Free What Planet Am I On? by Shaun Ryder Page A

would have wanted to. It would look a bit weird, a few forty-year-old men mooching around Disneyland on their own, you know what I mean? I’d take my kids there, but it’s not the sort of place you go with your pals unless you want a few weird looks.
    Anyway, it’s smooth as anything getting into ElBosque and when we get inside, Commander Perry, one of their top fighter pilots and instructors, is waiting for us. It feels a bit like the Tom Cruise film Top Gun . All the pilots are wearing those all-in-one jumpsuits that you sometimes see trendy dicks in East London wearing. Commander Perry is obviously top boy here – he is a pretty relaxed dude but you can tell everyone respects him. He reminds me of the main instructor with the ’tache in Top Gun . He shows us around the gaff a bit, and explains what they get up to, how the skies here are full of planes every day, but how they had never had an incident like the one that happened that day in 2010.
    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 awaywith 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.

CHAPTER 6
The Andes and the Stormtroopers
    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