What Planet Am I On?

by Shaun Ryder

  After a while Miguel is mega keen to get on the road for the night’s UFO watching. He explains we must set off a few hours before sunset in order to make sure that we find a remote spot away from all light sources, ready for a night of skywatching. He tells me he wants to be sure that if we see a UFO there is no confusing it with light from human sources. He also tells me it’s going to be pretty fucking nippy up there, as we’re going up to the snowline, and as we’ll be up there most of the night we need warm clothing, torches and all sorts of other supplies. He takes himself pretty seriously, old Miguel.

  As we drive up there Miguel explains, in his quite serious way that I’m getting used to by now, that although we might want to see a UFO tonight, our best hope is to only see one at a distance because a close encounter would not be nice. I’m not quite sure what he’s on about. If you can see a UFO, then technically, that is a close encounter. For someone who is a ufologist, he seems really pretty uncomfortable with the idea of actually coming into contact with a UFO, almost as if he’s frightened of them, but that fear is like a drug that he feeds off.

  We drive further up into the canyon, up the rocky mountain roads, and I can see why we needed a 4 × 4 to get up here. There are boulders and huge potholes in the road that we have to dodge round. I’ve got a Range Rover back home in Salford, but I wouldn’t fancy bringing it up here.

  We get further and further away from civilization until we find ourselves in the flat bottom of a canyon with snowy peaks all around us. This is the location Miguel recommends for tonight. It’s a pretty incredible spot. There’s no one else around and we feel a bit small in the bottom of this huge canyon. Even the big 4 × 4s look like Matchbox cars against the looming mountains. It’s almost dark by the time we arrive and bloody freezing; it’s hard to believe that we were in the sunny square in San José de Maipo only a couple of hours ago.

  When I get out and look up at the sky, though, it’s unbelievable. I’ve gazed at the sky all my life, but I’ve never seen a sky like this. Like I said at the start of the book, one of my earliest memories as a little kid is lying on the top bunk bed in the bedroom that I shared with Our Paul and just gazing up at the sky. I’ve done it ever since. I still do it now. My clubbing days are over, so if I’m not away working and I’m at home, you’ll often find me out in the back garden at night, staring up at the sky. I’ve been round the world numerous times on tour and seen a million night skies, but I’ve never seen anything like the sky here in Chile tonight (although when you’re on tour with a rock’n’roll band you’re mostly staying in big cities). I’ve never seen so many stars.

  The sky is so clear that you can understand why there have been so many reported sightings of UFOs around this part of Chile. Within about the first ten minutes I see one of the most amazing shooting stars I’ve ever seen. It’s pretty obvious that if there is anything unusual in the sky around here you’re going to get a good look at it. After the amount of people we’ve met today who have had an encounter, it’s hard to believe we won’t see something for ourselves as the night starts to draw in. Wayne, the director, has me on an infrared camera so he can capture my reaction to anything.

  I chat to Miguel about Chile’s history with UFOs. According to him, Chile has been visited by aliens for centuries. He subscribes to the theory that contact goes back far beyond the arrival of the Conquistadors and into antiquity – a hypothesis known as paleo-contact. The people who believe in that idea reckon that primitive man’s exposure to ancient aliens influenced the development of culture and religion on Earth. Some of them reckon that the gods worshipped in modern-day faiths were in fact originally extraterrestrial. I’m not quite sure I’m with him on that, to be honest.

  He also explains a different, interesting theory on why aliens might want to visit Chile – the idea is that it is being used as some sort of intergalactic filling station because there are minerals or fuels here that aliens might be interested in or need.

  By this time we’re three hours into our night skywatch and there’s been no sign of life in the dark skies above. I’m freezing my bloody nuts off, but fortunately Jorge, one of our drivers, has brought a good supply of a Chilean herbal tea, so that warms me up a bit.

  Miguel seems to be a bit on edge and all of a sudden he points up into the sky and whispers urgently, ‘There! There’s one . . .’

  ‘Yeah, yeah . . . I saw something,’ I reply.

