What Planet Am I On?
Page 5
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.
So that’s why Travis was one of the first people I wanted to meet.
I also wanted to meet scientists and experts who could give me their opinion. I love watching guys like Michio Kaku on TV. He’s an American theoretical physicist who has worked on stuff like string theory. I wanted to meet some top scientific minds and see what they had to say on the matter. I didn’t mind one bit if some of them disagreed with me or even dismissed my take on things – I just wanted to present a proper balanced look at the subject. I’m no Jeremy Paxman, but I also wanted to see if I could get some of those top scientists to say on camera what they’re afraid of saying. I do find that some of these guys will say stuff off the record that they are frightened to say on camera, as they think people will laugh at them or it might be damaging to their career, so I was keen to find out what they really thought.
Nick Pope was also top of my list. He was employed at the Ministry of Defence and worked his way up until, in 1991, he was put in charge of their ‘UFO desk’. His job was to investigate and analyse all claims of UFO sightings in this country and work out if they were a threat or not. When he got the gig, Nick was a UFO sceptic, which is probably why he got the nod in the first place. But after three years in the job, he couldn’t deny that there was something in the UFO sightings, that there was definitely something there. So he left the job and has since written several books about UFOs, warning us that ‘extraterrestrial spacecraft are visiting Earth and that something should be done about it urgently’.
I was a little bit wary about some of the people I was going to meet along the way. I think sometimes you need to question the qualifications of some of the so-called ‘experts’ that crop up on TV. A lot of them seem to be self-proclaimed specialists, especially when it comes to a subject like UFOs. Whenever I’m watching the BBC News or Sky News, I’m always sceptical when they produce some ‘specialist’ or ‘expert’. I know how it works. There will be a story about something random, could be anything . . . say there’s a story about frogs. So whoever is the researcher on duty at the TV channel that day gets told, ‘Right, we need an expert on frogs, find us one quick!’ So the researcher rings round everyone they know, trying to find someone who knows something about frogs, and they find someone who might have only seen a few frogs, but he’s read a bit about them as well, and he can do a quick bit of Googling before he comes on to refresh his memory. Then the newsreader goes, ‘Right, now over to our frog expert Joe Smith or Shaun Ryder or whatever his name is . . .’ They’re only on TV for seven seconds but it’s come up with a caption with their name and ‘Frog Expert’, so now everyone assumes they’re a fucking frog expert. Next time there’s some news story about frogs, all the channels will be going, ‘Try and get hold of that frog expert that they used last time, what was his name, Shaun Ryder or something?’ It just snowballs like that, and all of a sudden, from being a geezer who’d only seen a few frogs, he’s now officially an expert, and he goes round giving talks at frog conferences, and being flown here, there and everywhere to give his opinion on bloody frogs.
That’s how some of these ‘experts’ start out, so I always like to suss ’em out for myself. Don’t ever believe someone’s an expert just ’cos the telly tells you they are. Trust me. They haven’t gone to university and got a doctorate in frogs – they’ve bumbled into it. So let’s just say I wasn’t going to swallow everything that the UFO experts we met told me.
I didn’t want the programme to be dry, all scientists and experts, and I definitely didn’t want to be only meeting a load of oddballs with outlandish claims. I was looking for something in the middle, something serious, but I also wanted to meet people who’d had similar experiences to myself.
With that mixture of people, I was pretty sure we’d find something entertaining, but also get a little closer to the truth.
CHAPTER 5
UFO Highway, Chile
THERE WERE A few reasons I decided to start my search for UFOs in Chile. One was the fact that it seems to have been a huge hotbed of activity in recent years. Chile is the UFO capital of South America. If they haven’t seen one themselves, then most Chileans have someone in their family who has seen a UFO or has had some sort of encounter. The whole of South America seems to be pretty lively to me, to be honest, when it comes to stories like this. I’ve also seen a lot of documentaries and films about incidents that have happened right across South America, and the people there seem much more open to believing than they are back home
I remember hearing about a supposed alien skeleton that was found in the desert in Chile that caused a bit of a stir. But then it turned out to be the mummified remains of a deformed human being. I also remember that big story in Brazil in the mid-nineties, the Varginha incident, when there were quite a few spottings of a red devil-type creature, with brown skin and red eyes, that the military had allegedly captured. I’ve seen loads of stuff like that on documentaries over the years, so I knew it was pretty lively in South America and it seemed a great place to kick off.
Chile has more UFO sightings per square kilometre than almost anywhere else on the planet, and the country’s media is awash with reports of mysterious happenings in its skies. I’m sure this is partly because the night sky is so clear there. Ask anyone who’s been to Chile and they will tell you that they’ve never seen so many stars in their life.
One of the things we found out before we went is that most of the observatories in the southern hemisphere are in Chile because the sky is so clear. Even the UK, the US and Japan all have interests in observatories in Chile. Part of the reason is because we’ve mapped the northern hemisphere now, so we might as well crack on with the southern hemisphere.
The other main reason I chose Chile for the place to start my investigations is the fact that the government are so open out there. While most governments refuse to publicize UFO sightings, Chile comes at it from the totally opposite angle. They have their own government agency called CEFAA, which made me think of Ceefax every time I heard someone say it. Ceefax was a bit of a weird invention, wasn’t it? I remember when it started in the seventies and they’ve only just stopped it. Who the fuck was using it for the last couple of years? No one, probably. You’ve got to feel sorry for the people who were working on it near the end, who were probably thinking,
‘Will anyone actually ever read this?’
