What Planet Am I On? (17 page)

Larry says to me, ‘I remember when you guys were hitting NYC in the nineties and the whole Manchester scene was kicking off, that was great. Man, it’s a weird life we lead.’

You can say that again. The last month or so has been one of the weirdest trips of my life.

While we’re waiting for the crew to set up, Larry asks Travis something about his movie. ‘You know my favourite part of the movie, Travis – and I know you know I’ve watched it loads and it’s one of my favourite films – my favourite part is when you’re sat in your truck in town, and the little kid comes up to you and says. “Can I have your autograph?” and you say “Why?” and the kid says, “You’ve been to space.”’

‘Well, I’ll tell you what really happened,’ says Travis, ‘which is that I was on set during the filming of the movie, and this kid was running round getting all the autographs of all the actors and he said to me, “Hey, are you famous? Can I have your autograph?” I’m not sure he knew who I was.’

It seems like Larry and Travis are treated like pop stars when they turn up at UFO conferences because their
experiences are so famous. They talk about some of the other well-known characters that they both know on the UFO scene. It sounds a bit like when you’re in a band and you’re doing the summer festival circuit, and you end up bumping into the same bands backstage at different festivals. ‘All right, how’s it going? What time you on today? Have a good one . . .’

‘I’ve been back to Missouri a few times this year. I did a thing with Peter in Maine and we had to share a room,’ says Travis. ‘Never share a room with Peter, I gotta tell you he snores a whole bunch for a small guy.’

In December 1980, Larry was a fresh-faced recruit based at RAF Bentwaters. He was dragged into the Rendlesham Forest incident on the third night and has a lot to say about it. When he was honourably discharged from the United States Air Force in 1983, he went public with his version of what happened. He’s spent the last thirty years defying the authorities to tell his story.

Like I said, I’ve heard a lot about this story over the years, so I tell Larry I’ve always wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth. ‘Well, I’ll tell it, brother,’ he rasps.

‘It was a clear night. I didn’t know the area that well. We got to a clearing called Cable Green and there was a mist or a fog that was greenish yellow, on the ground, in a circular shape. The air was charged, yet movement was slow and there was no sound. Everything was void, it was like a vacuum.’

Larry then describes a red ball of light that appeared
and moved into the clearing, which is a description that has been substantiated by other accounts of that night.

‘By the time my eyes cleared there was a structured object, about thirty feet at its base and it went up to a point, like a pyramid. I was about twenty feet away and I saw these life forms . . . I thought they looked like kids, and I was like, ‘What
is this?
’ . . . it was animated and it was alive.’

Larry admits himself that his account is a bit dreamlike. But he says that this haziness was due to some sort of force field that was coming from the structure.

What is definite though – and Larry stills seems pissed off, rightly if you ask me – is that after he stood guard for a while, as other officers took radiation readings, he and other low-ranking officers were ordered back to base, while the mysterious objects were still there in the field. I ask him what explanation his superiors gave him.

‘They didn’t tell us it was from outer space but they definitely told us that this phenomenon had been visiting this planet for longer than any of us in the room could appreciate. They said they hoped we appreciated the need for secrecy and hoped they could count on our cooperation.’

‘Cooperation meaning don’t talk about it?’ asks Travis.

‘Don’t talk about it,’ says Larry, nodding. ‘They had us sign pre-prepared witness statements saying that we were off duty and saw lights in the trees.’

He adds, ‘The real twisted part with this is . . . hey, I always say “twisting” with you, Shaun. Why is that?’ He’s a bit of a comedian, Larry.

‘Dunno, Larry,’ I reply. ‘Something to do with my melons?’

I tell Larry that I actually nicked the phrase ‘twisting my melon’ off Steve McQueen for ‘Step On’. It surprises me how many people don’t know ‘Step On’ is a cover version, although the Happy Mondays version is now much more well-known than the sixties original. It all came about when we were asked to do a cover version for our American label, Elektra, for their fortieth anniversary. They wanted all their bands to cover something else on the label so they sent us a tape of Elektra songs to consider and the first or second song on there was ‘Step On’ by John Kongos. I’d never heard it before but I liked it and I could tell it would be an easy one for us to rip and make our own, which is what we did. It became almost a completely different track by the time we’d finished with it, and then Paul Oakenfold had put his stamp on it.

