by Shaun Ryder
‘I saw his face – he was worried – and he said, “Can you see here? Look here. You have cancer” . . . I couldn’t believe it and I went home. And suddenly I found them in the radio. They told me, come here . . . maybe there is still time; and I went.’
Given just a matter of years to live, Ernesto decided to make the long 1,000-mile journey to southern Chile where he says he was met by the Friendship people. He fell asleep and was taken by boat to an island with just fourteen inhabitants and, he claims, buildings containing mysterious air-locked rooms. They gave him a secret treatment, which he says eradicated his cancer, although he never sought out official medical confirmation that he had been cured. ‘I was coward enough not to ask. If I had cancer I would be dead by now.’
Almost thirty years later he’s still alive and he believes that the treatment he received on that fateful trip in 1985 saved his life. He may not know where Friendship Island is but he carries a lasting memory of the people he met there.
‘What I know is what they call the Friendship people, fourteen of them, don’t get old. I believe the Friendship people are still on the island . . .’
Ernesto’s story is pretty outlandish, but not knowing exactly where the island is hasn’t stopped him and others thinking the Friendship community is still active. Sergio himself believes it’s only a matter of time before we hear from them again.
To be honest, I’m struggling to accept all this. I really would love this to be true, to be real, and to believe that there’s an island full of sophisticated, intelligent people who can cure cancer and are in relationships with aliens but I’m just not having it. Whatever the truth is about the Friendship case, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with UFOs.
I came to Chile looking for facts and confirmation behind the country’s alien cases, but stuff like the Friendship case just feels more like a science-fiction story. We decide we need a bit more science-based investigation to get my UFO hunt back on track, so we decide to meet astronomer Lars-Åke Nyman to do just that. I feel like I’m going from one extreme to the other – from someone who believes a half-human half-alien race is living on a secret island to a top scientific bod who won’t believe a thing unless he’s got cold, hard evidence.
Shaun’s X-Files
There are scientific reasons why extraterrestrials could be attracted to Chile. It’s the best place in the world for communicating with distant galaxies, which is why it is home to most of the observatories in the southern hemisphere. ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array) is the largest astronomical project in the world, a joint project between the US, Japan and Europe, which was completed in 2013. ALMA is a revolutionary instrument in its scientific concept and engineering design, and as a global scientific project. The huge listening device is located in the thin, dry air of northern Chile’s Atacama Desert at an altitude of 5,000 metres above sea level. Made up of sixty-six high-precision antennae, it is opening a new window on the universe and allowing scientists to unravel important, longstanding astronomical mysteries.
Like I said earlier, Chile is one of the top places in the southern hemisphere for astronomers. Lars works on the ALMA project, the most recent in a long line of pioneering telescopes that have been built high in the Atacama Desert to take advantage of the clearest skies anywhere on Earth. As the largest astronomical project currently in existence, ALMA will allow unparalleled views of the cosmos. So there’s one question I’m dying to ask Lars. Is there any chance his telescopes can detect life out there?
‘Well, telescopes can maybe detect the building blocks of life, and then if they ever become sensitive enough to look at the atmosphere around planets in other solar systems, if we could detect water or oxygen or ozone, we would be able to tell if other life forms could exist on those planets, or at least it would give us an indication that there was a possibility for life.’
Shaun’s X-Files
We can’t see other planets outside our solar system yet, but there are other sophisticated ways of detecting them – and so far almost 3,000 have been found. This, however, is believed to be just a drop in the ocean. In 2012, NASA’s Kepler satellite predicted our galaxy alone contains at least seventeen billion Earth-sized planets. If just a fraction of these support life, the implications are mind-blowing.
I, personally, think the universe is teeming with life. So, I put this to Lars. ‘Given how many planets are out there, shouldn’t life be pretty common?’
‘That’s right. But so far we haven’t found life. We have sent some rovers and vehicles to Mars and tried. So far astronomers have detected more than 140 different types of molecules and some of them are quite complex, including sugars.’
