by Shaun Ryder
And then all of a sudden it just did one.
Got off at about 10,000 miles an hour.
Disappeared.
Gone.
It’s hard to describe it, or even say how big it was, because it was pretty far away. We were in Salford, but I reckon this craft could have even been above the moors between Bolton and Rochdale. To me, it looked like a star moving about, but just lower down. It’s hard to get perspective on something when it’s in the sky and moving that fast.
Again, like my first incident, other people had seen it as well because there were some reports in the press about people seeing similar things as far away as Bolton and even Todmorden in Yorkshire. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? If this craft was flitting about at 10,000 miles an hour, then when I was watching it zigzag across the sky it could well have been flitting between the Pennines and Liverpool.
Aside from my two incidents, there were also quite a few other reports of similar types of activity in the skies near me around the same time. The north-west seemed to be a bit of a hotbed at the time. Farmers saw things. Even police officers have gone on record saying that they saw similar things. It wasn’t just me, little Shaun Ryder in Salford, who was seeing things. Loads of people from all walks of life, from bus drivers to lawyers, reported seeing similar things.
Now, the first time I saw something – all those different lights in the sky I mentioned earlier – I definitely knew it wasn’t the rugby lights that the local paper used as an explanation. But you do think to yourself, ‘You know what? I know it wasn’t fucking rugby lights, I know there was something weird going on there, and I clocked it, but maybe there is some weird, non-UFO, explanation for it. Maybe it was some freakish optical illusion, or some sort of mini Northern Lights show over Salford.’
But the second time? Nah. I definitely saw something flying around at 10,000 miles an hour, zigzagging around the sky, completely defying physics or what any manmade craft could do. It was definitely a craft of some kind and it certainly wasn’t a manmade craft.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Star Wars hadn’t come out at the time – they came out just after my encounter. So it’s not as if I’d been to the pictures and floated back home with these visions in my head and conjured it up. I was just on my way to work, freezing my balls off at six a.m. in the morning, and I saw this craft. Not just me, but the little kid that was in front of me as well.
After the craft had disappeared that morning, I got on the bus and went into work and I told everyone about it. No one said, ‘Were you tripping?’ or ‘Are you sure you weren’t just stoned?’ or anything like that. I hadn’t taken acid or anything at that age, and that drug culture wasn’t around then either, back in the late seventies, or at least it wasn’t widespread. Acid wouldn’t have been in the vocabulary of your average postman back then. There was a bit of weed flying around the post office, but that was about it.
I’ve never forgotten that day. As I’ve said, I’ve forgotten days, weeks, months, years and, let’s face it, decades of my life, but I’ve never forgotten that morning. Something like that sticks in your head, believe me.
When you have seen something like I did, a craft flying about defying physics, it makes you think about things differently. Later, when I saw films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Star Wars, I did think to myself, ‘Well, where do they get their ideas from for these films?’ It’s not all straight from the imagination of whoever wrote the film, is it? Not all from the mind of a geezer sat in a room at his desk, staring at the wall, chewing his pencil waiting for inspiration. I’m a big one for believing that information is leaked to us through TV programmes and films – through the news, through all sorts.
Steven Spielberg apparently has friends in the military who have told him classified stuff which he then uses as inspiration in his movies. I read an interview once where someone asked him about it, saying, ‘You know some people believe you’re actually a government agent for aliens because of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET?’ And Spielberg replied, ‘I’m part of a government conspiracy to make America and the world conducive to accepting an alien neighbour? Great!’
The producer Jamie Shandera made a documentary about Spielberg just as ET came out, and said Spielberg told him there was a private screening of ET at the White House for Ronald and Nancy Reagan. At the end of the film, the President leant over, tapped Spielberg on the shoulder and quietly said to him, ‘You know, there aren’t six people in this room who know how true this really is.’
After my first two incidents, I didn’t have any similar experiences for years. Decades. There was one incident in Germany with the re-formed Happy Mondays in about 2006, when we thought we might have seen a UFO, but that was slightly different. This wasn’t the original lineup of the Mondays, but one I had for a few years in the noughties. We had a very weird experience one night on tour, but I’m pretty sure I can discount that as being more of less just down to the substances that were being consumed. There were a lot of weird people around us at a weird festival, smoking a weird substance, which triggered off a very weird experience.
There were some German dudes there who were real mushroom and dope aficionados and collectors, and they had just been to the Amazon rainforest and brought some stuff back with them. I realized afterwards it was a drug called DMT, which I’d heard about before. I think Bez and his ex-missus were the first people I knew to take it. Its proper name is Dimethyltryptamine (I had to Google that) and it’s a natural psychedelic drug. It occurs in plants and there are also traces of it in our bodies. Depending on how much you take, it can give you a proper, full-on immersive psychedelic trip. Loads of South American, Amazonian and American Indian tribes have been taking it for centuries, it’s part of their culture. Shamans use it in ceremonies. In the late nineties, dear old Tony Wilson was asked to make a TV show where he went to South America and took this drug to see what happened. I didn’t know about it until he came back, quite pleased with himself, and said, ‘I’ve been to the Amazon rainforest and taken a drug even you lot haven’t tried.’ And I was like, ‘Nah, Bez has had it, Tony. Our mate brought some back off his holidays.’ Poor Tony was a bit gutted.