  There is some sort of weird light in the sky where Miguel is pointing, but it’s soon obvious that whatever the light is, unfortunately it’s not what we’re looking for. I’m starting to get the feeling Miguel is even more desperate to see a UFO than I am. Being out here at night seems to have put him on edge and, as we talk, he opens up about a UFO encounter he had a few years ago that had a deeply profound effect on him . . .

  ‘I was a UFO researcher until 2003, well, I’m still a UFO researcher, but I haven’t done so much skywatching since an incident I had in 2003. I was with another twelve or thirteen people and I had an incident of missing time.’

  ‘Missing time’ is a regular feature of UFO encounters when people realize that they are missing an hour or two or three or more, and they can’t account for it.

  ‘From that time, I don’t take people to skywatch,’ says Miguel, ‘because I feel responsible for what happens.’

  Poor Miguel seemed to be going under a bit.

  ‘We had one or two hours’ missing time,’ explains Miguel. ‘Most of us could not remember what happened, which is a problem. You ask yourself “What happened there?” The questions remain and you think “Maybe I will remember one day in the future.” There is a risk you take when you enter into this phenomena research. But if you are a researcher you are obligated to. For me this is not a job. But I feel responsible for things that could happen to people who are with me.’

  It’s now the middle of the night and it’s freezing. Wayne the director tells us that he once made a film about Eskimos and had to live with them for months. He would sleep in clothes made of reindeer skins at night, because that’s the warmest thing you can wear, even warmer than the latest mountaineering gear. He also says they had to eat reindeer every night. I’m not sure I’d be up for that.

  It is proper brass monkeys now. I feel like I have no testicles. So I decide to call it a night. It might be a UFO hotspot, but I’m just not feeling the vibe tonight. I don’t think we’re going to see anything. Yet, even though the night might not be lit up with alien spacecraft, standing gazing at the southern skies up here in the Andes still feels like a real privilege . . .

  Miguel gets even more desperate when we say we’re off home . . . we’re miles from anywhere and we’ve got at least a three-hour drive back to Santiago, through the night, before we can finally get some shuteye. The whole crew has accepted that we aren’t going to see anything tonight, but Miguel still seems on edge. Maybe he’s always like this or maybe he feels responsible because he is here as the expert UFO hunter and we haven’t seen anything, I don’t know, but it’s not as if you can wish a UFO into existence, is it? Either there is something there in the sky the night you’re out there or there isn’t, and all of us accepted that there wasn’t anything there apart from Miguel.

  Shaun’s X-Files

  On 31 January 1998 people all over Santiago observed several humanoid figures descending from the sky to hover above the city. The figures seemed to come down like paratroopers would before opening their parachutes, but then some floated in the same position, some moved in a horizontal direction and some even moved back upwards. None of the figures opened a parachute to stop their fall, but their movements defied gravity. Captured on video by various witnesses, the case caught the imagination of the country and to this day it remains unexplained.

  Back in Santiago the next morning, we are off to investigate one of Chile’s most bizarre UFO incidents, which happened in the skies over the capital itself on 31 January 1998.

  I’d arranged to meet Rodrigo Fuenzalida, director of
Chile’s leading civilian UFO group, AION, who had agreed to take me to one of the key locations relating to the incident, on the outskirts of Santiago, and talk me through the footage. Rodrigo looks a bit like a Chilean ufologist’s answer to Indiana Jones. He has an Indiana Jones-type hat and a kind of safari jacket, and he takes himself quite seriously. We are following Rodrigo in his jeep and he has trouble finding the place at first, which wasn’t promising. When we get there, he points in the sky to where the incident happened and then starts showing me footage on his laptop, but I can’t see a thing, so we go back to his motor, out of the sun, and watch it in there. When I can see it, I can’t believe my eyes. It’s bonkers. One of the strangest, most mysterious things I’ve ever seen in my life.

  The best way I can describe it is like a Star Wars stormtrooper, stood on a pogo stick, under a woman’s hairdryer, descending out of the sky. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what it looks like to me. It must have been absolutely mental to have seen it with your own eyes when it happened.

