What Planet Am I On? (2 page)

Star Trek
, or ‘Spock’, was the main one for me when I was growing up. I’ve stuck with
Star Trek
over the years as well – we’ve had a long relationship. Years later, after I started Black Grape with Kermit, who was a big
Star Trek
nut as well (he just happened to be, that’s not why we started the band together), we were asked to go on a
Star Trek
night on BBC2. We had to talk about how we first got into it and what we thought about different characters, and our opinion on
Star Trek: The Next Generation
and all that. I remember when
The Next Generation
started in the mid-eighties. When I first heard they were going to do it, I thought, ‘Awww, bollocks!’ I just thought it was a really
bad idea, and it was going to be terrible and ruin
Star Trek
for everyone. But after watching the first few episodes I admit I was totally wrong.
The Next Generation
just blew me away.

A lot of the stuff that happens in
Star Trek
is very believable to me. I have this theory that if we as humans can imagine something, then it’s achievable, you know what I mean? Kermit was with me on that as well, all the way. My favourite episode of
The Next Generation
is called ‘Elementary, Dear Data’, when Professor Moriarty, who was Sherlock Holmes’s enemy or nemesis, tries to take over the ship, or at least a hologram of him does. What happens is that Commander Data generally has a pretty stressful time on the Starship
Enterprise
, dealing with all these extremely futuristic life forms and people from other planets, and making sure that Warp Factor Three is safe for the ozone and all sorts of stuff. So when he needs to just kick back, he goes up to the Holodeck, and in this episode he gets involved in the re-enactment of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. It’s called the Holodeck because that’s where the holograms are, but to Data it’s more of a holiday deck, a Holideck, as that’s where he goes for a bit of time out. I tell you what, if we had something like that in real life, drug use would go down by about 99 per cent – if we had a hologram world we could escape into and take a break from real life. Basically Moriarty just takes the piss all the way through the episode and it’s great. Check it out if you haven’t seen it, it’s a great episode.

So I was always interested in space and the possibility of life on other planets, but then in the late seventies I had two personal encounters with UFOs that changed my life and changed my thinking on it.

The first one happened at th’ Height – Irlams o’ th’ Height – which is a place near us when we were growing up. I was stood at a bus stop at th’ Height at about 9 p.m. at night. It was late summer so it was just going dark. I’d been out with a couple of pals of mine from school who lived at th’ Height and I was waiting to get a bus back up to Little Hulton, where I lived.

I looked up and just saw hundreds of lights across the sky, hundreds of them. My first thought was, ‘Fuck me, are we being invaded?!’ It was amazing. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. There were hundreds of these lights moving across the sky and they looked like craft. It scared me a little bit at first, but then I actually found it quite calming. I think if an adult saw something like that for the first time, they might be quite scared, but because I was a kid I wasn’t as frightened. As a kid you’re more innocent and naive, aren’t you? But as an adult you might sense the danger a bit more.

Quite a few other people saw it and it was reported in the
Salford Journal
or
Reporter
. Some spokesperson for the authorities, the head of police or Salford Council or something, blamed it on the floodlights of Salford Rugby Club going haywire, going bonkers, which was absolute
bullshit. I remember reading the paper at the time, thinking, ‘
You what?
Bullshit! Who you trying to kid?’ I knew what the lights at Salford rugby ground looked like, because I’d grown up there and I used to go and watch the rugby sometimes with my granddad and Our Paul. What I saw that night looked fuck-all like Salford’s floodlights. The lights I saw were different colours for a start and were slow-moving objects, and there were what looked like hundreds of them moving slowly across the sky.

Over the past decade or so, as I’ve got into watching documentaries on the History and Discovery channels and checking stuff out on YouTube, I’ve seen clips of similar things and I’ve been like, ‘Wow! That’s what I saw that night!’ I’m now pretty sure it was hundreds of craft moving slowly across the sky.

A few months later, probably late September or early October 1978, I had my second incident or encounter. I’d just left school by that time and started work as a post boy. I was on the 8 to 3.30 shift at the post office, so I was walking to the bus stop on Hilton Lane about 6.40 a.m. to get on the bus to work and it was still dark – that time of the morning when the dawn is just creeping in. There was a little lad who must have been about eleven or twelve in front of me, also walking to the bus stop. He must have been at one of the grammar schools in town, De La Salle or Manchester Grammar. As I’m walking to the bus stop I looked up and saw this object just flash across the sky in front of me at about 10,000 miles an
hour. I watched it zip across and then I looked at the little lad, and he was watching it as well.

As we reached the bus stop, we both just stood there watching this object, this thing. And it was fucking spell-binding. I’d never seen anything like it. This object was shooting across the sky . . . sssssccchhhhhOOOOmmmmMMMMMM . . . zzzzzoZZZZOOOOOOOOMMMMMM . . . in this mad zigzag pattern from one side to the other, at what seemed about 10,000 miles an hour. Then it would stop and then kind of hang about in one spot for a little bit, and then it was off again . . . ssssssssshhhhhhh . . . zigzagging back across the sky again. Then it might hover about for a little bit, and then again . . . sssssccchhhhhhOOOOmmmmMMMM MM . . . zzzzzoZZZZOOOOOOOOMMMMMM . . . zigzagging back across the sky again.

And then all of a sudden it just did one.

