What Planet Am I On? (20 page)

The more approaches to ufology that I learn about, the more I wonder about people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens. The Ministry of Defence files showed me lots of evidence about people witnessing UFOs. The scientists made me think that one day we may be able to communicate with other civilizations, but actually being abducted is a different matter. I said earlier in the book that the only abductee that I totally believed was Travis Walton but now I’m off to meet Stefan Lobuczek, who says he has been abducted several times. Accounts of abductions like Stefan’s are really rare in the UK, so I’m interested in what he has to say. I’m actually pretty jealous. I wouldn’t mind having a go at being abducted.
The idea of it frightens me to death, but so does jumping out of a bloody helicopter and I had to do that when I was on
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!

I meet Stefan at his house. He makes me a brew and tells me what happened when he was younger. He started having flashbacks to something he is convinced happened to him when he was a kid. ‘I felt this strange sensation and everything seemed to slow down. Almost like a strobe-like flicker. There was this tall thing, which was actually pink in colour.’

I’d read a description where he’d described the alien who was inspecting him as looking like the Pink Panther . . . I ask him whether that’s true.

‘It sounds really strange, doesn’t it? But yes, that’s the only thing I could relate it to at the time. I could see like a Perspex cabinet, which was low down and seemed to have chopped off legs in it. Behind me was a cylinder with a severed head in it, and I was thinking, “My God, they’re going to take me apart”.’

It all sounds pretty bonkers, doesn’t it? ‘What would you say to people that just say you had a vivid imagination?’ I ask Stefan.

‘It was real. I can 100 per cent tell you I remember being there. It was
real
. I wouldn’t like to be there again.’

Stefan didn’t have any explanation as to why the aliens sent some people, like him, back home to Earth, but chopped up other people. Considering what he says happened to him, he didn’t seem too much of a nervous wreck about it.

‘I deal with it in a different way. I tend to try and have a laugh and a joke about it and that’s my way of dealing with it.’

I ask him how he could tell it wasn’t just a dream or sleep paralysis or something.

‘I’m a very sceptical person. I’m more sceptical about my own experiences than I would be about somebody else’s. I’ve been trying to get to grips with this for years and put it to bed, but it just comes back to haunt me all the time. A lot of people out there could add to what’s going on, but they just won’t come out because they’re frightened of being labelled a nutcase.’

Stefan seems quite sane and rational, despite what he says happened to him. We go outside for a cig and he tells me about an abduction that happened when he went outside for a cig in the middle of the night – a four-foot alien walked through his garden fence and tasered him. Stefan was out cold for a number of hours but he woke up when it was all over.

I’ve never heard a story as elaborate as Stefan’s, and it’s hard to take everything on board without evidence. Stefan then offers to take us to his old house where he was abducted as a young boy, aged eleven. He seems pretty relaxed about it all but I know I’d be nervous if I was returning to the spot where a UFO beamed me up.

His account is remarkable but I’m struggling to makes sense of it. I’m hoping this trip will help me sort facts from fantasy.

I ask him how he feels about reliving this stuff.

‘I don’t like to relive any of it.’

‘Would you prefer to knock it on the head and go to the boozer?’ I joke.

We then get to the house and it all goes a bit weird. As soon as we get outside the building, Stefan looks more uncomfortable.

‘These beings came in the night and they took me, and they took me into a spacecraft and they did things to me, and then they put me back. That happened, from what I remember, twice. I can remember two vivid experiences of being on board some sort of spacecraft.’

‘Were you accompanied by an alien?’ I ask him.

‘There were these two things, short guys, and we travelled up in the light beam together.’

As I quiz him about what happened, Stefan starts freaking out, almost as if he’s having a mini panic attack. ‘Can we get out of here now? I don’t want to be in here any more. Seriously. I don’t want to be here any more . . . it’s upsetting me.’

He walks off to the car, so I say to the director, ‘Look, he’s obviously freaked out, so we better do one and get out of here.’

Stefan jumps in the back of the motor, still panicking, and says, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here . . . quick!’

I try to calm him down, but he’s having none of it. ‘Just take me home . . . there’re just too many memories.’

‘Stefan, you’ll be fine,’ I tell him.

After we’ve driven a little distance away and he seems
a bit calmed, I ask him, ‘Do you ever expect to get any closure on this, Stefan?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Do you think this is with you for the rest of your life?’

‘Yep, I think it will be.’

Stefan’s reaction to the place he believes he was abducted from was shocking and I’m not sure what to make of it. Clearly there has been a chain of events that have deeply affected him, but whether they were extraterrestrial experiences, I’m not too sure. Only Stefan knows the truth.

I’m grateful to Stefan for telling me his story because, from my own experience, I know it can be hard to speak about UFOs when you think people won’t believe you. But when I think about what I’ve learnt from the experts on my journey, I can’t help but think there could be other explanations for what happened to Stefan.

Even though I wasn’t completely convinced by Stefan’s account of his abduction, my journey across the UK has generally only strengthened my belief in UFOs. Our researchers were keen for me to meet Dr Lewis Dartnell, who is an astrobiologist at the University of Leicester. He has written a book called
Life in the Universe: A Beginner’s Guide
, and also works for
New Scientist
and
Sky at Night
, so he knows his stuff.

He’s a nice guy, but he isn’t about to let me lure him
into committing to a belief in life out there in space.

‘We might receive an unambiguous powerful and intelligent message from a star on the other side of the galaxy,’ he says, ‘and that might arrive tomorrow. It might contain instructions to build something, or be full of information that we can download. Until that happens, I’m going to keep an open mind, but reserve judgement, on whether there’s intelligent life.’