  I watch it again and again with Rodrigo, and every time I watch it, it just seems even more unexplainable. ‘It really does look like they’re dressed in Star Wars gear, like a Star Wars stormtrooper,’ I tell Rodrigo, and he laughs and agrees.

  ‘Yes, Star Wars in Chile!’

  ‘Can you imagine being stood here,’ I ask him, ‘and seeing this thing coming down out of the sky looking like a Star Wars stormtrooper on a pogo stick? It must have looked like Darth Vader was going to come down out of the sky.’

  I really haven’t seen anything like it before in my life. We’ve all seen plenty of pics and footage of UFOs, or alleged UFOs, but I’ve never seen anything remotely like this stormtrooper tackle. It reminds me a bit of the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, when that dude in a spaceship and a jet pack flew into the stadium. Every kid who watched that thought they would have one by the time they grew up but it never happened, did it? Bit like those hoverboards from Back to the Future II – where are they? It was 2015 in the film when all the kids were knocking about on hoverboards, so presumably they’ll be about in time for next Christmas.

  One of the reasons this case is unusual is the sheer number of witnesses, and their accounts are intriguing. Some motorists reported seeing some of the figures vanishing into the clouds, whilst those on the ground described other figures disappearing down into the city, never to be seen again. All very mysterious.

  It’s a very famous case in Chile and Rodrigo said there was a public poll done, and 70 per cent of the Chileans thought that whatever was captured on camera was extraterrestrial.

  We later checked with CEFAA, and Eugenio Ford, the guy there who was in charge of looking into the case for the government, said he eventually came to the conclusion that ‘They were UFOs; unidentified flying objects.’

  Shaun’s X-Files

  There are other similar cases to this in Chile, but they are just the tip of this very weird iceberg – this is a truly global phenomenon. There’re plenty of reports on the internet of strange humanoid figures descending from the sky. In the last ten years alone sightings have been made in Mexico, India and the USA, to name but a few. Some reports are more credible than others, but the Santiago case is right at the top of the peculiar pile . . .

  Of all of the things I’ve seen so far in Chile, this case is perhaps the most baffling. I know what it looks like to me, but it just defies conventional explanation. It’s a mad one.

  I do feel reassured, though, that Chile has been the perfect place to come and begin my search.

  CHAPTER 7

  Giant Alien in the Desert

  ON OUR THIRD day in Chile we are off to the Atacama Desert, which is the driest desert in the world. We are headed right to the north of Chile, so we have to fly up there. We had to get up at bloody 4.30 a.m. to get to the airport, which was a bit rough. The flight is at 7.30 a.m. so it seems a bit excessive to have to check in three hours before an internal flight, but when you’re filming you’ve got all the cameras and sound equipment and stuff so you have to check in early. We’d never do that on tour. The crew would go on ahead of us with all the gear, and then the band would arrive later.

  We are flying with Sky Airlines, one of the Chilean airlines, but nothing to do with Sky TV or Rupert Murdoch. It is a pretty small plane, and the guy in a suit in front of me puts his seat right back as soon as we take off, and he might as well have been sitting on my knee. I hate people like that. They give us a bit of a comedy breakfast, this bit of square omelette, but it actually tastes all right.

  We land in Iquique and as soon as we walk out of the airport we are besieged by a scrum of locals offering us taxis. I’ve never seen a taxi scrum quite so on top. It’s much worse than when we landed at Santiago. It’s like the old footage you see of the Beatles arriving at an airport. As soon as we get through the scrum and I step outside for a snout, the heat hits me. It isn’t necessarily that much hotter than Santiago, but because it’s so dry the heat is much more intense. The airport is literally surrounded by desert on three sides and the ocean on one. You step out of the door of arrivals and it’s just sand, leading up to the mountain that overlooks the airport.

  We hire a 4 × 4 and set off into town. It’s a half-hour drive along the coast, but a pretty desolate drive, just sand and mountains on the right and the ocean on the left, with the odd shack and the occasional little shrine, which the driver says are for people who have died. We check into the hotel, which is right on the seafront in Iquique. Only problem is there’s a sign outside the hotel that says ‘Warning – tsunami area’. Now I’m no expert on tsunamis, but our hotel is only three storeys high, which I’m not sure would give you much protection from a tsunami. At least I’m on the third floor.

