What Planet Am I On? (13 page)

But just then, when we’re all on a downer and on the verge of packing up and heading back to Santiago, I’m called over to look at a photo that Pancho, one of the film crew, has just taken of the night sky above us. Nothing could prepare me for what I’m about to see.

He’s taken the picture on a long exposure and you can definitely see
something
come almost directly straight down, then shoot off at a right angle. Pancho has been taking pictures of the night sky in Chile for years, and as a rock climber he has been all over the world and he always takes pictures of the night sky when he is on his trips, but he says he has never seen anything like it. For me, it’s definitely a UFO.

‘Let’s put it really simply,’ I say.

‘It’s Unidentified . . .

‘It’s Flying . . .

‘It’s an Object . . .

‘That makes it a fucking UFO, doesn’t it?’

‘I think it’s a UFO too,’ says Pancho, which surprises me a bit because I’ve had a slight vibe from Pancho all the while he’s been with us that he has been taking everything with a pinch of salt.

Even my manager Warren, who is a total sceptic, is visibly shaken and believes it’s a UFO. I’m made up that we’ve captured this on camera. This is more than I could have hoped for from this trip – proof of an actual UFO. We check the camera to rule out a damaged lens, and it’s fine.

To me, what we captured on camera tonight is another sign that life exists out there in the universe. I know many people remain sceptical about UFOs, but we once thought the Earth was flat; perhaps it’ll take a similar sea-change in our collective consciousness for humans to accept that we’re not alone.

BACK FROM CHILE
, I now wanted to take a look at our opinion and reaction to UFO stories at home. I decided I wanted to take a closer look at some of the UK’s most famous and infamous UFO cases from over the years. I was interested to find out a bit more about them, and meet the people involved, and see how it had affected them.

The press can be quite sensationalist when it comes to reporting UFOs. Unlike in South America or other parts of the world that are more open-minded, in the UK sightings are often treated with scepticism. Depending on what sort of person you are, any encounter can knock you for six, and if you find yourself in the media spotlight it must make it even harder to deal with. It can’t help, when you’re trying to make sense of what’s happened to
you, to have all sorts of people questioning your account. I wanted to learn a bit more about some of the UK’s best-known UFO stories, and also to see how the witnesses have coped.

To help me out on this UFO road trip across Britain, I’ve enlisted America’s most famous abductee, Travis Walton. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve followed Travis’s incredible story for years so when we started work on the TV show, Travis was one of the first names on my team sheet of people that I wanted involved in the programme. When our researchers got in touch with him, he said he was happy to come over to the UK and get involved in the show. So I’m really looking forward to going on a UFO road trip with him.

Travis’s extraordinary account provoked a media storm back in 1975. On 5 November, as I said, he was working with a logging crew in a remote corner of Arizona, but this is what happened that night. On the way home they saw a bright light behind a hill and when they drove closer they saw a large, silvery disc hovering above a clearing and shining brightly. It was around eight feet high and twenty feet across. They stopped the truck and Travis decided to get out and take a closer look. As he approached the spacecraft, the others saw a beam of blue-green light coming from the disc and ‘strike’ him. They shit themselves and sped off into the night. But after driving for a while, they realized they couldn’t leave Travis and went back for him. There was no sign of Travis or the flying saucer.

The logging crew drove back into town and reported the incident to the Deputy Sheriff, who said they were all distraught when they told him what had happened. The whole town searched for Travis for days and, when news got out about what had happened, news teams and UFO researchers all turned up. Then five days later, Travis reappeared a few miles from where he was allegedly taken, and described coming face-to-face with alien beings aboard some kind of craft.

The fact that both he and other members of the crew have passed numerous polygraph tests over the years makes this, without doubt, the most believable incident I’ve ever come across.

Travis has spent his life sharing his ordeal with others who claim to have had similar experiences. He only very rarely comes to the UK, and I feel his wealth of knowledge on this trip is going to prove invaluable.

