What Planet Am I On? (9 page)

Commander Perry was actually flying himself during the event and describes the day to me. He says he was flying ‘about 350 knots an hour’. I thought knots were how they measured how fast boats were travelling, not planes, but anyway, that’s about the same as 400 miles an hour. Now that means if this object was travelling at eighteen times the speed of the planes, it was going at least 7,000 miles an hour.

CEFAA have a pretty rigorous way of looking through all the videos and information they receive. They don’t just sit there watching clips and going, ‘Wow, check this out!’ They have all sorts of tests, and 95 per cent of the stuff they receive they clarify in some way or just discard. They either work out what it is and have a logical explanation for it, or they can tell it’s bollocks. It’s the other 5 per cent that interests them. And me.

Of the seven videos captured that day, so far only one has been officially released by CEFAA. In it the suspicious object passes through the frame several times as military jets take part in the air show.

Commander Perry takes me to the exact spot where the video was shot, and it’s easy to recognize it from the video. He repeats that neither he nor the other pilots saw anything unusual on the day, but he’s obviously fascinated by what showed up on the film. I ask him what he thinks it is, and he says: ‘It’s nothing military or civilian . . . it’s not a bird . . . so maybe it is not of this planet.’

He seems a pretty stand-up dude and he’s obviously well-respected in the Air Force, so it’s good to hear that coming from him. He then tells me about another film from that day that they’ve only just discovered, which is music to my ears. It was shot by one of the Air Force guys, but he’s only just realized that he caught the UFO on there. Not only has it never been seen in public before, even CEFAA don’t know it exists.

We all pile into the base’s command centre, and they show us the footage on a big screen. Commander Perry talks us through it. There’s only a brief glimpse of the object on the film, but I’m sure it’s the same UFO as the one on the original El Bosque video. It’s more than I expected to find on my first proper day UFO hunting in Chile, and I’m pretty blown away by how helpful everyone has been. You’d never get this reception at a military base back home. Commander Perry even arranges for me to get a copy of the footage to take away
with me. My first day and I’ve come away with some UFO footage that even the government hasn’t seen yet. It bodes pretty well for the rest of my trip.

THE NEXT MORNING
, we’re heading east out of Santiago to a place called Cajón del Maipo, which is one of Chile’s UFO
zonas calientes
or ‘hot zones’. It’s a pretty beautiful area – there’s a huge canyon at the bottom of the Andes, with various rivers running through it, so there’s a lot of trekking and rock climbing, and it’s always been big with tourists from home and abroad. But a lot of the locals are convinced that there are also visitors coming here from much further afield – other star systems – which is why I’m off to take a look for myself.

Cajón del Maipo is a bit like the Lake District, but more extreme. Not long after we got out of Santiago the scenery changed and became a lot greener, much greener than I’d expect Chile to be. Then as we start climbing higher it gets rockier. The landscape seems to change every
fifteen minutes. It’s still beautiful though, with ravines, rivers and all sorts. We are in two 4 × 4s with two local drivers, Pancho (who is also one of our cameramen) and Jorge, and they tell me how it’s an amazing place for rock climbing, which they are both bang into. Pancho travels all over the world to do his climbing, and shows us some pictures of some of the crazy cliffs and rocks he’s climbed in Arizona and other places. He even takes part in climbs that take over twenty-four hours, when he has to sleep in one of those tents that you just hang off the side of a cliff. Mad bastard. His mate Jorge also used to work here in Cajón del Maipo, looking after part of the land, so he knows it very well. In my experience a lot of people who are into extreme sports can often be dicks, but Pancho and Jorge are cool dudes, and it’s good to have them on board.

Shaun’s X-Files

The Andes is the longest mountain range in the world, stretching 4,300 miles through seven countries. Formed 138 million years ago when the South American and Nazca tectonic plates smashed together, they rise to a height of almost 7,000 metres and are home to scenery as brutal as it is beautiful. Not only that, they play host to some of the clearest skies anywhere on the planet – perfect for spotting any extraterrestrial visitors.

