What Planet Am I On? (8 page)

After a night’s kip back at the hotel, I’m up early for my first full day proper of UFO hunting. Well, I say early, but I’ve got two young kids, Lulu and Pearl, so 7.30 a.m. is a lie-in for me these days. I’m usually up around sixish most days. Get up and make a cup of coffee if the kids aren’t up. Probably get roped into watching some cartoon if they are. Or maybe take them for an early morning swim as we’ve got an indoor pool out the back of our house.

One of the main guys the production team wants me to meet while we’re here is Antonio Huneeus, a renowned ufologist, who has been studying UFOs for twenty years. He’s led quite a mad life, old Antonio. He’s from Santiago and studied journalism at the University of Chile before moving to New York when he was still quite young in the late seventies, and he had all sorts of jobs there, but began to make a name for himself writing about UFOs. He’s written a few books on UFOs and was awarded ‘Ufologist of the Year’ at the National UFO Conference in Miami in 1990, so he knows his shit. He’s now editor and reporter for a UFO organization in the States called Open Minds, which has a website and a magazine and organizes conferences. So he’s a pretty
well-respected authority on UFOs. It was also good to have someone local with us anyway, as they help explain differences in culture and how locals might see things. I meet him at the hotel and we get to know each other over a coffee. Not that Antonio really needs the coffee – he’s quite a hyperactive dude and he never seems to stop talking, which I could see I was going to have to get used to over the next few days.

The first incident we are off to investigate with Antonio is the case of El Bosque Air Force base. El Bosque is just outside Santiago, where something very strange happened a couple of years ago. Every four years at El Bosque they have what they call a change of guard of the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Air Force (FACH). They bump off the last dude (not literally) and get some new kid in to take his place. It’s a pretty big deal for them so they have this whole ceremony, a big show-of-power thing, with loads of the Air Force planes doing flight passes and demonstrations at El Bosque, like the Chilean answer to the Red Arrows.

The last time they changed Commander-in-Chief and had this big parade was in 2010, when the current dude, who’s called General Jorge Rojas Ávila, became the new chief, and the big all-singing, all-dancing, all-flying ceremony took place in El Bosque in the morning of 4 November. Everything on the day seemed to go according to plan and nobody noticed anything unusual during the ceremony.

So far, so pretty dull. But this is where it gets interesting.
Although no one noticed anything on the day, when these military dudes and their families went home and started watching the footage they’d shot on their video cameras or mobiles or whatever, a few of them spotted something very weird on their footage. Antonio shows me the footage on his iPad. It’s pretty crazy. This unidentified object, whatever it is, shoots across the sky in broad daylight, just behind the jet fighters that are in formation. I think the fact that it’s moving so bloody quick is probably one of the main reasons why no one on the ground really spotted it at the time. When they watched the footage they were like, ‘Hang on, what the fuck is that?’ They weren’t UFO spotters or anything, they were just normal Chilean Air Force cadets and engineers who were there.

You can’t see it with the naked eye because it’s moving so fast – it’s only when you slow it down you can see what looks like a tiny craft shooting across the sky during the ceremony. Seven different dudes caught the same thing on camera that day, and all their different footage shows this small, dome-shaped, flat-bottomed metallic object zooming across the sky. It’s buzzing around the fighter planes in the Air Force display and moving much, much faster than them. Antonio says that none of the pilots on the day noticed anything unusual. I ask Antonio what speed he reckons the unidentified object was doing.

Antonio tells me about the top scientists and military specialists who have seen the footage. ‘One of the rough estimates was eighteen times the speed of the planes. One
of the great things about this footage is they know the speed of the planes, so they can judge the speed of the [unidentified flying] object against the planes, and also you can judge the size and speed of it against the mountains. Usually, footage is in the dark, so you have nothing to judge it against. Here we have known parameters to measure it against which we don’t normally have.’

I know what he means as half the footage you see of what people think is a UFO just looks like a blob in the sky, and there’s no way of judging how big it is – it could be an insect or it could be a craft the size of the Starship
Enterprise
.

Antonio explains how there have been numerous cases of pilots reporting weird flying objects over the years, but virtually no footage like this where the unidentified flying object has been caught on film at the same time as terrestrial planes.

If you ask me, after looking at the footage again, something that size, that is moving eighteen times faster than fighter jets, is definitely not from this planet.

CEFAA was contacted by these seven different people individually after they’d all been freaked out by their footage. A number of CEFAA experts have studied these recordings and the agency has confirmed this as an unidentified object travelling at speeds in excess of 4,000 mph. The footage was eventually released to the public in March 2012, but no explanation has been found.

At the 2012 International UFO Congress, General Bermúdez, the big cheese of CEFAA, said that after
analysis by all their astronomers, Air Force specialists and internal military personnel, ‘it has been confirmed that the UFO captured in the footage is an unknown aerial phenomenon’. This obviously caused a bit of a stir in the global UFO community and, as you’d expect, loads of them jumped on it as the solid evidence of UFOs they’ve been waiting for.

The production team has arranged for us to go to the Air Force base and see exactly where this happened, and meet some of the witnesses, which is exciting. Me and Antonio jump in a people carrier and set off through Santiago. The traffic is a nightmare and the smog is also pretty terrible. It reminds me a bit of Los Angeles, the way it settles over the downtown area. I tell Antonio this and have a bit of a chat with him about the similarities between Santiago and LA. ‘Well, you know the climate is similar,’ he says, ‘and the smog comes down from the mountains in Santiago and settles over downtown in a similar way to the way it does in Los Angeles. Also, Chile and Los Angeles are both famous for their wine, and they also both have quite a bit of a new age culture.’ That’s a bit of LA I could never be arsed with, I tell him, all that new age bollocks.