Travis meets me in a recording studio in Manchester called Blueprint Studios, where I am just finishing work on a recording. It’s actually in Salford, and everyone from Timbaland to REM has recorded there.

As soon as I meet Travis, I like him, straightaway. I think he’s a totally straight-up dude, just a normal regular guy. He’s not an egomaniac. He doesn’t have this desperation for publicity that a lot of people that I come across do. I’m starting to see that there are some people in the UFO game that have egos as big as people in the music game. It’s weird the effect that the slightest bit of attention has on some people – it’s like a drug, they just want more
and more. I’ve never been like that, I’ve never craved the attention. I know it sounds weird for the frontman of a band to say, but I’ve never been completely comfortable being at the centre of things. As I’ve said, that was one of the main reasons I first got Bez up on stage with Happy Mondays, all those years ago, to deflect the focus from me.

Travis seems a bit similar in a way. It’s like he’s accepted that there is always going to be interest in his case and what had happened to him, but he doesn’t exactly crave the attention or get a buzz off it. He’s a breath of fresh air, really. He comes across as totally genuine. You can tell he’s gone through some really traumatic experience. In some of his interviews back in the seventies, shortly after the incident happened, he looks shell-shocked. He looks like he’s got post-traumatic stress disorder, like a young soldier who has just come back from Vietnam or Northern Ireland. One look at him in those early interviews and you can tell he’s been through a terrifying experience. It’s not only the look in his eyes, which is a bit of a thousand-yard stare. But also the way he speaks, the way he acts, everything. He looks traumatized.

Because I know all this about him before we meet, and because he must be sick of people bombarding him with the same old questions as soon as they meet him, I deliberately don’t jump in straightaway with questions. I decide to just hang out with him for the first day or so, and we have a bit of a laugh and a joke. I just play it the way I’d like someone to play it with me. It does my head in when someone I first meet starts saying, ‘What was it
like when you did this with the Mondays?’, ‘Tell me what Bez is really like?’, ‘Did you really take all those drugs?’, ‘What was it like in the jungle?’ Blah, blah, blah. That’s the worst way to start off with anyone, bombarding them with questions, because they’ll just think you’re a bit of an idiot. I always prefer to hang out with someone first.

Fair play to Travis, he’s a trooper. The guy is in his fifties and he’d flown into London late the night before, gone to some average hotel the production company had stuck him in, and only had a McDonald’s for tea that night. Then he’d got on an early train from London to meet us up north. Fair play to the geezer, that’s a pretty hardcore schedule for someone who’s no spring chicken, and he didn’t complain at all. So straightaway you know he’s a decent geezer.

The first place me and Travis are off to investigate on our UFO road trip round the country is High Bentham in North Yorkshire, up near the Lake District. If you’d have asked me without showing me a map, I would have said this was Lancashire, being north up the M6 from Manchester, but apparently it’s North Yorkshire. I never realized it spread so far west. It’s a nice part of the world, all rolling green hills and small villages here and there, just like the scenery in that Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon programme
The Trip
. It’s hardly Roswell, but this unassuming place was the setting of an intriguing UFO case in 2007.

Most UFO sightings are reported by individuals, but what makes this case unusual is that a whole family claim
to have had a shared UFO encounter. There were also other witnesses from the surrounding area that said they saw something that night and corroborated the Deverow family’s sighting, which led to a brief flurry of media interest.

The four family members were Anne, her daughter Rachel and Rachel’s two sons, Alex and Benjamin, who were aged nine and eleven when it happened. They’d been for a meal out at a Little Chef and were on their way home when it happened.

