What Planet Am I On?

by Shaun Ryder

  The first place me and Travis are off to investigate on our UFO road trip round the country is High Bentham in North Yorkshire, up near the Lake District. If you’d have asked me without showing me a map, I would have said this was Lancashire, being north up the M6 from Manchester, but apparently it’s North Yorkshire. I never realized it spread so far west. It’s a nice part of the world, all rolling green hills and small villages here and there, just like the scenery in that Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon programme The Trip. It’s hardly Roswell, but this unassuming place was the setting of an intriguing UFO case in 2007.

  Most UFO sightings are reported by individuals, but what makes this case unusual is that a whole family claim to have had a shared UFO encounter. There were also other witnesses from the surrounding area that said they saw something that night and corroborated the Deverow family’s sighting, which led to a brief flurry of media interest.

  The four family members were Anne, her daughter Rachel and Rachel’s two sons, Alex and Benjamin, who were aged nine and eleven when it happened. They’d been for a meal out at a Little Chef and were on their way home when it happened.

  They suddenly became aware of a bright white light in the sky to their left. They described the object as being about the size of a car headlight and being so bright that it made the moon look yellow. The object then moved across the sky and became visible through the windscreen, then went upwards and hovered right above their car. At this point the light accelerated downwards at an amazing speed. It was so fast that the family braced themselves for impact but it never occurred. Instead, the object gained altitude again and sped away over the hills of the Forest of Bowland. While this was happening, they all just watched without saying anything – they didn’t say a word until the strange object had disappeared from view. The next thing they remembered was driving into the village of High Bentham, where they lived. Anne rang up Radio Lancashire the next morning and they got her on air to describe what had happened to her, and lots of other witnesses came forward and said they had seen something similar, although they hadn’t had the same close experience that the Deverow family had.

  Seven years on, they all still live in the same High Bentham farmhouse and have agreed to meet me and Travis to talk us through the weird experience that happened to them that night. They recount the story to us, and Nana explains how ‘beautiful’ the peculiar object looked, and how she felt an ‘overpowering love’ for it. Rachel adds that after it disappeared they were all desperate to see it again.

  They also explain that they went back to where it happened six days later to try and retrace their steps. The weird thing was that the journey only took them nine minutes, whereas it had taken over half an hour on the night of the incident, which made their experience a ‘missing time’ episode.

  Shaun’s X-Files

  The manifestations may differ between cultures, but one factor reported in many UFO experiences is the phenomenon of ‘missing time’, a gap in the conscious memory of the people at the centre of these events. Another well-respected case, not that dissimilar to the Deverow family’s incident, also involved a group driving home from dinner together, and took place in Kentucky on 6 January 1976. As Mona Stafford and her two friends were driving, a bright-red object appeared in the sky, which Mona at first thought was an airplane on fire. As the object descended from the right side of the road to a point ahead of them, they could see that it wasn’t an airplane, but a huge object bigger than ‘two houses’. All the women described it as an enormous, metallic, disc-shaped object with a dome on top and a ring of red lights around the middle. The women all saw the disc close enough to see a yellow, blinking light on its underbelly. They realized they were driving at 85 mph, faster than they had ever driven before, and they were convinced the spaceship had taken control of their car. They later came back to consciousness on the highway, driving in the same direction, but realized with horror that they couldn’t account for well over an hour of time, raising the possibility that they were temporarily abducted.

  The Deverow family’s account is beginning to sound plausible to me, but I know from my own experience of telling people about my UFO incidents that most people won’t have taken their story seriously.

  Alex, the youngest lad, says, ‘At school I tried telling everyone what happened but as you can imagine I just got laughed at. It’s so crazy that people don’t want to believe that it happened.’

  His older brother agrees. ‘I think that people are very close-minded, and very quick to reject the idea that an incident might have happened. Even though it’s difficult for me to comprehend and it doesn’t really make sense and is unlike anything that has happened to me before, I still acknowledge that it happened, I know it happened. I don’t think you can truly believe anyone about an incident like this until you’ve witnessed one yourself.’

  Anne asks Travis if it helped him to talk to people who had had similar experiences.

  ‘I think it does. But back when it happened to me, there was hardly anything in the way of support groups. I went to a few conferences and was pretty freaked out by the strangeness I saw there, so I kind of avoided that. But it’s improved and more people who have witnessed things are coming forward. It’s less traumatic now than it was.’

  As me and Travis talk to the family, I realize that the older kid is taking the experience from more of a scientific point of view, trying to be pragmatic about it. Maybe he’s a little bit embarrassed about admitting in public what he thinks he saw, and he’s trying to rationalize it a bit. When something dramatic and otherworldly happens to you, obviously you try and find an explanation for it. You’re racking your brains, searching for an answer. You’re trying to impose a rational framework on to something that is pretty bloody irrational, which doesn’t work.

  I’ve tried to do that with the incidents that have happened to me, and Travis says that he’s tried to do that as well. He has quite a good take on things, Travis, and it’s good to have him with me to bounce ideas off. He tells me and the family how he eventually decided not to stick a label on what happened to him. He decided he was just going to stick to describing exactly what happened and let other people label it how they saw fit.