‘Of course, both California and Chile are also good spots for UFOs.’

Which is why I’m here, obviously. I decide to pick Antonio’s brains about why he thinks people are obsessed by UFOs.

‘Even the sceptics have to recognize that, at least as a
sociological phenomenon, UFOs are real, in other words, people see stuff. No one can deny that. But we don’t know what it is, which is why we call them UFOs.’

I tell Antonio about my second encounter, when I saw a UFO on the way to work as a postman early one morning, and he’s really interested and tells me that his first sighting was pretty similar. He was in Santiago in 1988: ‘I saw lights, it looked like a star, but it was moving like crazy, and then it would stop, and it went on for like twenty minutes or something.’

Apparently this type of sighting is pretty common. Two-thirds of all close encounters of the first kind, i.e. sightings of UFOs, are pretty similar to mine and Antonio’s – mysterious lights in the night sky, moving at very unusual speeds and performing mad, fast changes of direction that would be impossible for any plane that we’ve invented.

I also tell Antonio about my first sighting, when I looked up in the sky and saw literally hundreds of small lights, and my belief that there is life out there. He agrees with me: ‘I mean, the universe is so huge why would there just be one place with life? It doesn’t make sense.’

I also tell him that I think if the authorities announced tomorrow that we’ve made contact with an alien race then a lot of people would go bananas. What’s mad is that Antonio then starts telling me about a famous Arthur C. Clarke TV series in the eighties that he loved called
Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World
, which I actually remember
watching as an eighteen-year-old on Granada TV. Pretty crazy to go to the other side of the world and find a local banging on about something that you saw on local TV when you were growing up.

Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World
was a thirteen-part series that looked at ‘unexplained phenomena from around the world’ and one of the episodes was all about UFOs. They looked at the Robert Taylor incident, which happened in Scotland in 1979 and is also called the Livingston incident or the Dechmont Woods encounter. Old Bob Taylor was a forester (a bit like Travis Walton) who reported seeing an extraterrestrial spacecraft. His was the first UFO case that was officially investigated by the Scottish dibble. I think it’s still the only UFO sighting in the UK that has been the subject of a criminal investigation. They also looked at the case of Kenneth Arnold, who was an American dude who made what is considered to be the first report of seeing a UFO in the US, in 1947.

Antonio also gives me a copy of a book that he helped research called
Alien Rock – The Rock’n’roll Extraterrestrial Connection
, by Michael C. Luckman, who is the director of the New York Center for Extraterrestrial Research and the founder of the Cosmic Majority, ‘an organization of people on Earth who believe in UFOs, life on Mars, and the paranormal’. Antonio shows me a passage in the book which talks about how a bunch of Chilean musicians including Tito Fernández, Jorge Cruz and Gloria Benavides had a mad experience
when they were on tour in northern Chile in 1974. They were driving through a remote part of the desert called Pampa Soledad, which means ‘pampa of solitude’, when they spotted a light, which then began to chase them. They were convinced it was a UFO and it ended up chasing them for nearly an hour, with one of the musician dudes hanging out of the window of their car, waving a crucifix at the UFO to try and ward it off. As if that wasn’t weird enough, the orange light then split in half, like an orange into two segments, and they could see a tall humanoid figure about seven feet tall appear. Needless to say, they all shit themselves and raced to the nearest cop station, but when they got there the UFO had disappeared. Seventeen years later, in 1991, another group of people had a very similar episode on the same stretch of road in the Pampa Soledad, although this time it was a green light and they managed to catch a bit of it on a camcorder. Very strange.

Shaun’s X-Files

To put the mathematical chance of life elsewhere in the Universe into perspective, you need to understand Earth’s place within it. Our galaxy contains an estimated 400 billion stars – if only 0.001 per cent of these have some kind of life, that still leaves forty million planets that could support life. Then if you consider that our galaxy is just one of billions in the known universe, it’s enough to twist anyone’s melon.

It takes us about an hour to get to the El Bosque Air Force base on the outskirts of Santiago. When we get there, I can’t believe how easy it is to get in, considering how important this base is. I mean, I know they’re expecting us, but even so, we just tip up at the front gate and they let us straight through. No checking of ID or passports, no searches, no checking the vehicle or anything. Piece of piss. Getting into Disneyland is harder than that. I’m not joking. I once did a gig there with Happy Mondays about ten years ago and it was a fucking nightmare. They have Mickey Mouse security there. I’m not taking the piss, the security there actually did have badges that say ‘Mickey Mouse security’, but they were anything but Mickey Mouse. They were actually really on top. If you’ve ever been to Disneyland you will know they have venues, nightclubs, Hard Rock Cafes and all sorts in there, and we were playing one of the venues. It was a nightmare trying to get to the venue with the band and all our gear, past all the security, and once we were there they didn’t want us to move. We couldn’t go anywhere. They just wanted us to stay backstage until we went on – we couldn’t even jib off for a little look around Disneyland or anything, not that I would have wanted to. It would look a bit weird, a few forty-year-old men mooching around Disneyland on their own, you know what I mean? I’d take my kids there, but it’s not the sort of place you go with your pals unless you want a few weird looks.

Anyway, it’s smooth as anything getting into El
Bosque and when we get inside, Commander Perry, one of their top fighter pilots and instructors, is waiting for us. It feels a bit like the Tom Cruise film
Top Gun
. All the pilots are wearing those all-in-one jumpsuits that you sometimes see trendy dicks in East London wearing. Commander Perry is obviously top boy here – he is a pretty relaxed dude but you can tell everyone respects him. He reminds me of the main instructor with the ’tache in
Top Gun
. He shows us around the gaff a bit, and explains what they get up to, how the skies here are full of planes every day, but how they had never had an incident like the one that happened that day in 2010.