What Planet Am I On?

by Shaun Ryder

  WHAT PLANET AM I ON?

  Also by Shaun Ryder

  Twisting My Melon

  WHAT PLANET AM I ON?

  Shaun Ryder

  Constable • London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55-56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2013

  Copyright © Back to Back Productions Ltd., 2013

  The right of Shaun Ryder to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78033-949-8 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-78033-957-3 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Jacket design and typography © www.blacksheep-uk.com; Manchester skyline © Getty flying saucers © Alamy; Front jacket portrait © Getty

  To my wife and children

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks go to my wife, Joanne Ryder, and my children, for being there and being my backbone. I will always love you all; big thanks to my manager, Warren Askew, for making this happen, and special thanks to his wife Hayley and the kids for looking after me when I’m down south; to my mum and dad and family; my mother-in-law, Grannybag Joan; Amelia Ryder, the first doctor in the Ryder family; Peter Diver; my personal trainer, Gavin Kelly; Matt, Pat, Karen and Sam; Maria Carroll; Uncle Tom and Aunty Mary, RIP; Nikki Stevens; a big thank you to my fans for their support over the years; Andreas Campomar, Jo Stansall and Charlotte Macdonald at Constable & Robinson, for publishing the book and all their hard work on it. Sorry if the changes came in late; Matthew Hamilton, my literary agent at Aitken Alexander Associates; thanks to Wayne Derrick, the director of my TV series, Emma Pound, the AP, and everyone else who worked on the series; Pancho and Jorge, our drivers and fixers in Chile . . . and everyone I met along the way; and a massive thanks to Luke Bainbridge, who accompanied me on the UFO trip and helped me put pen to paper to record.

  Contents

  Introduction – My Lifelong Fascination with UFOs

  Chapter 1: Close Encounters of the Ryder Kind

  Chapter 2: The Truth is Out There

  Chapter 3: Ziggy Stardust and Other Spiders from Mars

  Chapter 4: Making History

  Chapter 5: UFO Highway, Chile

  Chapter 6: The Andes and the Stormtroopers

  Chapter 7: Giant Alien in the Desert

  Chapter 8: I See Another UFO

  Chapter 9: The World’s Most Famous Alien Abductee

  Chapter 10: Call the Cops

  Chapter 11: Meeting the Pope

  Chapter 12: The Church of UFOs

  Conclusion – Coming Down from My Trip

  INTRODUCTION

  My Lifelong Fascination with UFOs

  I’VE NEVER QUITE understood why some people think it’s weird to be interested in UFOs.

  The question for me is not why would you be interested in UFOs, but why wouldn’t you be interested in UFOs?

  It’s something that’s fascinated me all my life, particularly since I first saw one as a teenager. Believe me, if you see a UFO it sticks with you. I’ve never forgotten that day. I’ve forgotten big chunks of my life, especially some of the heady years, well decades really, when I was on the road with Happy Mondays and Black Grape. But I’ve never forgotten what happened that morning (which we’ll get to later). It’s been with me ever since.

  I know some people assume that UFOs are something that I got into in my wild, partying days with the Mondays, but that’s not the case. My fascination with UFOs started well before then, when I was a kid, and as I’ve got older, and my partying days are pretty much over, if anything my fascination with UFOs has just got stronger. I believed there was life out there way before I ever took drugs, and I had my first two encounters when I was young. I never actually had an encounter or saw anything extraterrestrial in the years I was partying.

  I can see why people might make that assumption because it’s a classic late-night conversation you might have. Those long nights when one of the things you start thinking about is what does it all mean? Is this all there is? Is there more to life than this? Are we alone in this universe or are there other things out there?

  I’ve never really talked about it in public before. Well, certainly not in any depth. I think a lot of people know that I saw a UFO when I was younger, particularly as it was featured in the film 24 Hour Party People – although it was portrayed very differently in the film to how it happened in real life. Not that anyone should believe what happens in that film. I liked 24 Hour Party People, I thought it was a good film, but it’s a film; that’s not me. That’s not a documentary about my life. The Shaun Ryder in the film is a caricature. It amazes me how people just swallow everything whole.

  So there was a little scene in the film, which a lot of people will have seen, and it’s been mentioned in interviews over the years but only ever in passing. I might have done an interview with NME or someone, but it usually goes something like:

  ‘So, I believe you’ve seen a UFO, Shaun?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Was you on drugs at the time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was you drunk at the time?’

  ‘No.’

  . . . and that’s about it. Seriously. That’s about as investigative as most of these journalists get. They’ve got a student mentality, most of them. That’s what I have to put up with. They probably want a rock ’n’ roll story that they can tell their mates down the pub involving Shaun Ryder. Get a life, mate. Maybe if I had told them, ‘Yes, I was off my head when I saw it’, then they would have wanted to know more. But I’ve honestly never really been asked much more than that about it.

