What Planet Am I On? (4 page)

One of the most interesting things I saw recently was the ex-Minister of Defence in Canada who came out and made a speech about the fact that extraterrestrials have been visiting our planet for years. The geezer is called Paul Hellyer, and he’s not shy when it comes to talking about UFOs – he’s been giving it out for years.

The speech was at a conference called the ‘Citizen Hearing on Disclosure’, which was basically calling for the US government to come clean about UFOs. Or, as they put it, campaigning for ‘what the US Congress
had failed to do for forty-five years, to seek out the facts surrounding the most important issue of this or any other time – evidence pointing toward an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race’.

According to old Hellyer, ‘aliens are living among us and . . . it is likely at least two of them are working with the US government’. More specifically, Hellyer announced that at least four species of extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth for thousands of years.

He has also called for ‘a public disclosure of alien technology obtained during alleged UFO crashes – such as the mysterious 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico’. He said, ‘not only do we have ET here, we have the capability to take him home’.

Now, I don’t necessarily just accept everything that he says because there’s some pretty wild stuff there – to say that two different species of aliens are working with the US government – but I absolutely believe that we have the technology and I believe him when he says species have been here.

I do believe contact was first made with aliens in the fifties and sixties and it was covered up. I heard one theory which said that aliens only made contact with Earth after we discovered nuclear power because they could see the harm we could do with it. I could buy into that. I’m not saying I thought aliens were flying around with those stickers in the back windows of their spaceships saying ‘Nuclear Power? No Thanks’, but I could see that if they knew more than us about it, and knew it was really
destructive, they might want to warn us off, especially if our messing around could end up affecting them as well.

There’s an American dude called Robert Hastings who has been researching UFOs for years. He reckons aliens ‘tried to warn the US and Russia that they were playing with fire during the Cold War’. He’s gathered witness statements from more than 120 military personnel over the years, claiming to show infiltration of nuclear sites by UFOs. One of those witnesses was Captain Robert Salas, a former US Air Force Ballistic Missile Launch officer, who said he was on duty during a missile disruption incident at Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana in 1967. He said he saw a ‘large glowing, pulsating red oval shaped object’ hovering over the front gate. He then noticed that the missiles he was overseeing had shut down. ‘The indicators for all or nearly all ten missiles showed as red-coloured “fault” lights, which meant that the missiles were disabled and could not be launched.’ He was told by his superiors not to discuss the matter.

Does that really seem so bonkers? We know ourselves that we’re playing with fire a bit with nuclear power, which is why some people are so against it. So what if there was an alien race out there, who were twice as advanced as us, and they could see what we were messing about with, and they actually knew how dangerous it was? When you put it like that it doesn’t seem so crazy, does it? Imagine it. They’d definitely want to take a look at what was going on.

I would love to know the full truth about what governments
know, and I set out to find out more while making the TV series and writing this book. But I do believe that if the authorities did turn round and say, ‘OK, it’s true, we are in contact with aliens’, then a lot of people would go bananas. Their heads would explode. Some people would just not be able to get their heads round it at all. It would challenge everything they thought was real.

Look back at when Orson Welles’s
The War of the Worlds
was first broadcast back in the thirties. It was a fake live news programme on the radio (this is before TV, remember) about an alien invasion that was supposedly happening. They said at the start that it was fictional, but loads of people switched on later and missed that bit, and totally thought it was for real. People panicked. I think a lot of people still would today.

I do truly believe that there will be an announcement about contact with aliens one day, though. Whether that will be in my lifetime or not, I don’t know.

My generation, and the generations before me, were generally brought up being told by the authorities that there is no life on other planets. Now things have changed slightly. We accept that there is water and probably some form of bacterial life on Mars, and most sensible people, including scientists, believe that there is life out there somewhere, if not in this galaxy then in another galaxy. Whether they believe that life has come to visit us on Earth, or will ever come to visit us here, is a different matter, but most of them believe something. I think it’s healthier for kids to grow up with that sort of thinking.

Astronomers have found 200 planets in the last six months that are like Earth, apparently – mirror Earths. If there are so many mirror Earths out there, then I think it’s pretty obvious that one day we will discover that there is life on one of these planets. Whether we’re able to communicate with them, I don’t know. On the other hand, there is also the chance that the message will come the other way and they’ll get in touch with us.

It’s only a matter of time, really.

Mathematically, the universe must be teeming with life.

The truth is out there, as they say. I wouldn’t be as daft as to say I’m determined to find it, but I really want to get closer to it.

I’M FAR FROM
the first musician to be fascinated by UFOs and life on other planets. From David Bowie to Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon to Robbie Williams, there’s a long illustrious history of musicians who have been fascinated by UFOs and space. Maybe it’s because we musicians are a bit otherworldly ourselves. Some musicians have even said that they believe they can tap into a cosmic super power that helps them write some of their best songs or produce their best performances on stage. I can see why they might say that, because the inspiration comes from somewhere, and the balls come from somewhere to get up on stage and perform, but I’m not sure I agree that it comes from any cosmic super power. Cynics may say that musicians and rock stars take a lot of drugs, but most of the incidents that I’ve heard about involving
musicians and UFOs or encounters don’t involve drugs at all.

When I read John Lennon’s account of seeing a UFO above New York City, I totally felt for him when he had to stress that drugs were not involved in the experience at all – just like I’ve had to.