Got off at about 10,000 miles an hour.

Disappeared.

Gone.

It’s hard to describe it, or even say how big it was, because it was pretty far away. We were in Salford, but I reckon this craft could have even been above the moors between Bolton and Rochdale. To me, it looked like a star moving about, but just lower down. It’s hard to get perspective on something when it’s in the sky and moving that fast.

Again, like my first incident, other people had seen it as well because there were some reports in the press
about people seeing similar things as far away as Bolton and even Todmorden in Yorkshire. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? If this craft was flitting about at 10,000 miles an hour, then when I was watching it zigzag across the sky it could well have been flitting between the Pennines and Liverpool.

Aside from my two incidents, there were also quite a few other reports of similar types of activity in the skies near me around the same time. The north-west seemed to be a bit of a hotbed at the time. Farmers saw things. Even police officers have gone on record saying that they saw similar things. It wasn’t just me, little Shaun Ryder in Salford, who was seeing things. Loads of people from all walks of life, from bus drivers to lawyers, reported seeing similar things.

Now, the first time I saw something – all those different lights in the sky I mentioned earlier – I definitely knew it wasn’t the rugby lights that the local paper used as an explanation. But you do think to yourself, ‘You know what? I know it wasn’t fucking rugby lights, I know there was something weird going on there, and I clocked it, but maybe there
is
some weird, non-UFO, explanation for it. Maybe it was some freakish optical illusion, or some sort of mini Northern Lights show over Salford.’

But the second time? Nah. I definitely saw something flying around at 10,000 miles an hour, zigzagging around the sky, completely defying physics or what any manmade craft could do. It was definitely a craft of some kind and it certainly wasn’t a manmade craft.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind
or
Star Wars
hadn’t come out at the time – they came out just after my encounter. So it’s not as if I’d been to the pictures and floated back home with these visions in my head and conjured it up. I was just on my way to work, freezing my balls off at six a.m. in the morning, and I saw this craft. Not just me, but the little kid that was in front of me as well.

After the craft had disappeared that morning, I got on the bus and went into work and I told everyone about it. No one said, ‘Were you tripping?’ or ‘Are you sure you weren’t just stoned?’ or anything like that. I hadn’t taken acid or anything at that age, and that drug culture wasn’t around then either, back in the late seventies, or at least it wasn’t widespread. Acid wouldn’t have been in the vocabulary of your average postman back then. There was a bit of weed flying around the post office, but that was about it.

I’ve never forgotten that day. As I’ve said, I’ve forgotten days, weeks, months, years and, let’s face it, decades of my life, but I’ve never forgotten that morning. Something like that sticks in your head, believe me.

When you have seen something like I did, a craft flying about defying physics, it makes you think about things differently. Later, when I saw films like
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
or
Star Wars
, I did think to myself, ‘Well, where do they get their ideas from for these films?’ It’s
not all straight from the imagination of whoever wrote the film, is it? Not all from the mind of a geezer sat in a room at his desk, staring at the wall, chewing his pencil waiting for inspiration. I’m a big one for believing that information is leaked to us through TV programmes and films – through the news, through all sorts.

Steven Spielberg apparently has friends in the military who have told him classified stuff which he then uses as inspiration in his movies. I read an interview once where someone asked him about it, saying, ‘You know some people believe you’re actually a government agent for aliens because of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
ET
?’ And Spielberg replied, ‘I’m part of a government conspiracy to make America and the world conducive to accepting an alien neighbour? Great!’

The producer Jamie Shandera made a documentary about Spielberg just as
ET
came out, and said Spielberg told him there was a private screening of
ET
at the White House for Ronald and Nancy Reagan. At the end of the film, the President leant over, tapped Spielberg on the shoulder and quietly said to him, ‘You know, there aren’t six people in this room who know how true this really is.’

After my first two incidents, I didn’t have any similar experiences for years. Decades. There was one incident in Germany with the re-formed Happy Mondays in about 2006, when we thought we might have seen a UFO, but that was slightly different. This wasn’t the original lineup of the Mondays, but one I had for a few years in the
noughties. We had a very weird experience one night on tour, but I’m pretty sure I can discount that as being more of less just down to the substances that were being consumed. There were a lot of weird people around us at a weird festival, smoking a weird substance, which triggered off a very weird experience.

There were some German dudes there who were real mushroom and dope aficionados and collectors, and they had just been to the Amazon rainforest and brought some stuff back with them. I realized afterwards it was a drug called DMT, which I’d heard about before. I think Bez and his ex-missus were the first people I knew to take it. Its proper name is Dimethyltryptamine (I had to Google that) and it’s a natural psychedelic drug. It occurs in plants and there are also traces of it in our bodies. Depending on how much you take, it can give you a proper, full-on immersive psychedelic trip. Loads of South American, Amazonian and American Indian tribes have been taking it for centuries, it’s part of their culture. Shamans use it in ceremonies. In the late nineties, dear old Tony Wilson was asked to make a TV show where he went to South America and took this drug to see what happened. I didn’t know about it until he came back, quite pleased with himself, and said, ‘I’ve been to the Amazon rainforest and taken a drug even you lot haven’t tried.’ And I was like, ‘Nah, Bez has had it, Tony. Our mate brought some back off his holidays.’ Poor Tony was a bit gutted.