by Shaun Ryder
‘Were you accompanied by an alien?’ I ask him.
‘There were these two things, short guys, and we travelled up in the light beam together.’
As I quiz him about what happened, Stefan starts freaking out, almost as if he’s having a mini panic attack. ‘Can we get out of here now? I don’t want to be in here any more. Seriously. I don’t want to be here any more . . . it’s upsetting me.’
He walks off to the car, so I say to the director, ‘Look, he’s obviously freaked out, so we better do one and get out of here.’
Stefan jumps in the back of the motor, still panicking, and says, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here . . . quick!’
I try to calm him down, but he’s having none of it. ‘Just take me home . . . there’re just too many memories.’
‘Stefan, you’ll be fine,’ I tell him.
After we’ve driven a little distance away and he seems a bit calmed, I ask him, ‘Do you ever expect to get any closure on this, Stefan?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Do you think this is with you for the rest of your life?’
‘Yep, I think it will be.’
Stefan’s reaction to the place he believes he was abducted from was shocking and I’m not sure what to make of it. Clearly there has been a chain of events that have deeply affected him, but whether they were extraterrestrial experiences, I’m not too sure. Only Stefan knows the truth.
I’m grateful to Stefan for telling me his story because, from my own experience, I know it can be hard to speak about UFOs when you think people won’t believe you. But when I think about what I’ve learnt from the experts on my journey, I can’t help but think there could be other explanations for what happened to Stefan.
Even though I wasn’t completely convinced by Stefan’s account of his abduction, my journey across the UK has generally only strengthened my belief in UFOs. Our researchers were keen for me to meet Dr Lewis Dartnell, who is an astrobiologist at the University of Leicester. He has written a book called Life in the Universe: A Beginner’s Guide, and also works for New Scientist and Sky at Night, so he knows his stuff.
He’s a nice guy, but he isn’t about to let me lure him into committing to a belief in life out there in space.
‘We might receive an unambiguous powerful and intelligent message from a star on the other side of the galaxy,’ he says, ‘and that might arrive tomorrow. It might contain instructions to build something, or be full of information that we can download. Until that happens, I’m going to keep an open mind, but reserve judgement, on whether there’s intelligent life.’
‘So you don’t think there is life out there in the universe?’
‘If we’re talking about the entire universe then all bets are off, because the universe is so big we don’t even know how big it is. But I think it’s best to contain a discussion like this to life in our galaxy alone. If there is life in another galaxy, just over there, say the Andromeda Galaxy, it’s millions and millions of years away. Even with a radio signal travelling at the speed of light, it would take millions of years to get here – we couldn’t have a meaningful conversation because by the time we’ve sent a message and got one back, that’s older than humanity has been a species. The timescales just blow your mind.’
‘So you don’t think I’m lying about what I saw – you just think that I was mistaken?’ I ask.
‘I don’t for a second think that you’re lying. I think you truly believe you saw something that you don’t understand, and you don’t have an explanation for it, and I don’t have an explanation for what you saw. But I think there’s plenty of things out there that we don’t yet have an explanation for that might end up being run of the mill or standard, or have a normal explanation that we just haven’t found yet.’
I try and put it a different way to him. ‘If you woke up tomorrow morning and it was 6 a.m. and pitch black, and you looked out of your window and over your house you saw a proper UFO, and you watched it and observed it, and then it shot off at 10,000 miles an hour, how would that change the way that you think?’
‘It obviously would. You’ve always got to keep an open mind and you’ve always got to allow for the possibility that you were wrong about particular things that get disproved by new evidence. But until that day . . . what confuses me about UFOs is it always seems to be people like yourself, or some friends, that see something in the sky that they don’t understand. But if there was a UFO, a crew of aliens inside a flying saucer or spaceship, why would you bother visiting just two or three people at one time? Why would you not come to Mexico City, where ten million people at the same time could see it and there would be thousands and thousands of iPhone pictures of that same thing? But it’s always just a few people. I’m not saying anybody is lying. You’ve seen something that you truly believe is not of this world and you can’t explain it, and I can’t explain it. But until there’s something which is seen by lots of people, independently, all at the same time, that cannot be explained in any other way, [only then will I] believe in spaceships visiting us.’