  The brothers seem to agree that once you’ve seen something, and have accepted that you’ve seen something, then you are probably more susceptible to seeing something else. Their nana backs them up and says, ‘It opens your mind and it can only be a good thing.’

  Travis agrees: ‘You’re more accepting of ambiguity, and I think that’s a good thing.’

  I like the family and I believe them, but I get the feeling they are maybe holding something back, as if they don’t want to say exactly how they feel about what happened on camera. Which you can understand if they are still coming to terms with it a little bit.

  They seem a nice, normal family and what I think makes their story more believable is the fact that they all have a very slightly different take on it. If you had four people at a football match and asked them to describe what happened, then you would get a difference of opinion, wouldn’t you? If you asked the Mondays to describe a gig that we had just played then I can fucking guarantee you that you would get a difference in opinion. You’d probably think we were all talking about different gigs.

  You also find that people react differently in different situations, particularly when something shocking or something you can’t explain happens. I know what human nature is like. When it comes to it there are different types of people who react differently in situations when you put them under pressure. Say a massive bang goes off unexpectedly, then some people will crouch and hide, and some people will jump up and immediately try and work out what has happened and confront the situation if necessary.

  During the interview, I can tell Travis feels an empathy with the family because he opens up to them more than to most other people. He especially seems to relate to the fact that some people have taken the piss out of the story of their experience. ‘Condemnation with
out investigation is the highest form of ignorance,’ he reassures the family. The thing is, you’ll find that half those people who take the piss out of you will later come back, maybe when there’re fewer people around, and ask you more about what happened, and they’re actually really interested. Rachel, the mum, says she’s had similar reactions as well.

  We also talk a little bit about how some of the loons and goons that UFO conferences and events attract don’t exact help the public perception of people who have seen something. Travis says he’s been to plenty of conferences where there are talks given by really serious people who have pretty strong evidence to support their stories or their sightings, but then there will generally always be some goon in a ten-gallon hat. Half the time he’ll be the one who ends up being on TV just because they think it’s a better or funnier story, as opposed to something which might open people’s minds and get them to think a bit. ‘What are these conference organizers supposed to do?’ Travis asks me. ‘Have some sort of litmus test for lunatics? There are several well-known cases that in my opinion are absurd.’ That must get mega frustrating for old Travis, having to regularly go up against all these nutcases that he knows are making stuff up. Travis is such a nice, friendly dude, it’s difficult to imagine him getting hassled about anyone, but that must cabbage his head a bit. As if he’s not annoyed enough with people questioning his story and him having to defend it, he also sometimes has to defend it against a background of fruitcakes. He must think, ‘Don’t label me with these dudes, man.’

  I must say the Deverow family all seem very sane and level-headed to me, and I make sure I tell them that. Travis and I are eager to make sense of what happened that evening, so we ask them to take us out to the area where the incident happened.

  In the days following the incident, Rachel and Anne returned to the site in an attempt to piece together what had happened to them and the boys. But despite being convinced they knew where they saw the light, try as they might they were unable to find any stretch of the road that matched their memory of events. Which freaked them out quite a bit, obviously.

  Shaun’s X-Files

  Some level of amnesia or reality distortion is not uncommon in those who claim to have seen UFOs, but rather than the symptom of a traumatic experience, some ufologists have a theory that these cases shared by individuals may be explained by some kind of extraterrestrial mind control. I’m not sure about that.

  There was a lot that the family aren’t prepared to say on camera, but which they talk to me about afterwards. Anne and Rachel actually went for regression therapy after the event, because they couldn’t work out what had gone on. When they went for regression therapy they realized that the road they were driving along when the incident happened was not a real road on Earth, but a road in the sky, and they were in a UFO. Which would explain why they couldn’t find the road when they went back looking for it, and would also explain the missing time that they couldn’t account for. But they didn’t want to talk about that on camera.

  After we leave the family, Travis and I chat a bit more about how people prejudge you and how some people are never going to believe anything out there exists. You have to judge each case on its own merit. Travis agrees, or as he puts it: ‘It’s nonsense to say that it’s all real or it’s all baloney.’ He also says that a lot of people have come up to him over the years and told him that the fact that he has talked so publicly about his experience has helped them, because they had also seen something. ‘In that sense, I’m not alone,’ he says.

  ‘This is so hard to do,’ he explains, meaning talking in public about his experience. ‘But it’s got less traumatic than it was. It’s got to the stage where I guess I’m a little desensitized.’

  I’m starving, so I decide to nip into the nearest village, which is Kirkby Lonsdale, and let Travis experience that old English delicacy, fish’n’chips. I tell him about how me mam and dad had a chippy for a year, when I was a kid in the seventies. They were ahead of the game because they were the first chippy round our way to serve curry sauce. This chippy in Kirkby Lonsdale has steak and kidney pudding and I’m tempted to have one, but they aren’t Holland’s. The film crew, who are all from down south, have never even heard of steak pudding! The whole concept of a pudding with meat is weird to them. I explain to them what a pudding is, and how if you’re going to have a pudding, it’s got to be Holland’s.