‘So you don’t think there is life out there in the universe?’

‘If we’re talking about the entire universe then all bets are off, because the universe is so big we don’t even know how big it is. But I think it’s best to contain a discussion like this to life in our galaxy alone. If there is life in another galaxy, just over there, say the Andromeda Galaxy, it’s millions and millions of years away. Even with a radio signal travelling at the speed of light, it would take millions of years to get here – we couldn’t have a meaningful conversation because by the time we’ve sent a message and got one back, that’s older than humanity has been a species. The timescales just blow your mind.’

‘So you don’t think I’m lying about what I saw – you just think that I was mistaken?’ I ask.

‘I don’t for a second think that you’re lying. I think you truly believe you saw something that you don’t understand, and you don’t have an explanation for it, and I don’t have an explanation for what you saw. But I think there’s plenty of things out there that we don’t yet have
an explanation for that might end up being run of the mill or standard, or have a normal explanation that we just haven’t found yet.’

I try and put it a different way to him. ‘If you woke up tomorrow morning and it was 6 a.m. and pitch black, and you looked out of your window and over your house you saw a proper UFO, and you watched it and observed it, and then it shot off at 10,000 miles an hour, how would that change the way that you think?’

‘It obviously would. You’ve always got to keep an open mind and you’ve always got to allow for the possibility that you were wrong about particular things that get disproved by new evidence. But until that day . . . what confuses me about UFOs is it always seems to be people like yourself, or some friends, that see something in the sky that they don’t understand. But if there was a UFO, a crew of aliens inside a flying saucer or spaceship, why would you bother visiting just two or three people at one time? Why would you not come to Mexico City, where ten million people at the same time could see it and there would be thousands and thousands of iPhone pictures of that same thing? But it’s always just a few people. I’m not saying anybody is lying. You’ve seen something that you truly believe is not of this world and you can’t explain it, and I can’t explain it. But until there’s something which is seen by lots of people, independently, all at the same time, that cannot be explained in any other way, [only then will I] believe in spaceships visiting us.’

This last part of my UK road trip has unexpectedly
been one of the most bonkers parts of my whole UFO adventure, and I’ve met some fascinating people who’ve opened my eyes to new realms of ufology. Speaking with Lewis gave me hope that there’s potential for even the most sceptical individuals to change their mind about UFOs, with time.

G
ETTING BACK HOME
at the end of my UFO trip, it’s a bit like coming off tour with the band. I feel like I’m coming back down to Earth and back to normal life. What did I expect to get out of this? I’m not sure I expected to get anything concrete out of it. I wanted to go on a journey and meet a lot of interesting people and ask a lot of questions about what’s out there, or what could be out there, and it was a trip. I thought I would see some weird stuff along the way, but I saw miles more weird shit than I expected – the footage that we saw in Chile of the craft buzzing around during the military display, the weird stormtroopers that were descending from the sky over Chile and, most of all, the thing that Pancho actually captured on film up at Colbún Lake, which we didn’t identify but
was certainly something weird flying above the Earth.

I’ve waited a long time to experience the excitement I felt during my first UFO encounter, and that incident made my journey to the other side of the planet feel well worth the effort. What pleased me was that my manager Warren and the film crew were all there, as all of them needed a bit of convincing, but none of them could come up with an explanation for what we caught on camera that night. To me it’s common sense that there’s life elsewhere in the universe and this was another sign of that. But I didn’t really write this book or make the show for me – it was more for those people who remain sceptical, to try and get them to be a bit more open-minded.

The footage that we saw of the weird stormtroopers was even more bizarre, but on reflection I think they were something to do with us – I think they were humans, not humanoid figures, but they had some new technology that the rest of us don’t know about yet. It was probably just some new sort of experimental gear that some military geezers were trying out. You wait and see, I bet in thirty years or so our military will end up dressed like that – it will be the standard combat gear.

I’m glad I went to Chile first. I’m not sure it’s somewhere I’ll be taking Joanne and the kids, but I think it was a knockout place to start my UFO mission. It’s definitely the UFO capital of the world right now. Rodrigo Fuenzalida, the director of Chile’s leading civilian UFO group, told us that, ‘There is not a single
family in Chile without at least one or two members who have experienced a sighting’, and it was really refreshing for me to be somewhere where most people believed in UFOs, or at least had an open mind about things.

I was brought up Catholic, and I think that definitely has had an effect on my way of thinking, whether I like it or not. Because it was pushed into my head from when I was a little kid, there’s still part of me at the back of my brain that believes if you commit suicide you don’t go to heaven, which I know will seem a bit crackers to a lot of people. Which I suppose must mean I believe in heaven. In some capacity. But I think the whole idea of God and heaven is a bigger concept than we can comprehend as human beings at the moment. I don’t necessarily believe in God as an old man with a silver beard who sits up there surveying everything.

I have also been reading a lot about intelligent design over the last couple of years. Some of the scientists who are bang into the idea of intelligent design reckon that it doesn’t mean you can’t still believe in God. My beliefs are a bit magpie-like, I suppose. I take a bit from different places, a bit from here and a bit from there, whichever bits seem to make sense to me, which I think more and more people do nowadays. They pick the various bits that make sense to them – it’s a bit like a pick’n’mix when you go to the cinema, you know what I mean? You leave the bits behind that you don’t fancy and pick out the bits that you do, stick them in your bag and you’re away. If you ever see someone else at a pick’n’mix you might see
them pick up pear drops or something and think, ‘What have you picked that for? That’s the last thing I’d go for’, and the same is probably true with other people’s beliefs.