This last part of my UK road trip has unexpectedly been one of the most bonkers parts of my whole UFO adventure, and I’ve met some fascinating people who’ve opened my eyes to new realms of ufology. Speaking with Lewis gave me hope that there’s potential for even the most sceptical individuals to change their mind about UFOs, with time.
CONCLUSION
Coming Down from My Trip
GETTING BACK HOME at the end of my UFO trip, it’s a bit like coming off tour with the band. I feel like I’m coming back down to Earth and back to normal life. What did I expect to get out of this? I’m not sure I expected to get anything concrete out of it. I wanted to go on a journey and meet a lot of interesting people and ask a lot of questions about what’s out there, or what could be out there, and it was a trip. I thought I would see some weird stuff along the way, but I saw miles more weird shit than I expected – the footage that we saw in Chile of the craft buzzing around during the military display, the weird stormtroopers that were descending from the sky over Chile and, most of all, the thing that Pancho actually captured on film up at Colbún Lake, which we didn’t identify but was certainly something weird flying above the Earth.
I’ve waited a long time to experience the excitement I felt during my first UFO encounter, and that incident made my journey to the other side of the planet feel well worth the effort. What pleased me was that my manager Warren and the film crew were all there, as all of them needed a bit of convincing, but none of them could come up with an explanation for what we caught on camera that night. To me it’s common sense that there’s life elsewhere in the universe and this was another sign of that. But I didn’t really write this book or make the show for me – it was more for those people who remain sceptical, to try and get them to be a bit more open-minded.
The footage that we saw of the weird stormtroopers was even more bizarre, but on reflection I think they were something to do with us – I think they were humans, not humanoid figures, but they had some new technology that the rest of us don’t know about yet. It was probably just some new sort of experimental gear that some military geezers were trying out. You wait and see, I bet in thirty years or so our military will end up dressed like that – it will be the standard combat gear.
I’m glad I went to Chile first. I’m not sure it’s somewhere I’ll be taking Joanne and the kids, but I think it was a knockout place to start my UFO mission. It’s definitely the UFO capital of the world right now. Rodrigo Fuenzalida, the director of Chile’s leading civilian UFO group, told us that, ‘There is not a single family in Chile without at least one or two members who have experienced a sighting’, and it was really refreshing for me to be somewhere where most people believed in UFOs, or at least had an open mind about things.
I was brought up Catholic, and I think that definitely has had an effect on my way of thinking, whether I like it or not. Because it was pushed into my head from when I was a little kid, th
ere’s still part of me at the back of my brain that believes if you commit suicide you don’t go to heaven, which I know will seem a bit crackers to a lot of people. Which I suppose must mean I believe in heaven. In some capacity. But I think the whole idea of God and heaven is a bigger concept than we can comprehend as human beings at the moment. I don’t necessarily believe in God as an old man with a silver beard who sits up there surveying everything.
I have also been reading a lot about intelligent design over the last couple of years. Some of the scientists who are bang into the idea of intelligent design reckon that it doesn’t mean you can’t still believe in God. My beliefs are a bit magpie-like, I suppose. I take a bit from different places, a bit from here and a bit from there, whichever bits seem to make sense to me, which I think more and more people do nowadays. They pick the various bits that make sense to them – it’s a bit like a pick’n’mix when you go to the cinema, you know what I mean? You leave the bits behind that you don’t fancy and pick out the bits that you do, stick them in your bag and you’re away. If you ever see someone else at a pick’n’mix you might see them pick up pear drops or something and think, ‘What have you picked that for? That’s the last thing I’d go for’, and the same is probably true with other people’s beliefs.
A lot of us are conditioned, as we grow up, to believe things just because humans have believed them for centuries, even though new evidence that has been unearthed recently or new scientific discoveries may contradict those old beliefs. I really think the next big scientific breakthrough will be in our minds, allowing us to be more open-minded. In a lot of ways, the main thing that is holding back scientific advances is the constrictions of the human mind, our refusal to accept that things that we previously thought were impossible might actually be possible. Scientifically, it is more likely that there is other life out there in the cosmos than there is a God.
I think most people struggle to accept extraterrestrial life because it would blow their minds. It totally would. As humans, we like to think we’re this amazingly developed race, and so intelligent, but in some ways we’re so small time. In many ways, we’re still almost living in the dark ages. We continue to fight all over the planet about religion, for fuck’s sake. Waging wars over things that might or might not have happened thousands of years ago. Does that seem intelligent to you?