There was a good documentary made about it a couple of years ago called DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which is on Netflix and well worth watching. In the documentary, they have scientists who talk about taking DMT and going on trips out to the universe. They’re also talking about how they might use it in medical science as well. They all agree it’s much more than a drug experience. It opens your mind and helps you understand life and death and all sorts. Lots of people who’ve taken it say you can see the life around plants, almost like the aura of plants.
DMT seems like a really positive thing to me, but the thing is when you’re prepared for that sort of trip then you’re ready for it, aren’t you? You get yourself in the right mindset. But when you’re just at a festival and someone passes you something and you don’t know what it is, you just think it’s something relatively harmless, so you crack on and then you don’t know what’s fucking hit you. BOOOOOM! All of a sudden we were in this really, really intense psychotropic mind-bending trip, which was much deeper and more intense than any acid I’ve ever taken. We were certain we could read each other’s minds. We were sat there in this room, absolutely out of it, convinced we were mind-reading, like a scene straight out of a sci-fi film.
I was sat there looking at Johnny, and in my head I’m thinking, ‘Right, I’m not talking now, Johnny, OK? And you’re not talking either, but nod if you can understand me . . .’
And Johnny nodded, which was just fucking mind-blowing.
Thing is, in reality I was saying all this out loud. We only thought we weren’t talking.
Then Johnny would do the same to me. He was thinking, ‘Right, now let’s see if you can read my mind. Nod if you can understand me, Shaun.’ And I thought I could hear what he was thinking, so I nodded, and it just blew our minds. The DMT had fucked us
up so much we thought we had super powers.
I have a really, really strong mind when it comes to hallucinogenics and things. When me and Bez first met we spent a year doing acid together every day, and I always had a strong enough mind to separate what was tripping and what was real life. Even when me and Bez would be tripping in the fields, and we were looking up at the clouds which were turning into Greek gods and climbing down out of the sky and talking to us – even then I had a strong enough mind to say, ‘No, this is a trip, this is not really happening.’ And even then we never saw a UFO.
But that incident with the DMT in Germany even threw me for a bit. That DMT stuff was something else. But as I say, that night was just a weird drug experience more than anything. So even though we thought we might have experienced some kind of alien mind-fuck that night, I’d definitely put anything out of the ordinary that happened down to the chemicals.
The reason I’m telling you all this is that I want to make it absolutely clear that despite what people might think, my interest in UFOs is nothing to do with drug experiences. It predates that, it goes back to when I was a kid, and it’s still with me now, long after I’ve stopped partying like I used to.
CHAPTER 2
The Truth is Out There
I’VE GOT A pretty inquisitive mind. I wouldn’t say I’m a conspiracy theorist, but I definitely don’t believe everything that the government or the media tell us either. I don’t believe what politicians or the authorities are telling us half the time. And I don’t believe half the stories you read about so-called celebrities, so I definitely don’t believe everything that’s said, or not said, about UFOs or the existence of life out there.
I find it funny when individuals get into power and they’re really interested to find out more about UFOs. I tend to find whoever it is, be it the President of America or the British Prime Minister, gets into office and says, ‘Right, show me the UFO file.’ Then it generally goes quiet – you never hear anything after that. One of two things happens: either they keep knocking on doors and getting no answer, because even if you’re the President or the Prime Minister there’s some top secret department who won’t give up all their secrets to you. Or perhaps sometimes they do go, ‘Here y’are then, here’s the UFO file’, and Obama or Tony Blair or whoever it is goes, ‘Bloody hell, right-o, maybe we better keep schtum about this.’
Either way, once they get in power, they seem to keep quiet about it.
Most people know about the most famous UFO occurrences like the Roswell incident. That was what kicked off popular UFO culture, if you like. Roswell is to ufology what Elvis at Sun Studios is to rock’n’roll, you know what I mean? Ever since then, the public has been fascinated by UFOs. Since I first heard about the Roswell case, I’ve been gripped by it.
My opinion on Roswell has changed over time. I’ve always been open to suggestions and up for learning more about possible theories on UFOs, which is one of the reasons I wanted to make the TV series and write this book. I watched one programme about Roswell that made a good case for suggesting it was all tied up with the beginnings of the cold war and nuclear power, and the Americans were trying to explain away new technology they were developing. There’s also the other explanation they came up with that it was some new-fangled weather balloon that confused the fuck out of the people who found it because they had never seen such an advanced material, so they thought it was something from another planet. It seemed a pretty convincing argument, and I was having it. But then I did also like the argument that it was a bit of a blag by the Americans to cover up some nuclear experiment – that they would rather have the general public half believing there was a UFO cover-up than the Russians finding out what was really going on, which was that they were developing some new spy plane technology or something. So for a while I was more inclined to believe that perhaps it was a US military cover-up of some kind and the whole alien thing was just a smokescreen.