As I told Larry, the ‘twisting my melon’ bit came from Steve McQueen. In a roundabout way. I’d been watching this Steve McQueen documentary called
Man on the Edge
because I was bang into him. In the documentary, one of the big producers from Fox or one of the other big film studios was describing how he first met McQueen and says something like, ‘This cool kid came in, and you could tell he was an actor. He looked like a cool street kid and he said to me, “You can’t tell me what’s what man! You’re twisting my melon man!”’ That’s what McQueen was like, an uncompromising little fucker. Can you imagine One Direction or someone saying something like that?
This producer carried on, ‘This kid spoke so hip, he didn’t know what he was saying!’ Straightaway, while I was watching it, I thought, ‘I’ll have that, thank you very much’ – ‘You’re twisting my melon man, you know you talk so hip, you’re twisting my melon man.’ I knew that’s what was needed for ‘Step On’: a killer catchphrase.

I always thought McQueen was a cool fucker. I actually got into him before I found out about his background. He had been an orphan as a kid and then he joined the Marines. He got into acting because he realized it was full of birds, and posh birds at that. Which was great by me. All I knew about him at first was that he had a great haircut and wore really cool clothes, and not much else matters to you at that age. It makes me laugh when people wank on about James Dean being the coolest guy that ever lived.
Please
. James Dean? He wasn’t even in the same league as Steve McQueen.

The other catchphrase in ‘Step On’ was the ‘Call the cops!’ line. That one came from a pal of ours in the Hacienda called Bobby Gillette, who was always shouting, ‘Call the cops!’ He’d stand in the Hacienda, off his nut, whistling and shouting, ‘Call the cops! . . . We’re here! The Mancs! Our firm! Our corner! . . . CALL THE COPS!’ So I just stuck those two elements together and came up with: ‘You’re twisting my melon man, you talk so hip, you know you’re twisting my melon man . . . call the cops!’ and it worked great on our version of ‘Step On’. That line has stuck with me over the years, so much so that I decided to call my autobiography
Twisting My
Melon
when I wrote it a couple of years ago. I quite like the fact that no one knows what it means, but everyone has their own take on it.

Anyway, getting back to old Larry and him getting his melons twisted in Rendlesham Forest. Over the years a number of men have come forward with their versions of what happened during the Rendlesham incident, and I have to say some of their accounts differ quite a lot. But there is also a radio recording of what happened that night, which seems to suggest they definitely saw a UFO. Larry says he’ll drive us out to show us the area where the incident happened.

Larry still finds it quite traumatic being at the site, even after all these years. ‘I never wanted to come back here. I thought it was pretty evil. Not in a satanic way, but just . . . my world became totally different that night.’

Some of the people who were with Larry that night definitely think evil was involved. I do find that is the natural reaction of some people when they’re confronted with something that they can’t comprehend or understand. They panic and think it’s the devil’s work. Rather than thinking it might be a good thing, they naturally assume the worst.

‘To me, as a young man,’ says Larry, ‘it just spun the world that I thought I knew upside down.’

I ask him what is his own personal take on what happened that night.

‘My personal belief, thirty-two years later, is that they [the Air Force and other authorities] had equipment pre-set
up here that was designed to bring in phenomena and other intelligence. Their plan was to contain this phenomenon and observe it under close quarters, with the Special Forces they had set up around the forest.’

‘So you believe they attracted these visitors?’ I ask.

‘I believe they, the government, the Feds, whoever, had the technology, which is beyond me, that could open the door to this phenomenon, so they could observe it. But this thing got out of hand. Maybe it was only supposed to be one night, but it turned into three, and I think they pissed this phenomenon off. That’s why it got too big and beings were coming down here.’

Larry also reckoned the authorities had nuclear power present.