  After I came runner-up on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! and then my autobiography Twisting My Melon did well, I got loads of offers to do TV shows, and my manager Warren had untold meetings with various production companies and TV channels about different shows. I got asked to do Strictly but that clashed with I’m a Celebrity . . . so I didn’t do it. I did do All Star Mr & Mrs with my wife Joanne, which was great, and we won £8,000 for our local school charity. But a lot of the other proposals we got were more Shaun Ryder rock’n’roll clichés, which to me were just boring. It makes me laugh how these people sit in brain-storming meetings in production companies and that’s the best they can come up with.

  But then, along the way, my manager Warren said, ‘What would you like to do, Shaun?’ I’ve spent most of the last thirty years with people asking me to do things – Will you do this gig? Will you do this interview? Will you go on this chat show? So it was refreshing to be asked for my ideas.

  I told them I’d like to make a TV series and a book investigating UFOs and everyone thought it was a great idea. So all of a sudden we’re on. Bingo! Next thing I know I’m asked to draw up a list of people I want to meet and places I want to go, and a year later here we are. It was a pretty wild road trip, and I learnt a lot. I met some fascinating people on the road and a few nutters, it has to be said, but I also got a bit more than I bargained for.

  CHAPTER 1

  Close Encounters of the Ryder Kind

  AS A LITT
LE kid I wouldn’t say I was obsessed, but I was definitely fascinated by the sky at night and space. When we lived in our house on Cemetery Road in Salford and I was about six years old, me and Our Paul shared a room and bunk beds. I was always on the top bunk and Our Paul was on the bottom bunk. I would spend all night looking out at the night sky, just staring up at the stars and into space.

  I kind of knew from that age that we definitely weren’t alone in the universe. I didn’t talk about it to everyone, but like most kids that age I had a very open, fertile mind, and it was something I thought about quite a lot when I was lying on that top bunk looking up at the stars – the fact that there was definitely more stuff going on out there. It wasn’t something that someone put in my head or anything. I wasn’t a nut, do you know what I mean? I’m not sure there were such things as space geeks back then, but I was fascinated by it.

  No one in my family was massively into it, although I know my dad did believe that we weren’t alone in the universe. We just had a couple of those little conversations about it that you have between father and son. My dad certainly wasn’t a sci-fi nut either, but his philosophy was simply that there was other life out there somewhere, and those people who thought there wasn’t and just dismissed the idea would one day end up looking as stupid as those people in olden days who thought that if you rowed your boat out far enough you would fall off the end of the world because it was flat. My dad was pretty philosophical about it, but that was just his personal opinion – he wasn’t obsessed and he didn’t read books on it or anything. It was just one of the things that me and him used to talk about when I was a little kid. Not around the table when we were having our tea, but just me and him having a little chat.

  I was always bang into all sorts of space gear as a kid – I loved Star Trek. I was quite young when it started in the sixties and when I first got into it as a kid I used to call it ‘Spock’. He was just the most identifiable thing in it to a young kid, wasn’t he? With his ears and a name like that? He was super intelligent as well. So I’d always be asking my mam and dad, ‘When’s Spock on?’ or ‘Can we watch Spock?’

  But the biggest thing that really got everyone thinking about space travel when I was a kid was man landing on the moon. That happened in 1969, when I was seven years old, and I remember it quite clearly. It was a huge deal at the time, and I remember my dad went out and got us our first colour telly for it. It was a big old thing, a rented television with a meter on the back where you had to put 10p in. Then the rental guy would come round and empty the meter every now and then. Imagine that now? Having to stick 10p in the back of your telly if you want to watch Coronation Street.

  The moon landings were obviously a huge deal at the time – it was as big as the World Cup or something. It was televised and they disrupted all the normal scheduling to show it. When I went to school that was all anyone was talking about.

  There were also a few huge sci-fi movies that came out in the late seventies when I was a teenager, especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars. At the time I thought Close Encounters was a great movie, but I thought Star Wars was just fantasy nonsense; it’s like a comedy Wild West movie set in space. Ridiculous. I was fifteen when it came out in 1977 and I just didn’t enjoy all that saving-the-Princess routine and battling-for-the-Federation bollocks. It was just not for me. Garbage. I thought Close Encounters was a much better movie at the time, and I still do. To me it was more real than Star Wars. So I’m not one of those nerds on space, those sci-fi nuts who just love everything. When the Star Wars prequels came out in the noughties, with Ewan McGregor and Samuel L Jackson in them, I tried watching them, but I still wasn’t having it. Ollie, one of our kids, was a teenager then, and he had all the Star Wars figures and was bang into it, so I thought I would give it another go, but nah. It’s just not my scene. Star Wars is a world that you either buy into as a kid or you don’t, you know what I mean? It’s like my little girls, Pearl and Lulu, are not into The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, and they’re not interested in Harry Potter either. Most kids love Harry Potter, but they’re not having it. I was the same with Star Wars.

  So like I say, as a kid I loved gazing at the stars at night and the moon landings, but I wasn’t a total nut or anything. Having said that, back in the late sixties there wasn’t much around to go overboard on anyway. Doctor Who was OK, I’d usually watch it if it was on, but I wasn’t mad for it. I liked Thunderbirds, thought that was OK, but Captain Scarlet was better.

