by Shaun Ryder
Anyway, old Hendrix reckoned he had been a full-on, full-blooded American Indian in a past life. He also said he experienced astral travel in adulthood. Some of his best-known songs were about space and aliens and their impact on Earth. The oddest incident happened when he was filming his Rainbow Bridge gig in 1970 at the Haleakala Crater on the island of Maui, which even sounds like the right place for a UFO encounter. The crew were trekking through the crater with a load of donkeys carrying all the gear when they suddenly saw a silver disc hovering in the clear sky. Guitarist Merrell Fankhauser said, ‘Jimi walked out on the cinder field of an 800 year old lava flow with open arms saying, “Welcome, space brothers!”’
This next bit made me laugh. Fankhauser described how everyone was stunned at seeing the UFO except a film producer who’d been at the whisky and was waddling along on the back of a donkey. He couldn’t see a thing and told them all that they were crazy. ‘The producer became so upset when people kept pointing to the glowing orb that he fell off the donkey, injured his back, and had to be airlifted by helicopter.’
Another musician, Curtis Knight, said Jimi told him that ‘the craft had come down to put its spiritual stamp of approval on the show. He also said that he’d been emotionally and physically recharged by the experience.’
Reg Presley, the lead singer of the Troggs who sang ‘Wild Thing’, was another one who was bang into UFOs and space. In the mid-1990s, he even had his own TV show called The Reg Presley UFO Show and a few years later he published a book about UFOs and phenomena called Things They Don’t Tell Us.
Like I said earlier, David Bowie was the main pop star obsessed by space and UFOs when I was a kid. I didn’t know this at the time, but Bowie had been into UFOs ever since he was a kid, and when he was a teenager he even co-edited a flying-saucer newsletter. In an interview with the old magazine Creem in the sixties he told them, ‘I made sightings six, seven times a night for about a year . . . We had regular cruises that came over. We knew the 6.15 was coming in and would meet up with another one. And they would be stationary for about half an hour, and then after verifying what they’d been doing that day, they’d shoot off.’
He also gave his thoughts on how the mainstream media handled UFOs, claiming that the way they angled the stories involved so much manipulation that readers would be forced to dismiss any possibility that there was any truth behind them: ‘You hit them with the various code words and they’re not going to believe anything if you don’t want them to’.
Like most people of his age, Bowie was bang into Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released in 1968 between the disaster of Apollo 1 and the success of Apollo 7. Everyone was into 2001 when it came out – it was a great film. Bowie even used a twist on the title of Space Odyssey for his 1969 song ‘Space Oddity’. I only found out during our research for this project that Bowie was partly inspired by the first colour photos of Earth from outer space when he was writing the lyrics to ‘Space Oddity’. Astronaut William Anders took a photo of Earth from Apollo 8, in December 1968, as it came back from the dark side of the moon. Most of the newspapers printed the picture and obviously it was a big fucking deal. I was a bit too young to appreciate it fully at the time, but I can imagine now how mind-blowing it must have been. My generation onwards have all grown up seeing amazing pictures of the Earth, but imagine if you were my nana and you’d lived most of your life without really knowing what Earth, the planet that you lived on, actually looked like until one day someone goes, ‘Here y’are, check this out, this is what Earth looks like in colour.’
It must have done people’s heads in a bit.
Anyway, that’s what Bowie’s on about in ‘Space Oddity’ when he sings about Planet Earth being blue. He was looking at those first colour photos of Earth and imagining what it would be like to be a lone spaceman up there on your Jack Jones, just looking back at Earth.
‘Space Oddity’ came out just before the moon landings, and the BBC played it over footage of the moon landings. Which is a bit of an odd decision if you ask me, considering the opening lyrics are about it all going tits up in space for Major Tom. If Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin’s families lived in the UK at the time and were watching the BBC coverage, I bet they would have thought, ‘Leave it out, mate, we’re fucking worried enough about them getting back as it is!’
Bowie didn’t complain though. ‘Space Oddity’ went on to go top five, and then it went to Number One when it was rereleased in the mid-seventies. It’s still his biggest selling single in Britain. Apparently Tony Visconti refused to produce the single because he felt it was too much of a commercial gimmick. I bet he regrets that. As commercial gimmicks go, it wasn’t a bad one, you know what I mean? Any band today would give it’s fucking right arm for a commercial gimmick like that. I’ve never agreed with arguments about ‘keeping it real’. It’s pop music, mate. It’s called pop because it’s popular. The aim is to sell records. Or it used to be, before the internet.
Bowie has always been fascinated by space and space travel. One of my first clear memories of Top of the Pops was Bowie doing ‘Starman’ as Ziggy Stardust in 1972 with his electric blue guitar. Have you seen how skinny Bowie looks in that all-in-one leotard number? Fucking hell. He looks like if he turned sideways he’d disappear. But get on this, it turns out that the suit was padded. He looks like he’s wasting away, the skinniest man alive, and he’s wearing a fucking PADDED SUIT!
He also had another extraterrestrial single in 1973, ‘Life on Mars’ from Hunky Dory, and Major Tom cropped up again in ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and even a couple of decades later in ‘Hello Spaceboy’.
Back in 1976 Bowie starred in The Man Who Fell to Earth which, even if you didn’t like Bowie, was a great film. It probably had more influence on me in fashion than music at the time. Bowie had this big duffel coat and a wedged centre parting, like a mushroom centre parting. It had a big effect on what became terrace fashion.
Bowie had a huge influence on Manchester in the late seventies. When I first started going out in Manchester, there was a nightclub called Pips, which was one of our favourite hangouts. It had eleven bars spread across nine different rooms, including a Roxy Music and David Bowie room. We used to spend all our time hanging out in there because that’s where all the coolest dudes hung out. A lot of the Roxy and Bowie fans would get all dressed up to go down to Pips, but we never did; we were more on the original Perry Boy vibe by then. The Perry Boys were heavily influenced by football terrace culture. In Manchester they later became known as Pure Boys and then just Boys. All that culture later led into what the press dubbed Madchester. The first time it was covered in the national press was when i-D magazine came up and did a piece in 1987 and called us ‘Baldricks’ because they reckoned we had haircuts like Baldrick from Blackadder. But no one in Manchester called themselves a Baldrick.
There was a story just recently about how David Bowie was offered big money to make a live comeback after his latest album, The Next Day, came out, but he was a bit reluctant because he was nervous about returning to the stage after so long. I remember that he once said that he originally created his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, to deal with nerves on stage. We found this quote when we were working on this book: ‘I’m not particularly a gregarious person. I had an unbearable shyness; it was much easier for me to keep on with the Ziggy thing off stage as well as on. Who was David Bowie and who was Ziggy Stardust? It was motivated by shyness.’
I’m totally with him on that. That’s one of the reasons I got Bez on stage, because I never wanted to be the centre of attention. Bez was my Ziggy Stardust, in a way.
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.
CHAPTER 4
Making History
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 recent
ly 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.