We are heading to San José de Maipo, a small town high up in the valley, where the production team has
arranged for me to meet ufologist Miguel Jordan. He’s been coming here looking for UFOs since the early nineties and he’s had a few experiences himself, so I am keen to see what he has in store for me. I meet him in the town square and I can tell straightaway that he takes the business of UFOs pretty seriously. He knows the area well and explains to me that more than 40 per cent of the locals in the area have seen UFOs. Which seems pretty high to me. We decide to get chatting to a few of the locals in the town square and find out if many of them have had personal encounters, and then after that drive further up in the mountains to spend the night UFO watching.

In 2002, the Mayor of San José de Maipo declared it a UFO-tourism zone after he and so many other locals made sightings – although I suppose a cynic might say that’s just a way to build tourism, isn’t it?

It was a pretty sunny afternoon and there were people sat around the square on benches and people having a bite to eat, so I thought I’d go and test out what Miguel’s been saying about the high number of sightings.

Miguel is pretty confident but the first family hasn’t seen one, so we move on. The second guy we speak to is an old fella who worked for forty-three years in a hydroelectric power station up in the hills nearby. Forty-three years! You get less for murder. The old dude reckons that UFOs were ‘
always
showing up there’. He says his colleagues saw them as well, many times over the years, and he describes them as moving lights, similar to
what I saw when I had my first encounter. I can’t speak Spanish for toffee, but when me and the old guy are explaining our encounters to each other, we almost don’t need Miguel to translate. We’re on the same wavelength.

Everyone that we speak to in the square seems pretty friendly, even those who are not interested in UFOs or don’t want to be on camera. If I tried the same thing with a camera crew wandering down Deansgate in Manchester, asking people if they had seen a UFO, I’d get some pretty strange reactions from people. I wonder if the openness here is down to what they’ve witnessed or something more fundamental.

After a while Miguel is mega keen to get on the road for the night’s UFO watching. He explains we must set off a few hours before sunset in order to make sure that we find a remote spot away from all light sources, ready for a night of skywatching. He tells me he wants to be sure that if we see a UFO there is no confusing it with light from human sources. He also tells me it’s going to be pretty fucking nippy up there, as we’re going up to the snowline, and as we’ll be up there most of the night we need warm clothing, torches and all sorts of other supplies. He takes himself pretty seriously, old Miguel.

As we drive up there Miguel explains, in his quite serious way that I’m getting used to by now, that although we might want to see a UFO tonight, our best hope is to only see one at a distance because a close encounter would not be nice. I’m not quite sure what he’s on about. If you can see a UFO, then technically,
that
is
a close encounter. For someone who is a ufologist, he seems really pretty uncomfortable with the idea of actually coming into contact with a UFO, almost as if he’s frightened of them, but that fear is like a drug that he feeds off.

We drive further up into the canyon, up the rocky mountain roads, and I can see why we needed a 4 × 4 to get up here. There are boulders and huge potholes in the road that we have to dodge round. I’ve got a Range Rover back home in Salford, but I wouldn’t fancy bringing it up here.

We get further and further away from civilization until we find ourselves in the flat bottom of a canyon with snowy peaks all around us. This is the location Miguel recommends for tonight. It’s a pretty incredible spot. There’s no one else around and we feel a bit small in the bottom of this huge canyon. Even the big 4 × 4s look like Matchbox cars against the looming mountains. It’s almost dark by the time we arrive and bloody freezing; it’s hard to believe that we were in the sunny square in San José de Maipo only a couple of hours ago.

When I get out and look up at the sky, though, it’s unbelievable. I’ve gazed at the sky all my life, but I’ve never seen a sky like this. Like I said at the start of the book, one of my earliest memories as a little kid is lying on the top bunk bed in the bedroom that I shared with Our Paul and just gazing up at the sky. I’ve done it ever since. I still do it now. My clubbing days are over, so if I’m not away working and I’m at home, you’ll often find
me out in the back garden at night, staring up at the sky. I’ve been round the world numerous times on tour and seen a million night skies, but I’ve never seen anything like the sky here in Chile tonight (although when you’re on tour with a rock’n’roll band you’re mostly staying in big cities). I’ve never seen so many stars.

