Free What Planet Am I On? by Shaun Ryder

was a thirteen-part series that looked at ‘unexplained phenomena from around the world’ and one of the episodes was all about UFOs. They looked at the Robert Taylor incident, which happened in Scotland in 1979 and is also called the Livingston incident or the Dechmont Woods encounter. Old Bob Taylor was a forester (a bit like Travis Walton) who reported seeing an extraterrestrial spacecraft. His was the first UFO case that was officially investigated by the Scottish dibble. I think it’s still the only UFO sighting in the UK that has been the subject of a criminal investigation. They also looked at the case of Kenneth Arnold, who was an American dude who made what is considered to be the first report of seeing a UFO in the US, in 1947.
    Antonio also gives me a copy of a book that he helped research called Alien Rock – The Rock’n’roll Extraterrestrial Connection , by Michael C. Luckman, who is the director of the New York Center for Extraterrestrial Research and the founder of the Cosmic Majority, ‘an organization of people on Earth who believe in UFOs, life on Mars, and the paranormal’. Antonio shows me a passage in the book which talks about how a bunch of Chilean musicians including Tito Fernández, Jorge Cruz and Gloria Benavides had a mad experiencewhen they were on tour in northern Chile in 1974. They were driving through a remote part of the desert called Pampa Soledad, which means ‘pampa of solitude’, when they spotted a light, which then began to chase them. They were convinced it was a UFO and it ended up chasing them for nearly an hour, with one of the musician dudes hanging out of the window of their car, waving a crucifix at the UFO to try and ward it off. As if that wasn’t weird enough, the orange light then split in half, like an orange into two segments, and they could see a tall humanoid figure about seven feet tall appear. Needless to say, they all shit themselves and raced to the nearest cop station, but when they got there the UFO had disappeared. Seventeen years later, in 1991, another group of people had a very similar episode on the same stretch of road in the Pampa Soledad, although this time it was a green light and they managed to catch a bit of it on a camcorder. Very strange.
    Shaun’s X-Files
    To put the mathematical chance of life elsewhere in the Universe into perspective, you need to understand Earth’s place within it. Our galaxy contains an estimated 400 billion stars – if only 0.001 per cent of these have some kind of life, that still leaves forty million planets that could support life. Then if you consider that our galaxy is just one of billions in the known universe, it’s enough to twist anyone’s melon.
    It takes us about an hour to get to the El Bosque Air Force base on the outskirts of Santiago. When we get there, I can’t believe how easy it is to get in, considering how important this base is. I mean, I know they’re expecting us, but even so, we just tip up at the front gate and they let us straight through. No checking of ID or passports, no searches, no checking the vehicle or anything. Piece of piss. Getting into Disneyland is harder than that. I’m not joking. I once did a gig there with Happy Mondays about ten years ago and it was a fucking nightmare. They have Mickey Mouse security there. I’m not taking the piss, the security there actually did have badges that say ‘Mickey Mouse security’, but they were anything but Mickey Mouse. They were actually really on top. If you’ve ever been to Disneyland you will know they have venues, nightclubs, Hard Rock Cafes and all sorts in there, and we were playing one of the venues. It was a nightmare trying to get to the venue with the band and all our gear, past all the security, and once we were there they didn’t want us to move. We couldn’t go anywhere. They just wanted us to stay backstage until we went on – we couldn’t even jib off for a little look around Disneyland or anything, not that I