What Planet Am I On?

by Shaun Ryder

  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.

  Commander Perry was actually flying himself during the event and describes the day to me. He says he was flying ‘about 350 knots an hour’. I thought knots were how they measured how fast boats were travelling, not planes, but anyway, that’s about the same as 400 miles an hour. Now that means if this object was travelling at eighteen times the speed of the planes, it was going at least 7,000 miles an hour.

  CEFAA have a pretty rigorous way of looking through all the videos and information they receive. They don’t just sit there watching clips and going, ‘Wow, check this out!’ They have all sorts of tests, and 95 per cent of the stuff they receive they clarify in some way or just discard. They either work out what it is and have a logical explanation for it, or they can tell it’s bollocks. It’s the other 5 per cent that interests them. And me.

  Of the seven videos captured that day, so far only one has been officially released by CEFAA. In it the suspicious object passes through the frame several times as military jets take part in the air show.

  Commander Perry takes me to the exact spot where the video was shot, and it’s easy to recognize it from the video. He repeats that neither he nor the other pilots saw anything unusual on the day, but he’s obviously fascinated by what showed up on the film. I ask him what he thinks it is, and he says: ‘It’s nothing military or civilian . . . it’s not a bird . . . so maybe it is not of this planet.’

  He seems a pretty stand-up dude and he’s obviously well-respected in the Air Force, so it’s good to hear that coming from him. He then tells me about another film from that day that they’ve only just discovered, which is music to my ears. It was shot by one of the Air Force guys, but he’s only just realized that he caught the UFO on there. Not only has it never been seen in public before, even CEFAA don’t know it exists.

  We all pile into the base’s command centre, and they show us the footage on a big screen. Commander Perry talks us through it. There’s only a brief glimpse of the object on the film, but I’m sure it’s the same UFO as the one on the original El Bosque video. It’s more than I expected to find on my first proper day UFO hunting in Chile, and I’m pretty blown away by how helpful everyone has been. You’d never get this reception at a military base back home. Commander Perry even arranges for me to get a copy of the footage to take away with me. My first day and I’ve come away with some UFO footage that even the government hasn’t seen yet. It bodes pretty well for the rest of my trip.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Andes and the Stormtroopers

  THE NEXT MORNING, we’re heading east out of Santiago to a place called Cajón del Maipo, which is one of Chile’s UFO zonas calientes or ‘hot zones’. It’s a pretty beautiful area – there’s a huge canyon at the bottom of the Andes, with various rivers running through it, so there’s a lot of trekking and rock climbing, and it’s always been big with tourists from home and abroad. But a lot of the locals are convinced that there are also visitors coming here from much further afield – other star systems – which is why I’m off to take a look for myself.

  Cajón del Maipo is a bit like the Lake District, but more extreme. Not long after we got out of Santiago the scenery changed and became a lot greener, much greener than I’d expect Chile to be. Then as we start climbing higher it gets rockier. The landscape seems to change every fifteen minutes. It’s still beautiful though, with ravines, rivers and all sorts. We are in two 4 × 4s with two local drivers, Pancho (who is also one of our cameramen) and Jorge, and they tell me how it’s an amazing place for rock climbing, which they are both bang into. Pancho travels all over the world to do his climbing, and shows us some pictures of some of the crazy cliffs and rocks he’s climbed in Arizona and other places. He even takes part in climbs that take over twenty-four hours, when he has to sleep in one of those tents that you just hang off the side of a cliff. Mad bastard. His mate Jorge also used to work here in Cajón del Maipo, looking after part of the land, so he knows it very well. In my experience a lot of people who are into extreme sports can often be dicks, but Pancho and Jorge are cool dudes, and it’s good to have them on board.

  Shaun’s X-Files

  The Andes is the longest mountain range in the world, stretching 4,300 miles through seven countries. Formed 138 million years ago when the South American and Nazca tectonic plates smashed together, they rise to a height of almost 7,000 metres and are home to scenery as brutal as it is beautiful. Not only that, they play host to some of the clearest skies anywhere on the planet – perfect for spotting any extraterrestrial visitors.

  We are heading to San José de Maipo, a small town high up in the valley, where the production team has arranged for me to meet ufologist Miguel Jordan. He’s been coming here looking for UFOs since the early nineties and he’s had a few experiences himself, so I am keen to see what he has in store for me. I meet him in the town square and I can tell straightaway that he takes the business of UFOs pretty seriously. He knows the area well and explains to me that more than 40 per cent of the locals in the area have seen UFOs. Which seems pretty high to me. We decide to get chatting to a few of the locals in the town square and find out if many of them have had per
sonal encounters, and then after that drive further up in the mountains to spend the night UFO watching.

  In 2002, the Mayor of San José de Maipo declared it a UFO-tourism zone after he and so many other locals made sightings – although I suppose a cynic might say that’s just a way to build tourism, isn’t it?

  It was a pretty sunny afternoon and there were people sat around the square on benches and people having a bite to eat, so I thought I’d go and test out what Miguel’s been saying about the high number of sightings.

  Miguel is pretty confident but the first family hasn’t seen one, so we move on. The second guy we speak to is an old fella who worked for forty-three years in a hydroelectric power station up in the hills nearby. Forty-three years! You get less for murder. The old dude reckons that UFOs were ‘always showing up there’. He says his colleagues saw them as well, many times over the years, and he describes them as moving lights, similar to what I saw when I had my first encounter. I can’t speak Spanish for toffee, but when me and the old guy are explaining our encounters to each other, we almost don’t need Miguel to translate. We’re on the same wavelength.

  Everyone that we speak to in the square seems pretty friendly, even those who are not interested in UFOs or don’t want to be on camera. If I tried the same thing with a camera crew wandering down Deansgate in Manchester, asking people if they had seen a UFO, I’d get some pretty strange reactions from people. I wonder if the openness here is down to what they’ve witnessed or something more fundamental.