What Planet Am I On? (6 page)

Cat Stevens, the singer-songwriter, was another geezer who was adamant he had an encounter, when a UFO sucked him up into the sky, back in 1973. He said, ‘One night I was lying in bed and I saw this flying saucer shoot across the sky and stop over me. And it sucked me up in it. When it put me down, I shot up in bed. I know IT WASN’T A DREAM. IT WAS REAL. I KNOW it was real.’

Cat’s hit song ‘Longer Boats’ is also about UFOs, and includes lyrics that tell you to look up in the sky in case you can see aliens looking down. Two of his other songs,
‘It’s a Super (Dupa) Life’ and ‘Freezing Steel’, also include references to flying saucers. Mind you, apparently old Cat has believed a few things in his life. He’s been pretty Zen, he’s been into tarot cards, numerology and astrology. He’s a Muslim now and goes by the name of Yusuf Islam.

While we were working on this book, we also came across the claims of Sammy Hagar, who I didn’t know much about, but he was the dude who replaced David Lee Roth as lead singer in Van Halen in 1985. He never used to talk about it until he wrote his autobiography a few years ago, but then he came out with all this stuff about being abducted by aliens when he was young. In his book he describes how he had this dream where he saw a ship with two creatures inside. He felt they were connected to him, as if they were tapped into his mind through some sort of wireless connection. But then he went on MTV and said it wasn’t a dream – he reckoned it had really happened to him. ‘It was real. Aliens were plugged into me. It was a download situation. This was long before computers or any kind of wireless. There weren’t even wireless telephones. Looking back now, it was like, “Fuck, they downloaded something into me!” Or they uploaded something from my brain, like an experiment. “See what this guy knows.”’

Which is pretty far out stuff, do you know what I mean?

Loads of bands have also written songs about or referenced the Roswell incident over the years. The Pixies wrote a song about Roswell called ‘Motorway to Roswell’ on their
Trompe le Monde
album. I always like the Pixies. Our first big tour of the US was in 1989, supporting them. I wasn’t a massive fan of their music before that tour, but I really liked them as a live band and they were a lot better than us musically at that point. I got on well with them as well, especially Kim the bass player who later joined the Breeders. Actually, it was on that same Pixies tour that I first saw David Bowie in person. The night we played in Los Angeles, we went out to this club called Enter the Dragon and the Beastie Boys were there, and then the man himself, David Bowie, walked in. Gaz Whelan, our drummer, was off his head and started going, ‘Ha ha – Bowie’s a midget! Bowie’s a midget.’ He was always obsessed by people’s height for some reason. He wasn’t that wild, Gaz, but we were always having to try and shut him up if he got drunk or off his head, because he always went over the top.

Megadeth, the heavy metal dudes, wrote a song called ‘Hangar 18’, which was the hangar at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, where the alien aircraft from Roswell was apparently taken in 1947. Some reports claim that the US authorities continued to store and analyse bits of the UFO at Wright-Patterson for years. Megadeth even re-created the aliens from the Roswell clips for one of the videos to the song.

Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters is obviously bang
into UFOs because ‘Foo Fighters’ was a term used by Allied aircraft pilots in the Second World War to describe UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies while they were on their missions. He also put the first Foo Fighters album out on his own label called Roswell Records.

The Orb also put out an album in the early nineties called
U.F.Orb
, which had a track on it called ‘Blue Room’, which was named after the Blue Room, the supposed UFO-evidence holding room at Wright-Patterson Air Force base.

I also came across the pretty wild claim from Killah Priest, a rapper involved in the Wu-Tang Clan, who reckoned that, ‘Black people come from space. When you look at the sky, it’s black. Without the sunlight – forget it, it’s black. In the beginning there was darkness.’

More recently, Robbie Williams has been quite open about the fact that he is bang into his UFOs and has talked about how he has seen one on three occasions. The first was growing up in Stoke-on-Trent as a kid, the second was at home in Beverly Hills – ‘I was lying on my sun lounger outside at night. Above me was a square thing that passed over my head silently and shot off.’ On another occasion, he described how ‘This big ball of gold light turned up.’ He called his 2006 tour ‘Close Encounters’ and also wrote a song called ‘Arizona’ about alien abduction in 2008. ‘Seriously, I want to go out and investigate these things,’ he said. ‘I’m stopping being a pop star and I’m going to be a full-time ufologist.’

There was also a story recently that he was planning to buy an island called White Rock Island, off the coast of Los Angeles, to use as a UFO viewing base.

I wouldn’t mind buying my own private island for UFO hunting.

So as you can see I’m far from the only musician who’s interested in UFOs. Reading about all this stuff that the researchers for this book unearthed just got me even more fascinated. I couldn’t wait to get out there and do some more research and investigating myself.

WHEN WE SAT
down and started to plan the TV show and the book, I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to go with it. I was also made up that it was going to be on the History channel because I knew they would take it seriously, which is what I wanted.

I’ve always been well into my films and documentaries, but over the last few years, as I’ve chilled out a bit and spent more time at home with a young family, I’ve watched more and more. I could watch the History channel and Discovery all day. Unless I’m watching CBeebies with the kids or
Coronation Street
with Joanne, that’s what you’ll find me watching most of the time. So I kind of had an idea in my head of the sort of show that I wanted to make.