  Travis enjoys his fish’n’chips and even has a cup of tea to wash it down. It’s the third cup of tea he’s had today – he must be the most English Yank I’ve ever met, even though he’s only been here once.

  The teasing the boys had got at school was typical, but it’s got a lot better over the years. Even the media, especially the tabloids, have stopped relentlessly taking the piss out of anyone who claims to have had some sort of UFO experience.

  What was a little weird was that all the family talked about the overwhelming love towards the thing that they saw, and Rachel and Anne both said they really wanted to see another one. I can totally identify with that. I wouldn’t say that when I had my experiences I felt an overwhelming love towards the craft, but I certainly didn’t feel threatened by it.

  The other thing is that time does change your feelings about an experience. You will probably feel different about something three, five or ten years later. Especially the boys, who were only nine and eleven years old when it happened. Even though they know what they saw, they’re not standing up and saying they believe in UFOs – they’re looking for a more scientific explanation for it all. Over our chippy tea, Travis points out to me that the older kid, Benjamin, said something about embellishment, and he wondered if he might even be talking about his mum and nana: Benjamin wants to stick to the facts. But as the boys grow older, I think they may find that no matter how hard they try, they won’t be able to explain what happened to them through looking at conventional science, and they’ll end up accepting that they had some sort of UFO experience.

  I really did believe their story. One thing that helped convince me was that Rachel, the mother, has a pretty high-flying job. She’s a representative for a pharmaceutical company, and she’s obviously really intelligent and together, but she’s had this experience with the rest of her family that she can’t quite understand.

  Travis is with me on this – he believed the family too. He was convinced they’d definitely had some sort of experience; he was having it.

  The thing is, they had a collective experience, which changes other people’s perceptions. The former clinical psychologist and UFO expert Peter McCue has talked quite a bit about how people are more likely to believe in collective experiences than individual experiences. One of the things that he’s said is that even if you give four people acid and they all have hallucinations at the same time, none of them would have the same hallucination, so a group of people all witnessing the same thing happening at the same time can’t be put down to a hallucination.

  Which makes sense, although I do take what McCue says with a pinch of salt. He’s obviously a bright geezer and he has a lot of decent theories – he’s made me think about some things in a different way and I intend to talk to him in person as part of my research. But I’m also wary that he’s seized the opportunity to become a bit of an expert in his field by applying his psychological experience to the paranormal.

  When we set off on this trip I thought I knew all there was to know about Travis’s story, but now I’ve met him and hung out with him, it’s made me think a bit more about how much his UFO experience might have fundamentally affected him. Over our tea, he reveals to me that if he could rewind history and do things differently, or if he had to do it all again, he’s not sure if he would tell anyone had happened to him.

  He’s obviously been through a lot over the years, and it must do your head in when something so life-changing happens to you and a lot of people’s reaction is to question whether it actually happened at all.

  I can see why he decided to take a step back from it
all. Right after it happened he was like the John Lennon of the UFO world in America. He was just bombarded by the press and TV – everyone wanted to speak to him and interview him. Can you imagine? Before it all happened, he was happy as Larry being a lumberjack from some small town. Just getting on with his own life. Then out of nowhere he’s abducted for five days. As if his head is not in a spin already from his encounter, he’s then thrown into this whirlwind of TV shows and newspaper interviews. It’s enough to cabbage anyone’s head, and it obviously cabbaged Travis’s for a while. But he felt he had to go out and do all those interviews because the incident had been so widely reported and everyone had an opinion on it, all the so-called experts – and you know my opinion on some of these so-called experts – and a lot of them obviously were picking holes in it. Travis naturally felt he had to put his version of events forward. He was constantly grilled for ten years, with half of the people thinking he was some kind of hero and the other half basically calling him a liar or a loon. That’s how it goes with these type of stories from my experience – you’ve got the absolute nuts who will lap up anything you tell them, and then you’ve got the absolute sceptics, who’ll have none of it and just think what you’re saying is bollocks. There’s no middle ground, and Travis was trapped in that crossfire. Fuck me. It would do anyone’s head in, so no wonder he stepped out of the limelight.

  Now we have spent a bit of time together, and have got pretty comfortable with each other, we start chatting more openly about stuff and I’m finding out more about his story. You find out more from someone if you get to know them a bit by just casually chatting than if you just barge in there straight off with a load of questions.

  Part of the reason why the caricature of the Mondays, and me and Bez in particular, lasted so long was that no one who was ever sent to interview us actually bothered to try and see further than that caricature. Which suited us at the time. We knew that those rock’n’roll tales of excess made for good headlines, and it’s a piece of piss to throw a journalist a few tales about excess, isn’t it? And it made our life easier as we didn’t have to do any soul-searching or anything. But I always thought it was fucking poor on the journalists’ part, that they just turned up wanting a few clichéd rock’n’roll tales and then they would run away happy to write the same piece that had been written a million times before about the mad world of Happy Mondays. Maybe it’s because most of them were nice middle-class kids, from a nice upbringing, who had genuinely never met anyone like us – some of them had never even met a northerner – but, fuck me, it wasn’t half boring.