  Star Trek, or ‘Spock’, was the main one for me when I was growing up. I’ve stuck with Star Trek over the years as well – we’ve had a long relationship. Years later, after I started Black Grape with Kermit, who was a big Star Trek nut as well (he just happened to be, that’s not why we started the band together), we were asked to go on a Star Trek night on BBC2. We had to talk about how we first got into it and what we thought about different characters, and our opinion on Star Trek: The Next Generation and all that. I remember when The Next Generation started in the mid-eighties. When I first heard they were going to do it, I thought, ‘Awww, bollocks!’ I just thought it was a really bad idea, and it was going to be terrible and ruin Star Trek for everyone. But after watching the first few episodes I admit I was totally wrong. The Next Generation just blew me away.

  A lot of the stuff that happens in Star Trek is very believable to me. I have this theory that if we as humans can imagine something, then it’s achievable, you know what I mean? Kermit was with me on that as well, all the way. My favourite episode of The Next Generation is called ‘Elementary, Dear Data’, when Professor Moriarty, who was Sherlock Holmes’s enemy or nemesis, tries to take over the ship, or at least a hologram of him does. What happens is that Commander Data generally has a pretty stressful time on the Starship Enterprise, dealing with all these extremely futuristic life forms and people from other planets, and making sure that Warp Factor Three is safe for the ozone and all sorts of stuff. So when he needs to just kick back, he goes up to the Holodeck, and in this episode he gets involved in the re-enactment of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. It’s called the Holodeck because that’s where the holograms are, but to Data it’s more of a holiday deck, a Holideck, as that’s where he goes for a bit of time out. I tell you what, if we had something like that in real life, drug use would go down by about 99 per cent – if we had a hologram world we could escape into and take a break from real life. Basically Moriarty just takes the piss all the way through the episode and it’s great. Check it out if you haven’t seen it, it’s a great episode.

  So I was always interested in space and the possibility of life on other planets, but then in the late seventies I had two personal encounters with UFOs that changed my life and changed my thinking on it.

  The first one happened at th’ Height – Irlams o’ th’ Height – which is a place near us when we were growing up. I was stood at a bus stop at th’ Height at about 9 p.m. at night. It was late summer so it was just going dark. I’d been out with a couple of pals of mine from school who lived at th’ Height and I was waiting to get a bus back up to Little Hulton, where I lived.

  I looked up and just saw hundreds of lights across the sky, hundreds of them. My first thought was, ‘Fuck me, are we being invaded?!’ It was amazing. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. There were hundreds of these lights moving across the sky and they looked like craft. It scared me a little bit at first, but then I actually found it quite calming. I think if an adult saw something like that for the first time, they might be quite scared, but because I was a kid I wasn’t as frightened. As a kid you’re more innocent and naive, aren’t you? But as an adult you might sense the danger a bit more.

  Quite a few other people saw it and it was reported in the Salford Journal or Reporter. Some spokesperson for the authorities, the head of police or Salford Council or something, blamed it on the floodlights of Salford Rugby Club going haywire, going bonkers, which was absolute bullshit. I remember reading the paper at the time, thinking, ‘Y
ou what? Bullshit! Who you trying to kid?’ I knew what the lights at Salford rugby ground looked like, because I’d grown up there and I used to go and watch the rugby sometimes with my granddad and Our Paul. What I saw that night looked fuck-all like Salford’s floodlights. The lights I saw were different colours for a start and were slow-moving objects, and there were what looked like hundreds of them moving slowly across the sky.

  Over the past decade or so, as I’ve got into watching documentaries on the History and Discovery channels and checking stuff out on YouTube, I’ve seen clips of similar things and I’ve been like, ‘Wow! That’s what I saw that night!’ I’m now pretty sure it was hundreds of craft moving slowly across the sky.

  A few months later, probably late September or early October 1978, I had my second incident or encounter. I’d just left school by that time and started work as a post boy. I was on the 8 to 3.30 shift at the post office, so I was walking to the bus stop on Hilton Lane about 6.40 a.m. to get on the bus to work and it was still dark – that time of the morning when the dawn is just creeping in. There was a little lad who must have been about eleven or twelve in front of me, also walking to the bus stop. He must have been at one of the grammar schools in town, De La Salle or Manchester Grammar. As I’m walking to the bus stop I looked up and saw this object just flash across the sky in front of me at about 10,000 miles an hour. I watched it zip across and then I looked at the little lad, and he was watching it as well.

  As we reached the bus stop, we both just stood there watching this object, this thing. And it was fucking spell-binding. I’d never seen anything like it. This object was shooting across the sky . . . sssssccchhhhhOOOOmmmmMMMMMM . . . zzzzzoZZZZOOOOOOOOMMMMMM . . . in this mad zigzag pattern from one side to the other, at what seemed about 10,000 miles an hour. Then it would stop and then kind of hang about in one spot for a little bit, and then it was off again . . . ssssssssshhhhhhh . . . zigzagging back across the sky again. Then it might hover about for a little bit, and then again . . . sssssccchhhhhhOOOOmmmmMMMM MM . . . zzzzzoZZZZOOOOOOOOMMMMMM . . . zigzagging back across the sky again.