I was asked for a list of people I’d like to meet and
interview and the producers also came up with suggestions themselves. We did get off to a slightly false start because everyone involved had a different idea of the kind of show we were going to make. The first director they teamed me up with was a guy who had directed Louis Theroux documentaries. Now, I like a bit of Louis Theroux, I think he’s an all right dude, but what he does is very
him
. There’s no point Shaun Ryder trying to do a Louis Theroux because I’m not that sort of person. I haven’t got that sort of dry personality, you know what I mean? Also, which is even more important to me, I didn’t want to just go round taking the piss out of people. I don’t see the point in that. Even though I don’t mind that Louis Theroux, I think he does pick easy targets half the time and it would be a piece of piss to do that with the UFO believers. I’m pretty set in my own beliefs when it comes to UFOs, and I kind of know where I draw the line, but obviously it’s the sort of subject that does attract a few crackpots and attention seekers. I didn’t want to make a series which just dug up the most bonkers people that we could all have a laugh at – what, with me giving little sly looks to the camera and making snidey comments behind their backs? Nah, mate, that’s exactly the show I didn’t want to make.

It’s a subject that I’m really interested in so I wanted to meet some serious dudes: people that I’d read about or seen interviewed over the years and had found fascinating. People who have had their own experiences and encounters, whether they’re similar to mine or not.
I’ve been interested for years in a couple of the folks that you’ll read about in this book and have always wanted to meet them. People like Travis Walton, a lumberjack from Arizona who swears he was abducted by aliens in 1975. Travis wrote a book about his experience and Hollywood even made a film about his encounter called
Fire in the Sky
, which is one of my favourite movies. I saw it when it first came out in 1993, but Travis’s encounter actually happened around the same time I had my first encounter.

After I saw the film I read anything I could find about the case, but that was before the internet had taken off really, and before I got into the Discovery and History channels. Since then I’ve seen Travis on TV loads, but I have only ever seen him interviewed on American shows, never a British show like the one we were setting out to make. Most of the interviews I’ve seen are also old because Travis decided to take a step back from all publicity and television for quite a few years and not do anything. He’s only recently decided to come back into the limelight a bit. So Travis was a cert for me.

I found it a bit unusual that Travis’s case grabbed me so much. To be honest, I think most cases of alien abduction are bullshit. When people come out and say they’ve been abducted by aliens, I think you can tell pretty much every time they’re talking nonsense.

Probably the most famous abduction case is the Betty and Barney Hill one. They were an American couple who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials in New Hampshire in 1961. They were driving back
from a holiday at Niagara Falls when they saw what they thought was a UFO, which they reckoned followed them and started playing cat-and-mouse with them. At one stage, they claimed, they saw some humanoid figures in the spaceship and one of them told them, ‘Stay where you are and keep looking.’ They then woke up in their car to find their clothes ripped, their watches stopped at the same time and with no memory of the previous two hours. In UFO circles this is called a ‘Missing Time case’. They wrote a book about their experience called
The Interrupted Journey
and it was made into a movie in 1975 called
The UFO Incident
. No disrespect to Betty and Barney, but I’m just not having their story. I’ve never met them but sometimes you just get a vibe, don’t you? Loads of people have bought into it, so good luck to them, but everything I’ve seen and read about it doesn’t quite add up to me.

I’ve also read a lot about other abduction cases and seen documentaries on them, and most of it is just bullshit to me. Most of the abductees come across as fantasists or attention seekers. I’m just not having it.

The only one that got to me, the only one that really interested me, and the only one who I could say, hand on heart, I believe, is Travis Walton. It’s not just Travis either. He was with a bunch of his co-workers at the time, and they all witnessed what happened and they have all passed several polygraph tests testifying to what they saw. There were about eight of them, who were all lumberjacks, and they just worked together – they weren’t all mates.
Travis and his brother-in-law, Mike Rogers, who was in charge of them all, obviously got on, but the rest of them didn’t and a few of them hated each other. They were just grafters who ended up lumped together on a job. They had no loyalty to each other or anything. You know what it’s like when you’re forced to spend loads of time working with people who you don’t exactly see eye-to-eye with? You end up hating them. They do your head in on a daily basis. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the rock’n’roll game like I am, or a postie like I used to be when I had my first encounter, or you work in a dull-as-fuck Ricky Gervais-type office or you’re a lumberjack like Travis . . . if a group of people are lumped together like that and they don’t particularly get on, they’ll end up hating each other and you get little cracks in the group. This geezer doesn’t like this geezer . . . this other geezer thinks that him over there is a knob – it’s the same in any line of work.

But Travis and the other lumberjacks who were there that night have all stuck to the same story for forty years. Forty years. Sometimes they’ve been split up and interviewed separately by experts and on TV, they’ve done untold polygraph tests – with different cops and specialists – and for forty years every one of them has stuck to the same story. Most of them aren’t in touch with each other now, but they all still insist it happened.

If you take a bunch of normal blokes who commit a crime – rob a post office or something like that – then at
least one of them will betray the others or stop sticking to the story. Trust me, I’ve seen it with my own eyes enough times. When you’re in a band you have a bit of a party line that you stick to, but at some point it will fall apart. The party line might just be to play up to the public image that you have. We had it in Happy Mondays – we might have been naughty lads when we were younger but that image, particularly of me and Bez, becomes almost exaggerated, becomes a caricature. When anyone thinks of the Mondays, they just think we were a bunch of wreckheads, and we played along with that for a long time. But then someone in the band doesn’t like that and wants to prove they’re a proper, serious musician. Whenever you get a bunch of blokes together on a job, any job, over time cracks will appear and you’ll start to get a different version of events.

But no matter how much they hated each other, the lumberjacks stuck to the story. One of the guys went round to Travis’s house and wanted to batter him because Travis said in his account that this geezer was crying when it happened. Even though he was fucking furious with Travis for saying that, and wanted to have it out with him there in the street, he still didn’t suggest that the events hadn’t really happened.