They suddenly became aware of a bright white light in the sky to their left. They described the object as being about the size of a car headlight and being so bright that it made the moon look yellow. The object then moved across the sky and became visible through the windscreen, then went upwards and hovered right above their car. At this point the light accelerated downwards at an amazing speed. It was so fast that the family braced themselves for impact but it never occurred. Instead, the object gained altitude again and sped away over the hills of the Forest of Bowland. While this was happening, they all just watched without saying anything – they didn’t say a word until the strange object had disappeared from view. The next thing they remembered was driving into the village of High Bentham, where they lived. Anne rang up Radio Lancashire the next morning and they got her on air to describe what had happened to her, and lots of other witnesses came forward and said they had seen
something similar, although they hadn’t had the same close experience that the Deverow family had.

Seven years on, they all still live in the same High Bentham farmhouse and have agreed to meet me and Travis to talk us through the weird experience that happened to them that night. They recount the story to us, and Nana explains how ‘beautiful’ the peculiar object looked, and how she felt an ‘overpowering love’ for it. Rachel adds that after it disappeared they were all desperate to see it again.

They also explain that they went back to where it happened six days later to try and retrace their steps. The weird thing was that the journey only took them nine minutes, whereas it had taken over half an hour on the night of the incident, which made their experience a ‘missing time’ episode.

Shaun’s X-Files

The manifestations may differ between cultures, but one factor reported in many UFO experiences is the phenomenon of ‘missing time’, a gap in the conscious memory of the people at the centre of these events. Another well-respected case, not that dissimilar to the Deverow family’s incident, also involved a group driving home from dinner together, and took place in Kentucky on 6 January 1976. As Mona Stafford and her two friends were driving, a bright-red object appeared in the sky, which Mona at first thought was an airplane on
fire. As the object descended from the right side of the road to a point ahead of them, they could see that it wasn’t an airplane, but a huge object bigger than ‘two houses’. All the women described it as an enormous, metallic, disc-shaped object with a dome on top and a ring of red lights around the middle. The women all saw the disc close enough to see a yellow, blinking light on its underbelly. They realized they were driving at 85 mph, faster than they had ever driven before, and they were convinced the spaceship had taken control of their car. They later came back to consciousness on the highway, driving in the same direction, but realized with horror that they couldn’t account for well over an hour of time, raising the possibility that they were temporarily abducted.

The Deverow family’s account is beginning to sound plausible to me, but I know from my own experience of telling people about my UFO incidents that most people won’t have taken their story seriously.

Alex, the youngest lad, says, ‘At school I tried telling everyone what happened but as you can imagine I just got laughed at. It’s so crazy that people don’t want to believe that it happened.’

His older brother agrees. ‘I think that people are very close-minded, and very quick to reject the idea that an incident might have happened. Even though it’s difficult for me to comprehend and it doesn’t really make sense
and is unlike anything that has happened to me before, I still acknowledge that it happened, I know it happened. I don’t think you can truly believe anyone about an incident like this until you’ve witnessed one yourself.’

Anne asks Travis if it helped him to talk to people who had had similar experiences.

‘I think it does. But back when it happened to me, there was hardly anything in the way of support groups. I went to a few conferences and was pretty freaked out by the strangeness I saw there, so I kind of avoided that. But it’s improved and more people who have witnessed things are coming forward. It’s less traumatic now than it was.’

As me and Travis talk to the family, I realize that the older kid is taking the experience from more of a scientific point of view, trying to be pragmatic about it. Maybe he’s a little bit embarrassed about admitting in public what he thinks he saw, and he’s trying to rationalize it a bit. When something dramatic and otherworldly happens to you, obviously you try and find an explanation for it. You’re racking your brains, searching for an answer. You’re trying to impose a rational framework on to something that is pretty bloody irrational, which doesn’t work.

I’ve tried to do that with the incidents that have happened to me, and Travis says that he’s tried to do that as well. He has quite a good take on things, Travis, and it’s good to have him with me to bounce ideas off. He tells me and the family how he eventually decided not to stick a label on what happened to him. He decided he was just
going to stick to describing exactly what happened and let other people label it how they saw fit.