Sugar? ‘What has sugar got to do with it?’ I ask Lars.
‘Sugar is one of the building blocks of life. So it’s interesting to find out that it is already out there in space, inside molecular clouds.’
‘Do you believe that anyone is travelling between the stars?’ I ask Lars. ‘Do you think there are UFOs out there?’
‘Personally, I don’t think so. The distances between the stars are very, very large. Our nearest star is four light years away, so it takes light four years to travel here, so even if we could one day travel at the speed of light, it would take us a very long time to reach the nearest stars and stars beyond that.’
This is the thing that gets me, though – I reckon that scientists like Lars still think in terms of human technology. ‘Can’t we just open the fabric of time and space and, you know, just pop through it?’
‘So far we have no indication that we can do those things,’ he replies.
‘But something like the craft that I saw when I was a teenager, that was defying the laws of gravity and zooming across the sky at 10,000 miles an hour, obviously had technology that was millions of years ahead of us. Surely they might be able to open up the fabric and step through?’
‘This is speculation. But you don’t know. I’ve spent twenty years standing on top of mountains looking at the sky and I’ve never seen anything I couldn’t explain.’
‘You should have come to Salford in the seventies, mate!’ I tell him. Before I leave Lars, I ask him what his ultimate gut feeling is about life out there.
‘I find it hard to believe that we would be the only unique life form in the universe . . . so many planets have been discovered, and molecules, that I think it is very likely that we will eventually find life on other planets.’
Lars has dedicated his life to studying the universe so it’s great to hear him confirming that the probability of extraterrestrial life is so high. All right, so we might disagree on a few cosmic principles, but I feel my trip is back on track, and I think I’m miles better off concentrating on investigating what is happening in the skies above Chile, rather than searching for some secret island.
For my final trip in Chile, I decide I want to investigate another one of the country’s top UFO hotspots in the hope that I can see something else mind-blowing before we head home. We have assembled a bit of a crack team to help us, including Antonio Huneeus and a research party from Chile’s leading civilian UFO group, organized by Rodrigo Fuenzalida. We’re driving in convoy south from Santiago to Colbún Lake, one of the well-known zonas calientes (UFO hotspots). Hopefully we’re in good hands for my last throw of the intergalactic dice.
Rodrigo and his team are super keen, and they seem to have tipped off people about our mission. When we reach the zonas calientes, Rodrigo wants us to stop at a small UFO-themed roadside café (more of a shack really) and the guy who owns it, who seems to be some pal of Rodrigo, has laid on a spread to welcome me on this UFO mission. It’s all a bit weird, it looks like the kind of spread you would put on for a kids’ party, but in a small roadside UFO-themed shack, all to welcome me on my UFO hunt. I’ve got to say it’s one of the weirdest receptions I’ve ever had. We can’t stop long, though, as Wayne the director wants to get to Colbún Lake before sunset to make sure we’re all set up for our big night of s
tarwatching.
It’s pretty stunning. Colbún’s like a bigger, grander version of the Lake District, and there’s a top sunset going down. The lake is actually the largest artificial reservoir in Chile, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it was manmade just by looking at it. Rodrigo and Antonio tell me there has been a lot of UFO activity here and the locals partly put it down to the big power plant on the other side of the lake . . . they think the aliens are coming down and swiping power from the plant. They call them ‘Light Stealers’. I’m not sure about this. If aliens have got the advanced technology and power to travel the galaxy and visit Earth, it seems pretty unlikely that once they’re here they’ll need to nick a bit of electricity to make sure they’ve got enough to get home. They probably don’t even use electricity – wouldn’t they have a more advanced energy?
Rodrigo tells me how his own team saw some UFOs in this exact spot, four years ago. They saw one hovering above the trees by the lodges where we are staying, and it was so low that it even burnt the top of the trees. Considering all the UFO sightings that have been reported here, it’s difficult to believe we won’t see something in the skies this evening.
