What Planet Am I On? (12 page)

I meet Sergio in a park overlooking Santiago. I ask him to explain more about the case. ‘I think they are a scientific and religious community who have contact with extraterrestrials. That’s my conclusion. But some people think there is a connection between the Friendship and Nazis.’

Aliens and Nazis?
This story just gets wilder.

Sergio explains that one of the alternative theories about the Friendship community is related to the influx of Germans and Italians who fled Europe after the Second World War. There’re even a few people who believe that the Friendship are involved in trying to rebuild the Third Reich in southern Chile, although Sergio isn’t convinced this is the case. I’m not having any of it either. I know there were a load of Nazis that poured into South America after the Second World War, and I referenced it in the first Black Grape single, ‘Reverend Black Grape’:

Oh Pope, he got the Nazis

To clean up their messes

In exchange for gold and paintings

He gave them new addresses

Clean up your messes

But I’m not buying into this theory that those Nazis fleeing Europe ended up on a secret island off the coast of Chile and were in contact with aliens.

‘My personal conclusion is there is no connection between the Friendship case and Nazis,’ agrees Sergio.

‘But you do believe there are humans on this island that are in contact with aliens?’ I ask.

‘Yes . . .’

He then loses me a bit with his next explanation, but from what I gather he is suggesting that female humans on the island bred with the aliens. Wow. The human beings bred with the aliens?

‘Yes . . . they are a mix between human and extraterrestrial.’

Bloody hell. I don’t quite know what to say to Sergio. The driving factor for Sergio’s belief that the Friendship community have extraterrestrial links is his relationship with Ernesto de la Fuente, an ordinary geezer with an extraordinary claim.

We go to meet Ernesto to get his side of the story. Ernesto was one of the first people to contact the Friendship, via radio, and from the mid-1980s he developed a close link with the island community. Their relationship took an odd turn when, after falling ill in Santiago, Ernesto visited a doctor and was given some shocking news.

‘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 starwatching.

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.