In English CEFAA stands for the ‘Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena’, and they’re the bods who are in charge of investigating ‘strange air phenomena’ in Chile. They’re also the only government agency in the world that is releasing hard physical evidence of UFOs. That was a big bonus for me. It’s not often you get government officials saying, ‘What’s that? You want to talk about UFOs that have been spotted in our country? Sure, come down, Shaun, we’ll show you everything that we’ve got here and talk you through the various incidents . . .’ You’re not going to get that kind of response in fucking America, are you? Or back home in Britain. Can you imagine tipping up at Area 51 and them saying, ‘Oh, you want to know the truth about the Roswell incident? Yeah, no bother, come in, follow me, we’ll show you everything that we’ve got here . . .’
Chile is a mad country really. It’s just a massive long strip, almost 3,000 miles long, stretching down the west coast of South America, sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. I flew into the capital Santiago, which is half way down the country. I’ve been to South America a few times with the Mondays and after twenty hours on a plane it always feels like I’ve arrived at the edge of the world. Our first trip was quite mental – it was in January 1990 at the height of our madness. When I think back to that trip now, it seems like it happened to a different person. But then I suppose it did, because I’m now very different to the Shaun Ryder I was then. We were playing the Maracana, the huge football stadium in Rio de Janeiro where the World Cup final will be held in 2014. Not bad for your first gig in Brazil, eh? It was part of this huge ‘Rock in Rio’ gig. A few journalists flew with us on the plane, including James Brown from NME, who later went on to start Loaded, and Piers Morgan, who was then a reporter on the Sun. Piers got his baptism into life on the road with the Mondays when he sat near to PD (Paul Davis), our keyboard player, on the plane over. PD just pulled out a big bag of coke and got stuck in there and then on the plane. Just pulled a towel over his head and snorted his little head off.
We were all in first class, and when we landed in Rio all these military-type dudes in sunglasses and dark suits got on and marched down the aisle going, ‘Where iz Happy Mondays?’ and we were all thinking ‘Fuck!’ So the band and all our crew were marched off the plane. We all thought we were going to get searched and thrown in jail, but it turned out our pal who lived in Rio and was well connected had arranged for us to be swept straight through security. Which was nice.
While we were in Rio, Piers Morgan set it up for us to go round to the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs’s house for a barbecue. He wanted to get a picture of the Mondays with the Great Train Robber for the Sun. That was Piers’s idea of great journalism. I actually really liked Ronnie Biggs – he was a top geezer and we got on well because he was a fellow Leo. We also went to some really offside club called Help, which was a crazy night and it all got pretty hairy. We were lucky to get out alive, but I’ve told that full story in my autobiography, and no UFOs were involved. It was a crazy trip but I loved it, despite the hairy moments.
I’ve only actually been to Chile once before and that was the year before, when we’d played here with the Mondays. We did some big gig in Santiago, the capital, but we were only there for a couple of days, literally just in and out, and I hardly left my hotel room. I’ve never been one for exploring or sightseeing when I’m on tour with the band. When we first started touring the world with the Mondays, years ago, my idea of sightseeing was to jib off and score. But all that’s behind me, a long time ago. Nowadays, I generally just prefer to chill out in my room. Touring is a young man’s game really – now we get some time off in between gigs I’m quite happy chilling in my room, watching a few films or documentaries. So when we’d been here in Chile the year before, I’d hardly seen anything of Santiago, apart from what I’d seen coming in from the airport, from my hotel window or from the stage. Ask any musician and that’s all they generally see on tour. I don’t think many musicians spend their day off visiting cathedrals and art galleries. They’re all too knackered. It takes it out of you, even when you’re not partying hard.
The researchers from the History channel had done their homework before we arrived and hooked us up with some of the top UFO bods in the country, so I was keen to crack on and see what we could discover.
Shaun’s X-Files
Chile is unusual in being among a number of countries that officially take UFOs seriously, so much so that in 1997 the government set up CEFAA (which is pronounced see-fa) to analyse and study all sightings of UFOs and strange air phenomena reported in the country. Once CEFAA is certain an object is truly unidentifiable, it officially releases the footage.
The agency is open about its findings and is governed by the 2008 law 20.285, known as the ‘Transparency Law’, designed so that government agencies act in an open and transparent manner. Most countries that have released UFO records have done so primarily in the area of government paper files but none have released hard physical evidence like Chile’s CEFAA. It has released a different category of ufological evidence including photos, video and extraordinary audio recordings from pilots witnessing UFOs.
We went to pay a visit to CEFAA in Chile’s Aeronautics and Space Museum in Santiago. The museum reminded me a bit of the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, although it was obviously dedicated to planes and space. It was a huge old hangar space, with some mad old planes and exhibitions on space travel. CEFAA was actually based out the back, in what was, without being rude, pretty much basically just a couple of Portakabins knocked together to create a small office. I don’t know what we were expecting, really. I suppose it was never going to be some huge command centre like you see on the Apollo missions or in that film War Games, where that kid Matthew Broderick nearly sets off World War Three by hacking into the US military computers. He’d get sent down for about 135 years if he did that in real life now. The CEFAA team were really friendly though, and welcomed the crew in and made them tea and biscuits, which was nice of them. They had a big map of Chile on the wall, with pins stuck in where there had been various UFO spottings that they were investigating.
This Chilean real life X-Files team is headed up by an ex-Air Force dude called General Ricardo Bermúdez. He and his team investigate and document any reported unidentified flying objects, and then, and this is the difference with every other country, they release their findings and make them available to the public. General Ricardo Bermúdez is a pretty friendly dude, and happy to discuss their findings face-to-face and on camera. The most important thing he says is, ‘We can say that this phenomenon is present in our controlled air space and outside it as well’, i.e. he thinks UFOs exist, according to all the official evidence that he’s seen. So, we’ve only been here twenty-four hours and we’ve already had the head of a government department telling us, on camera, that after seeing all the evidence they had, he’s sure UFOs exist. Not a bad day’s work.
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 r
eporter 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.