Rodrigo’s team moves in to set up the monitoring equipment and cameras in the hope that they will record any unusual activity in the night sky while we’re kipping. His team all seem super keen, and I get the feeling that Rodrigo enjoys being in charge. They all take themselves pretty seriously. As the sun sets, I have a beer while they get organized, and it seems that all that’s left for us to do is wait.
However, we then find out there is a major problem. Despite the fact that they take themselves so seriously, Chile’s leading civilian UFO group have left a crucial bit of the kit back in Santiago. Which is really annoying. I was pretty excited about what we might capture on camera tonight. I thought we would get up in the morning and have nine hours of footage to go through. Instead, we’re going to have nine hours of sweet Fanny Adams. I’ve come all this way and someone forgets a bit of kit. There’s some debate about whether we can get someone to drive down from Santiago with the missing bit of kit, but it’s a five-hour journey. The group phone round to see if anyone nearby will be able to help us, but we’re in the middle of bloody nowhere and it’s not the sort of thing a corner shop in the middle of bloody nowhere will stock, you know what I mean? With the equipment not working, the night feels like a dead loss – a pointless 250-mile trip to the middle of nowhere.
But just then, when we’re all on a downer and on the verge of packing up and heading back to Santiago, I’m called over to look at a photo that Pancho, one of the film crew, has just taken of the night sky above us. Nothing could prepare me for what I’m about to see.
He’s taken the picture on a long exposure and you can definitely see something come almost directly straight down, then shoot off at a right angle. Pancho has been taking pictures of the night sky in Chile for years, and as a rock climber he has been all over the world and he always takes pictures of the night sky when he is on his trips, but he says he has never seen anything like it. For me, it’s definitely a UFO.
‘Let’s put it really simply,’ I say.
‘It’s Unidentified . . .
‘It’s Flying . . .
‘It’s an Object . . .
‘That makes it a fucking UFO, doesn’t it?’
‘I think it’s a UFO too,’ says Pancho, which surprises me a bit because I’ve had a slight vibe from Pancho all the while he’s been with us that he has been taking everything with a pinch of salt.
Even my manager Warren, who is a total sceptic, is visibly shaken and believes it’s a UFO. I’m made up that we’ve captured this on camera. This is more than I could have hoped for from this trip – proof of an actual UFO. We check the camera to rule out a damaged lens, and it’s fine.
To me, what we captured on camera tonight is another sign that life exists out there in the universe. I know many people remain sceptical about UFOs, but we once thought the Earth was flat; perhaps it’ll take a similar sea-change in our collective consciousness for humans to accept that we’re not alone.
CHAPTER 9
The World’s Most Famous Alien Abductee
BACK FROM CHILE, I now wanted to take a look at our opinion and reaction to UFO stories at home. I decided I wanted to take a closer look at some of the UK’s most famous and infamous UFO cases from over the years. I was interested to find out a bit more about them, and meet the people involved, and see how it had affected them.
The press can be quite sensationalist when it comes to reporting UFOs. Unlike in South America or other parts of the world that are more open-minded, in the UK sightings are often treated with scepticism. Depending on what sort of person you are, any encounter can knock you for six, and if you find yourself in the media spotlight it must make it even harder to deal with. It can’t help, when you’re trying to make sense of what’s happened to you, to have all sorts of people questioning your account. I wanted to learn a bit more about some of the UK’s best-known UFO stories, and also to see how the witnesses have coped.
To help me out on this UFO road trip across Britain, I’ve enlisted America’s most famous abductee, Travis Walton. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve followed Travis’s incredible story for years so when we started work on the TV show, Travis was one of the first names on my team sheet of people that I wanted involved in the programme. When our researchers got in touch with him, he said he was happy to come over to the UK and get involved in the show. So I’m really looking forward to going on a UFO road trip with him.