Over the years, plenty of musicians have also written songs, or even themed whole albums around their obsession with UFOs. I’ve personally never written a song about UFOs or aliens in all my years with Happy Mondays or Black Grape. But then I very rarely ever write a specific song about anything in particular. Most of my songs I put together like a magpie, dragging together different lines and images that work well together. Probably the closest I came to revealing my extraterrestrial interests was name-checking Neil Armstrong in the Black Grape single ‘In the Name of the Father’:

Neil Armstrong, astronaut,

he had balls bigger than King Kong,

First big suit on the moon, and he’s off to play golf

hole in one!

But that didn’t mean anything really. When we were making the first Black Grape album, me and Kermit would just riff off each other in the studio a lot of the time. We’d both have little snippets and one-liners, and a song would emerge from that.

When I was growing up, David Bowie was the main pop star who was writing about space and life on other planets, or certainly the main one who we knew about, the geezer who was speaking to kids like me. But Bowie was far from the first. What did John Lennon say about Elvis? Before anyone did anything, Elvis did everything? Well, that applies to UFOs as well.

There’s a well-known story told by Elvis’s dad about how there was a big blue light that shone above his house when Elvis was born. Elvis himself came out with some bonkers stuff in his time, but in the last fifteen years of his life he became mates with a woman called Wanda June Hill who recorded some strange interviews with him. There’s some debate over these interviews but they’ve been checked out by a specialist who says it is Elvis.

In one of these interviews he tells old Wanda that he was visited by ‘life forms’ as a kid. ‘I am not of this world,’ Elvis told her. ‘I am a man, I am a human being now, but what is “me” is not from here. I am from out there . . . you think I am making this up, but it’s true – you’ll know one day.’

When he was shooting the film
Spinout
in 1966, Elvis started seeing his co-star Deborah Walley at the same time, and told her that he didn’t want to spend any time on ‘trivialities’: ‘I got the word. I want to give it to you. I’m not a man. I’m not a woman. I’m a soul, a spirit, a
force. I have no interest in anything of this world. I want to live in another dimension entirely.’

Elvis had several UFO encounters including one in the late sixties when he was driving down Route 66 with Larry Geller and Jerry Schilling, two of the ‘Memphis Mafia’ (which is what they called the hangers-on who were always around Elvis). Elvis saw a ‘flying saucer’ cross the sky in front of them and get brighter, then do a right-hand turn and just shoot off into the distance. ‘That was definitely not a shooting star!’ said Elvis. The other two agreed. Jerry pointed out that nothing manmade moved like that and Larry said, ‘That thing moved like a flying saucer.’ Elvis later told Larry, ‘It’s ridiculous to think we’re the only life with millions of planets in the universe.’

I’m totally with old Elvis on that one. Couldn’t agree with you more, mate.

You could spend your life reading about Elvis, and there are quite a few extraterrestrial connections we read about while researching this book and TV series. It didn’t stop when he died either – loads of people have claimed to have seen weird lights and phenomena over Graceland since.

I’m not sure where Elton John was coming from when he first saw a picture of Elvis from ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and thought he resembled ‘a man from Mars’. But I do remember an episode of
The X-Files
where references were made to Elvis’s UFO connections. FBI agent Fox Mulder told his partner Dana Scully that he was going
on a spiritual journey and then at the end of the show he tips up at Graceland, putting on Elvis shades.

There were lots of incidents with musicians and UFOs in the sixties, which I’m sure your cynics will say was down to the amount of acid that was being taken at the time. I think it was mostly just a case of musicians being fascinated by space and the possibilities of other life out there in the cosmos at the time. In the early sixties there were loads of bands who gave themselves cosmic names like Bill Haley and the Comets, the Telstars, the Zodiacs and others. Everyone knows that the Beatles were first called the Quarrymen, but they also changed their name to Johnny and the Moondogs for a short while. When the Beatles started becoming famous, John Lennon was asked in an interview where the name came from and he said, ‘It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto us “From this day on you are Beatles with an ‘A’.”’ Most people assumed that ‘flaming pie in the sky’ referred to a UFO. Paul McCartney also did a solo album in the nineties called
Flaming Pie
.

John Lennon’s main UFO incident came much later when he was living in New York. On 23 August 1974, Lennon and May Pang (his assistant who he got together with for a bit when he split from Yoko) saw a UFO from his apartment balcony at the Dakota Building in New York. May later described what happened, saying that John was screaming for her to come out on to the terrace and she saw ‘this large, circular object coming towards us. It was shaped like a flattened cone, and on top was a large,
brilliant red light, not pulsating as on any of the aircraft we’d see heading for a landing at Newark Airport.’ May said they stood there mesmerized, unable to believe what they were seeing.

Lennon and May were naked as apparently it was a hot night.

‘Suppose it’s looking at us,’ May said. ‘Maybe they think that everyone who lives on the East Side wanders around naked on their terraces on Friday evening. We look like Adam and Eve.’

The UFO then did one and headed off towards Brooklyn, and Lennon shouted, ‘Stop, take me with you!’

May said that all that night, Lennon kept repeating, ‘I can’t believe it . . . I’ve seen a flying saucer.’

Lennon had just finished his
Walls and Bridges
album, which came out the next month, and on the liner notes he wrote, ‘On the 23rd August 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a UFO – JL.’

He later referenced the episode in two songs, ‘Out of the Blue’ from the album
Mind Games
and ‘Nobody Told Me’ from
Milk and Honey
.