I also think the authorities know more than they are letting on. One of the first things that plenty of new leaders have done when they get into power, particularly US Presidents or British Prime Ministers, is to say, ‘Right then, bring me the UFO files.’ Sir Winston Churchill did it. He was obsessed. JFK did it. Obama did it. But like I said earlier, when they get into power they are then reluctant to discuss it. Obviously they might not be able to say anything because they might be bound by secrecy and all that, but with some of them it’s almost like they try to airbrush history and deny the fact that they were interested in the first place. They just never mention it themselves, and if the topic’s raised they try and slide off the subject as quick as they can.
They know. Trust me, they know. If I can see something from my back garden then, with all the technology they’ve got, they’ve also seen it. They know. They’ve known for years. Just because they don’t tell you doesn’t mean anything. Do you think they would trust you with that information? Listen, we’ve just had evidence from whistleblower Edward Snowden that the US government is spying on just about everyone and everything – not just other governments but you, through your Facebook account, emails and everything. They don’t trust you. Fact. But you reckon they trust you enough to share all their secrets about space and possible UFOs? Come off it.
I also think maybe it’s harder for people to believe the evidence or footage that we do have now that you can create some really weird shit with camera trickery and stuff. No matter how clear the footage is, or how obvious it is that there’s something not of this Earth there, some people will always say, ‘Nah, that’s just created.’ It’s not like the old days of fake footage – you can do anything now, and people are so used to camera effects and stuff at the cinema that they’re less likely to take stuff at face value. Even I can be a bit sceptical myself when I see footage on television or YouTube.
But it’s different when you see something with your own eyes. You know that’s not camera trickery then. When you have seen a craft with your own eyes, how could it have been faked? Even if somebody had built a model of a craft, it wouldn’t be able to move at anything like the speed or have the agility of what I saw. Not if it was built by humans.
I do think there will be a big announcement one day. Whether it’s in my lifetime, or my kids’ lifetime, I don’t know. I think they’re scared to tell us exactly what is going on, and I can understand why. Your average member of the general public would shit it if the government came out and said UFOs exist. Even if they were told, ‘Listen, it’s fine, don’t worry. They are coming here and visiting us on Earth, but they’ve been coming here for millions of years, so you’ve got nothing to worry about’, they would still shit it. They’d start panicking that their minds and bodies were about to be taken over by these alien beings.
To me, it’s common sense that there is life out there, and I think one day everyone will see that.
The truth is out there, and I for one am going to try and keep getting closer to it.
Me listening to another UFO expert. My UFO journey was one of the weirdest trips I’ve ever been on.
Santiago, where I started the Chile leg of my UFO trip.
General Ricardo Bermúdez, head of CEFAA, Chile’s official UFO agency, set up by the government in 1998.
UFO expert and journalist Antonio Huneeus, me and Squadron Commander Perry at El Bosque Air Force base, where a unidentified flying object was captured on film, flying eighteen times faster than air force planes.
Me in Cajon del Maipo, Chile, on the edge of the Andes.
I spent all night skywatching in Cajon del Maipo, Chile, where the night sky was amazing, but we didn’t see any UFOs.
Rodrigo Fuenzalida, director of Chile’s leading civilian UFO group, AION.
Me in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world.
Me, with the Atacama Giant in the distance.
UFO expert and journalist Antonio Huneeus, astronautics researcher Nicolás Berasain and me, climbing the Atacama Giant in the desert.
Author Patricio Abusleme Hoffman, me and Humberto Rojas round the campfire in the desert.
Me and Travis Walton. Travis’ story of being abducted by aliens for five days in 1975 was made into a Hollywood film called Fire in the Sky.
Travis and me with the Devereaux family, who had a missing time encounter.
Larry Warren, me and Travis. Larry was witness to Rendlesham, the UK’s Roswell.
Me, Alan Godfrey and Travis Walton. Alan had two encounters when he was a policeman in Todmorden in the late 70s.
Me and astrobiologist Lewis Dartnall. As well as people who had witnessed incidents, I was keen to meet with scientists and academics on my UFO trip, to get their opinion.