case for the government, said he eventually came to the conclusion that ‘They were UFOs; unidentified flying objects.’

Shaun’s X-Files

There are other similar cases to this in Chile, but they are just the tip of this very weird iceberg – this is a truly global phenomenon. There’re plenty of reports on the internet of strange humanoid figures descending from the sky. In the last ten years alone sightings have been made in Mexico, India and the USA, to name but a few. Some reports
are
more credible than others, but the Santiago case is right at the top of the peculiar pile . . .

Of all of the things I’ve seen so far in Chile, this case is perhaps the most baffling. I know what it looks like to me, but it just defies conventional explanation. It’s a mad one.

I do feel reassured, though, that Chile has been the perfect place to come and begin my search.

ON OUR THIRD
day in Chile we are off to the Atacama Desert, which is the driest desert in the world. We are headed right to the north of Chile, so we have to fly up there. We had to get up at bloody 4.30 a.m. to get to the airport, which was a bit rough. The flight is at 7.30 a.m. so it seems a bit excessive to have to check in three hours before an internal flight, but when you’re filming you’ve got all the cameras and sound equipment and stuff so you have to check in early. We’d never do that on tour. The crew would go on ahead of us with all the gear, and then the band would arrive later.

We are flying with Sky Airlines, one of the Chilean airlines, but nothing to do with Sky TV or Rupert Murdoch. It is a pretty small plane, and the guy in a suit in front of me puts his seat right back as soon as we take
off, and he might as well have been sitting on my knee. I hate people like that. They give us a bit of a comedy breakfast, this bit of square omelette, but it actually tastes all right.

We land in Iquique and as soon as we walk out of the airport we are besieged by a scrum of locals offering us taxis. I’ve never seen a taxi scrum quite so on top. It’s much worse than when we landed at Santiago. It’s like the old footage you see of the Beatles arriving at an airport. As soon as we get through the scrum and I step outside for a snout, the heat hits me. It isn’t necessarily that much hotter than Santiago, but because it’s so dry the heat is much more intense. The airport is literally surrounded by desert on three sides and the ocean on one. You step out of the door of arrivals and it’s just sand, leading up to the mountain that overlooks the airport.

We hire a 4 × 4 and set off into town. It’s a half-hour drive along the coast, but a pretty desolate drive, just sand and mountains on the right and the ocean on the left, with the odd shack and the occasional little shrine, which the driver says are for people who have died. We check into the hotel, which is right on the seafront in Iquique. Only problem is there’s a sign outside the hotel that says ‘Warning – tsunami area’. Now I’m no expert on tsunamis, but our hotel is only three storeys high, which I’m not sure would give you much protection from a tsunami. At least I’m on the third floor.

The first thing we are off to investigate in the desert is a geoglyph called the Atacama Giant. A geoglyph is a large
design on the ground, which can be made from stones or sometimes carved into the earth. The most famous ones in the world are the Nazca Lines in Peru, but we also have some back home, including a few ones of white horses or men with big dicks on the sides of hills. Some people believe some geoglyphs were made by aliens – I’m not sure I believe that, but they’re definitely a weird phenomenon. Even though I’m fascinated by things like geoglyphs, I don’t put it all down to weird phenomena . . . sometimes I think we just really underestimate how intelligent people were years ago. We tend to think that until quite recent times people were pretty Neanderthal and not capable of thinking outside the box or further than their next meal or their next fuck. I don’t underestimate people like that.

There are more geoglyphs in the Atacama Desert than anywhere else in the world – more than 5,000. Most of them are of animals and humans, but the most famous one, the Atacama Giant, is a massive humanoid, alien-type figure, and that’s the one we’re off to check out.

We’ve arranged to meet up with a geezer called Nicolás Berasain at the hotel. He’s an astronautics researcher, the founder of Exopolitics Chile, which looks at the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and a bit of a self-styled expert on the Atacama Giant. He’s going to come with us to see the Giant and share his theories on it. Apparently it’s a fair old drive through the desert to get to the Giant, about four hours.