  The first thing we are off to investigate in the desert is a geoglyph called the Atacama Giant. A geoglyph is a large design on the ground, which can be made from stones or sometimes carved into the earth. The most famous ones in the world are the Nazca Lines in Peru, but we also have some back home, including a few ones of white horses or men with big dicks on the sides of hills. Some people believe some geoglyphs were made by aliens – I’m not sure I believe that, but they’re definitely a weird phenomenon. Even though I’m fascinated by things like geoglyphs, I don’t put it all down to weird phenomena . . . sometimes I think we just really underestimate how intelligent people were years ago. We tend to think that until quite recent times people were pretty Neanderthal and not capable of thinking outside the box or further than their next meal or their next fuck. I don’t underestimate people like that.

  There are more geoglyphs in the Atacama Desert than anywhere else in the world – more than 5,000. Most of them are of animals and humans, but the most famous one, the Atacama Giant, is a massive humanoid, alien-type figure, and that’s the one we’re off to check out.

  We’ve arranged to meet up with a geezer called Nicolás Berasain at the hotel. He’s an astronautics researcher, the founder of Exopolitics Chile, which looks at the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and a bit of a self-styled expert on the Atacama Giant. He’s going to come with us to see the Giant and share his theories on it. Apparently it’s a fair old drive through the desert to get to the Giant, about four hours.

  Iquique is a pretty small town and within ten minutes of setting off, the road is climbing up the steep mountainside over the town, towards the desert. It’s so steep that there are loads of crazy dudes jumping off the top and just paragliding straight over the town and landing in the sea, which is pretty mad to watch. Reminds me of when Tony Wilson tried paragliding for Granada Reports back in the seventies, although these dudes know what they’re doing.

  We stop off briefly on the way to the Giant to have a butcher’s at a ghost town called Humberstone. They used to mine a lot of sodium nitrate here a hundred years ago, what they called ‘white gold’. Even though it’s in the middle of the driest desert in the world, Humberstone had its own swimming pool converted fr
om the hull of a ship, an opera house and everything. Then someone in Europe invented a synthetic nitrate so no one was arsed about buying it from Humberstone or the other Atacama mines any more, and they closed the town almost overnight in the 1950s. The town has just lain deserted ever since, for sixty years, and it’s pretty spooky, as you’d imagine.

  After that we head on across the desert. I’ve never been in a proper desert like this before, just miles and miles of nothingness as far as you can see. The closest I’ve been is when I went to stay up in the Rif Mountains in northern Morocco, after the Mondays split for the first time and before I started Black Grape. I was with the singer Donovan’s daughter at the time, Oriole, and her family had links with Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Donovan’s wife Linda had previously had a kid with Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones, and he’d recorded an album called Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka with Bachir’s father, Hadj Abdesalam Attar, in 1968, when he was leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka. We got properly looked after when we went there – Bachir even sent his Mercedes to pick us up from Marrakech. It was proper bandit country, though. We were stopped on the way by the Army and police on the roadblocks, who took all our details, just in case we didn’t come back. We stayed in Bachir’s house, which was a sort of complex with high walls, a bit like the gaff where they eventually found Osama bin Laden. We stayed there for three weeks in the end. It was great. We just got stoned and listened to music, and made a little bit of music with them.

  That’s where all the hash in Morocco is grown anyway. It reminded me of The Man Who Would Be King, that film starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery as two rogue officers who set off from British India in search of adventure and end up becoming kings of Kafiristan.

  Anyway, that trip to Morocco was the closest I’ve been to proper desert before, but the Atacama Desert is a different ball game. This is proper desert, no messing. There aren’t many signs of life anywhere – it’s a pretty alien place, just miles and miles of nothing but arid dust and rocks – and in a weird way it makes you feel like there’s more chance of finding signs of extraterrestrial life than human life out here.