‘The nuclear power that we had was adversely affected by the phenomenon.’

Something truly weird obviously happened that night in Rendlesham. But I find it hard to separate the fact from fiction, even with Larry. I like Larry, but he’s quite angry. He seems to be angry with the world, that this happened to him, and more than that, the way it had happened. There were two guys who, years later, had come out with their own version of the story, and he is particularly angry with them: ‘Why did they not say this at the time?’ They didn’t say anything for years and all of a sudden, twenty-five years later, they came out and said, ‘We touched the craft, and we got something, and they were time travellers.’

But if these guys did keep quiet for ages, I can see they
might do that because they were career military dudes, you know what I mean? Their dads were in the Air Force. Their dads’ dads were in the Air Force. It was a career for them. They weren’t just some guys who signed up to get the fuck out of Hicksville USA. They were from military families whose whole lives going back generations were based around the military. So it made total sense to me that they didn’t want to come out and talk about it. They were just closing ranks. That’s what the military does, isn’t it? Literally. You don’t shit on your own.

‘You know what it’s like, Travis,’ Larry says. ‘I know you’ve had people questioning what you say, and I know your head spins with it, or used to.’

Larry actually thinks he was lucky not to get whacked because he wouldn’t shut up about the incident. And do you know what? Maybe he’s right. I know that sounds a bit
Goodfellas
, but the authorities were trying to shush him up for a long time. There were plenty of people back in the day who were linked to stories that were sensitive to governments and then happened to meet with ‘unfortunate accidents’. I think that sort of thing is less likely to happen nowadays, partly because it would be harder to cover up.

But make no mistake; governments don’t like you going round talking about something that they want to keep quiet.

Especially the US government.

AS I MENTIONED
earlier, I wanted to meet as many credible figures as possible during my mission, and Nick Pope was exactly the sort of geezer that I wanted to talk to. I’ve always had a bit of an issue with the way UFO witnesses are judged – the credibility of a sighting seems to depend on who sees it. If you or I spot a UFO, it’s unlikely many people will believe us, but it’s a different matter if it’s a large group of individuals working within the military or government. That makes even the sceptics sit up and take notice.

Nick Pope is a very interesting dude because he’s a former member of the Ministry of Defence whose opinions on UFOs are taken very seriously indeed. I’ve seen him on TV over the years and read his book, and what I like about Nick is he isn’t
supposed
to believe. He
first joined the MOD in 1985, and did a few different jobs before 1991 when he was appointed to Secretariat (Air Staff) Department 2A – which is a right mouthful, but basically to those in the know at the MOD, it was the ‘UFO desk’. His job was to investigate and analyse claims of UFO sightings and to assess their threat to national security. Little did he know that the job was going to change his life.

It’s pretty obvious to me that he was chosen for the job because he was a safe bet. He was from a military background and his dad was in the secret service. It counts in your favour, doesn’t it, if you come from a military background and you’re almost conditioned to it from birth? He was also a UFO sceptic, which helped. Obviously they didn’t want to put some absolute UFO nut in the MOD job, giving them access to all sorts of secret files. So when the job came up, someone obviously went, ‘What about young Nick Pope . . . Popey’s boy? Let’s get him in. He doesn’t believe in all this stuff and he’s only twenty-one, he’s not going to go out and start mouthing off and causing us problems. He’s perfect. Give Popey’s lad a shout . . .’

So Popey’s lad gets the gig because he’s one of their own, you know what I mean? He’s family, and he doesn’t really believe in all this stuff. And when Nick comes in on his first day, he has the attitude that it’s pretty much all bullshit. But then over the first year or two of the gig, he starts seeing all this evidence come across his desk that can’t just be explained away, and he’s like, ‘Whoa, hang
on a minute, there’s actually some weird shit going on here.’

Apparently some ufologists like Doug Cooper were happy to work with him and talk to him as part of official investigations. But some other ufologists saw him as ‘a sinister
Man in Black
type character’ and refused to have anything to do with him, as they believed the MOD and its staff were all part of a conspiracy to cover up the truth about UFOs.