Travis’s extraordinary account provoked a media storm back in 1975. On 5 November, as I said, he was working with a logging crew in a remote corner of Arizona, but this is what happened that night. On the way home they saw a bright light behind a hill and when they drove closer they saw a large, silvery disc hovering above a clearing and shining brightly. It was around eight feet high and twenty feet across. They stopped the truck and Travis decided to get out and take a closer look. As he approached the spacecraft, the others saw a beam of blue-green light coming from the disc and ‘strike’ him. They shit themselves and sped off into the night. But after driving for a while, they realized they couldn’t leave Travis and went back for him. There was no sign of Travis or the flying saucer.
The logging crew drove back into town and reported the incident to the Deputy Sheriff, who said they were all distraught when they told him what had happened. The whole town searched for Travis for days and, when news got out about what had happened, news teams and UFO researchers all turned up. Then five days later, Travis reappeared a few miles from where he was allegedly taken, and described coming face-to-face with alien beings aboard some kind of craft.
The fact that both he and other members of the crew have passed numerous polygraph tests over the years makes this, without doubt, the most believable incident I’ve ever come across.
Travis has spent his life sharing his ordeal with others who claim to have had similar experiences. He only very rarely comes to the UK, and I feel his wealth of knowledge on this trip is going to prove invaluable.
Travis meets me in a recording studio in Manchester called Blueprint Studios, where I am just finishing work on a recording. It’s actually in Salford, and everyone from Timbaland to REM has recorded there.
As soon as I meet Travis, I like him, straightaway. I think he’s a totally straight-up dude, just a normal regular guy. He’s not an egomaniac. He doesn’t have this desperation for publicity that a lot of people that I come across do. I’m starting to see that there are some people in the UFO game that have egos as big as people in the music game. It’s weird the effect that the slightest bit of attention has on some people – it’s like a drug, they just want more and more. I’ve never been like that, I’ve never craved the attention. I know it sounds weird for the frontman of a band to say, but I’ve never been completely comfortable being at the centre of things. As I’ve said, that was one of the main reasons I first got Bez
up on stage with Happy Mondays, all those years ago, to deflect the focus from me.
Travis seems a bit similar in a way. It’s like he’s accepted that there is always going to be interest in his case and what had happened to him, but he doesn’t exactly crave the attention or get a buzz off it. He’s a breath of fresh air, really. He comes across as totally genuine. You can tell he’s gone through some really traumatic experience. In some of his interviews back in the seventies, shortly after the incident happened, he looks shell-shocked. He looks like he’s got post-traumatic stress disorder, like a young soldier who has just come back from Vietnam or Northern Ireland. One look at him in those early interviews and you can tell he’s been through a terrifying experience. It’s not only the look in his eyes, which is a bit of a thousand-yard stare. But also the way he speaks, the way he acts, everything. He looks traumatized.
Because I know all this about him before we meet, and because he must be sick of people bombarding him with the same old questions as soon as they meet him, I deliberately don’t jump in straightaway with questions. I decide to just hang out with him for the first day or so, and we have a bit of a laugh and a joke. I just play it the way I’d like someone to play it with me. It does my head in when someone I first meet starts saying, ‘What was it like when you did this with the Mondays?’, ‘Tell me what Bez is really like?’, ‘Did you really take all those drugs?’, ‘What was it like in the jungle?’ Blah, blah, blah. That’s the worst way to start off with anyone, bombarding them with questions, because they’ll just think you’re a bit of an idiot. I always prefer to hang out with someone first.
Fair play to Travis, he’s a trooper. The guy is in his fifties and he’d flown into London late the night before, gone to some average hotel the production company had stuck him in, and only had a McDonald’s for tea that night. Then he’d got on an early train from London to meet us up north. Fair play to the geezer, that’s a pretty hardcore schedule for someone who’s no spring chicken, and he didn’t complain at all. So straightaway you know he’s a decent geezer.