Iquique is a pretty small town and within ten minutes
of setting off, the road is climbing up the steep mountainside over the town, towards the desert. It’s so steep that there are loads of crazy dudes jumping off the top and just paragliding straight over the town and landing in the sea, which is pretty mad to watch. Reminds me of when Tony Wilson tried paragliding for
Granada Reports
back in the seventies, although these dudes know what they’re doing.

We stop off briefly on the way to the Giant to have a butcher’s at a ghost town called Humberstone. They used to mine a lot of sodium nitrate here a hundred years ago, what they called ‘white gold’. Even though it’s in the middle of the driest desert in the world, Humberstone had its own swimming pool converted from the hull of a ship, an opera house and everything. Then someone in Europe invented a synthetic nitrate so no one was arsed about buying it from Humberstone or the other Atacama mines any more, and they closed the town almost overnight in the 1950s. The town has just lain deserted ever since, for sixty years, and it’s pretty spooky, as you’d imagine.

After that we head on across the desert. I’ve never been in a proper desert like this before, just miles and miles of nothingness as far as you can see. The closest I’ve been is when I went to stay up in the Rif Mountains in northern Morocco, after the Mondays split for the first time and before I started Black Grape. I was with the singer Donovan’s daughter at the time, Oriole, and her family had links with Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians
of Jajouka. Donovan’s wife Linda had previously had a kid with Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones, and he’d recorded an album called
Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka
with Bachir’s father, Hadj Abdesalam Attar, in 1968, when he was leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka. We got properly looked after when we went there – Bachir even sent his Mercedes to pick us up from Marrakech. It was proper bandit country, though. We were stopped on the way by the Army and police on the roadblocks, who took all our details, just in case we didn’t come back. We stayed in Bachir’s house, which was a sort of complex with high walls, a bit like the gaff where they eventually found Osama bin Laden. We stayed there for three weeks in the end. It was great. We just got stoned and listened to music, and made a little bit of music with them.

That’s where all the hash in Morocco is grown anyway. It reminded me of
The Man Who Would Be King
, that film starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery as two rogue officers who set off from British India in search of adventure and end up becoming kings of Kafiristan.

Anyway, that trip to Morocco was the closest I’ve been to proper desert before, but the Atacama Desert is a different ball game. This is proper desert, no messing. There aren’t many signs of life anywhere – it’s a pretty alien place, just miles and miles of nothing but arid dust and rocks – and in a weird way it makes you feel like there’s more chance of finding signs of extraterrestrial life than human life out here.

Like I said earlier, the Atacama Desert is the driest desert in the world and, according to experts who measure this sort of thing, there’re parts of the desert where it has never rained since records began. Never. Bit different to bloody Manchester. I think there are parts of Manchester where it has never ever stopped raining since records began!

On the way, our old friend Antonio Huneeus shows us some pics of the Giant and other geoglyphs on his iPad and, as always, gives me his opinion. People have different theories on different geoglyphs – some folk think that some of them are a kind of homage to aliens, and some reckon they were made by people who had out-of-body experiences and that’s why they were able to construct something that looks in proportion from the sky. The Atacama Giant is nearly 100 metres long and is the largest humanoid-like ancient geoglyph in the world. Experts reckon it was constructed between
AD
800 and 1400, but probably around
AD
900. Some people think it’s a pre-Incan shaman holding a medicine bag and an arrow, other people think it’s an ancient alien astronaut. Nicolás, our resident Giant expert, doesn’t say much, probably struggling to get a word in edgeways the way old Antonio goes on with himself. He does know his shit old Antonio, I’ll give him that, but he doesn’t half go on.

What Nicolás does manage to squeeze in, probably when Antonio is taking a breath, is that he sides with the camp that believes the Giant is actually an ancient alien astronaut.

Shaun’s X-Files

Peru’s Nazca Lines may be the most famous, but geoglyphs are a truly global phenomenon. From the Australian outback to the Mojave Desert, from the Amazon rainforest to the rolling hills of middle England, no two of these curious figures are identical. Many of them are easily explained; others have more enigmatic origins.