Then I saw another documentary which showed some other evidence and a new way of looking at it, which made me think again and come back round to thinking, ‘Nah, something definitely happened at Roswell. There was definitely some contact with an alien race that those fuckers in charge don’t want us knowing about.’ Nurses who worked there later came out and swore blind that they were there when autopsies were done on little bodies. So that’s where I’m at now with Roswell. I’m back to thinking that something definitely went down there.
When the US started their ‘Star Wars’ programme under Ronald Reagan, obviously your average man on the street got even more interested in what was happening out there in space. Now they’ve abandoned it, but I don’t think that’s stopped the general public’s interest.
I think young kids are particularly fascinated by UFOs. Especially now they’re not being told, like I was, that there is no life out there; they’re being taught that water has been found on Mars, and that there may be life out there somewhere and that there are planets similar to Earth, that could sustain life, being discovered all the time.
I talk to my kids about UFOs and whether there is other life out there, just as my dad used to talk to me when I was a kid. I’ve talked to them about what I’ve seen. Their response was, ‘Why were they here, Dad?’ I said, ‘They’re probably coming to check up on us, to see how we’re doing, to make sure we’re all right.’ And they were happy with that. I also talk to my wife Joanne about it, and she’s very much of the same opinion as me that there is definitely life out there.
If you look back at history, most things that humans have thought about have gone on to be invented. Most things that you think about become reality. Someone thought about photography one day and then it became real. Someone thought about moving pictures one day and it became real. Someone thought about landing on the moon, it became real.
That sort of stuff fascinates me – how the mind works and changes reality. Like the cat-in-the-box theory. It’s called the Schrödinger’s cat theory. It’s a bit too complex for me to explain, but look it up – it’s to do with our influence on everything around us and how we affect reality.
I think we’re all aerials or antennae in a way, and we all tune into and pick up signals from people who are similar to us, and we attract people who think in the same way and believe the same sort of things. That’s how we end up getting drawn to certain people. With Happy Mondays, our drummer Gaz Whelan was always bang into UFO sort of stuff, and we would chat about it for hours when we were on tour. Bez also has a really inquisitive mind. I’m sure you all know the boggle-eyed caricature of Bez, which everyone loves, but anyone who’s ever sat down and had a chat with Bez, when he’s not off his head, will tell you that he’s a really intelligent and inquisitive guy. He contradicts himself all the time, on everything and anything, often in the same sentence. But he’s an interested, and interesting, dude.
Like I said earlier, Kermit from Black Grape is also fascinated by things like this, which is one of the things we bonded over. Well, along with the fact that we both had quite healthy drug habits at the time. Too Nice Tom, a good friend of mine who is a boxing trainer and directed The Grape Tapes, a film about Black Grape, is the same. Too Nice Tom is another geezer who has a very inquisitive mind, and me and him could sit there all day talking and debating about all kinds of things.
I began to investigate more for myself when I started using the internet and sites like YouTube over the last few years. I only became internet friendly, or computer-literate I suppose would be the proper term for it, about four years ago. I never had a bloody computer until I was forty-five. They didn’t exist when we were kids, obviously. The first arcades had started coming out that had Space Invaders and Pac Man and that, but not home computers. Then when I was in a band for twenty years, touring the world, I never really needed a computer. When you’re in a band you have a tour manager who organizes everything for you and basically runs your life. You don’t need to be going on the internet and checking your flight times or anything. All we needed to
do was try to be in hotel reception for whatever time and a car would be there to pick us up.
I remember way back in 1995, when the first Black Grape album came out, me and Kermit had to go down to London and do a load of press interviews and stuff. That was the first time we had to do any press involving the internet. One of the things that we had to do was record one of the first podcasts. I don’t think the word podcast had even been invented then, but that’s basically what it was, an interview with some geezer that was only put out online, so I suppose it was one of the first podcasts, even if some trendy marketing genius hadn’t come up with the actual term yet. The other thing we had to do was a question-and-answer session online with some fans. Some techie guy set us up online and the first thing me and Kermit thought was, ‘Bingo, let’s talk to girls. Where are the girls?’
I first started to use the internet by myself when I got a phone that had access to the internet on it. This was probably about 2004. At first I just used it for texting. It took me a little while to get up to speed with that. I remember being on tour with the Mondays in 2006 in the States and we got stopped by the cops, just a routine check, and this cop smacked me on the hand with his truncheon because I was stood there in front of him with my phone in my hand, texting. I couldn’t believe it, the cheeky bastard. For once I knew I hadn’t even done anything wrong. But the Americans were slower than us to get on to the texting lark, so this cop didn’t even know what texting was. I said, ‘Ow, what the fuck are you doing you dick? I’m just texting!’ He just saw me with my hand in front of my pants, fiddling around with something, and he made some ridiculous remark about my ‘lewd behaviour’. Fuck knows what he thought I was up to but I got a fucking smack on the hand with a truncheon. Nice one. But I’ve learnt over the years with American cops that their interpretation of what’s going on is more important than what is actually happening. It might look to everyone else like you’re not doing anything wrong, but if the cop that’s in your face interprets it a different way, then you’d better watch out.