The sky is so clear that you can understand why there have been so many reported sightings of UFOs around this part of Chile. Within about the first ten minutes I see one of the most amazing shooting stars I’ve ever seen. It’s pretty obvious that if there is anything unusual in the sky around here you’re going to get a good look at it. After the amount of people we’ve met today who have had an encounter, it’s hard to believe we won’t see something for ourselves as the night starts to draw in. Wayne, the director, has me on an infrared camera so he can capture my reaction to anything.

I chat to Miguel about Chile’s history with UFOs. According to him, Chile has been visited by aliens for centuries. He subscribes to the theory that contact goes back far beyond the arrival of the Conquistadors and into antiquity – a hypothesis known as paleo-contact. The people who believe in that idea reckon that primitive man’s exposure to ancient aliens influenced the development of culture and religion on Earth. Some of them reckon that the gods worshipped in modern-day faiths were in fact originally extraterrestrial. I’m not quite sure I’m with him on that, to be honest.

He also explains a different, interesting theory on why
aliens might want to visit Chile – the idea is that it is being used as some sort of intergalactic filling station because there are minerals or fuels here that aliens might be interested in or need.

By this time we’re three hours into our night skywatch and there’s been no sign of life in the dark skies above. I’m freezing my bloody nuts off, but fortunately Jorge, one of our drivers, has brought a good supply of a Chilean herbal tea, so that warms me up a bit.

Miguel seems to be a bit on edge and all of a sudden he points up into the sky and whispers urgently, ‘There! There’s one . . .’

‘Yeah, yeah . . . I saw something,’ I reply.

There is some sort of weird light in the sky where Miguel is pointing, but it’s soon obvious that whatever the light is, unfortunately it’s not what we’re looking for. I’m starting to get the feeling Miguel is even more desperate to see a UFO than I am. Being out here at night seems to have put him on edge and, as we talk, he opens up about a UFO encounter he had a few years ago that had a deeply profound effect on him . . .

‘I was a UFO researcher until 2003, well, I’m still a UFO researcher, but I haven’t done so much skywatching since an incident I had in 2003. I was with another twelve or thirteen people and I had an incident of missing time.’

‘Missing time’ is a regular feature of UFO encounters when people realize that they are missing an hour or two or three or more, and they can’t account for it.

‘From that time, I don’t take people to skywatch,’ says Miguel, ‘because I feel responsible for what happens.’

Poor Miguel seemed to be going under a bit.

‘We had one or two hours’ missing time,’ explains Miguel. ‘Most of us could not remember what happened, which is a problem. You ask yourself “What happened there?” The questions remain and you think “Maybe I will remember one day in the future.” There is a risk you take when you enter into this phenomena research. But if you are a researcher you are obligated to. For me this is not a job. But I feel responsible for things that could happen to people who are with me.’

It’s now the middle of the night and it’s freezing. Wayne the director tells us that he once made a film about Eskimos and had to live with them for months. He would sleep in clothes made of reindeer skins at night, because that’s the warmest thing you can wear, even warmer than the latest mountaineering gear. He also says they had to eat reindeer every night. I’m not sure I’d be up for that.

It is proper brass monkeys now. I feel like I have no testicles. So I decide to call it a night. It might be a UFO hotspot, but I’m just not feeling the vibe tonight. I don’t think we’re going to see anything. Yet, even though the night might not be lit up with alien spacecraft, standing gazing at the southern skies up here in the Andes still feels like a real privilege . . .

Miguel gets even more desperate when we say we’re off home . . . we’re miles from anywhere and we’ve got
at least a three-hour drive back to Santiago, through the night, before we can finally get some shuteye. The whole crew has accepted that we aren’t going to see anything tonight, but Miguel still seems on edge. Maybe he’s always like this or maybe he feels responsible because he is here as the expert UFO hunter and we haven’t seen anything, I don’t know, but it’s not as if you can wish a UFO into existence, is it? Either there is something there in the sky the night you’re out there or there isn’t, and all of us accepted that there wasn’t anything there apart from Miguel.