What Planet Am I On? (11 page)

Of the 5,000 or so geoglyphs strewn across this barren corner of northern Chile, the Atacama Giant is by far both the most impressive and mysterious. In fact, it’s the largest ancient geoglyph figure in the world – almost 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York. From ancient deity to astronomical calendar, there are several theories surrounding the meaning of this geoglyph. Some academics believe the giant was an ancient calendar for predicting where the moon would set, others think the figure’s strange appearance – that of a humanoid robot-like figure – suggests it’s a depiction of an alien, worshipped as a god called Tunupa by the Andean people of the time.

When we get to the Giant, it turns out it’s in the middle of nowhere. As I suppose everything is in the middle of a desert. In Britain, the Giant would be a National Trust site and you wouldn’t be able to get within half a mile of it. But when we arrive at the Giant, there is no one about, and certainly no one official-looking. At first sight I am
a little disappointed, after everyone had been bigging it up so much. I can’t deny it. I’m a bit like, ‘Er, is that it?’

The Giant is up on a rocky hill called Cerro Unita, so we have to park quite far away. Maybe it’s deceptive from where we park, but it doesn’t look that big at all. It looks pretty fascinating, but it certainly doesn’t look taller than the Statue of Liberty. Maybe they meant that small model of the statue that they’ve got in Las Vegas! Nicolás, our resident Giant expert, reassures us that it’s longer than a football field. My manager Warren used to be a professional footballer, so he’s got a good idea how long a football pitch is, and he’s having none of it. It looks like the very first Space Invaders, you know, the really blocky computer characters that you got back in the day.

We set off on foot up the rocky Cerro Unita to the Giant, and obviously it does get bigger when you get closer, but it also weirdly disappears. It was created to be viewed from afar so when you get up close you can’t really work out which bit is which. We reach the feet first, obviously, but then as we work our way up the mountain, we lose track of which bit goes where – we can’t work out the Giant’s arse from his elbow at first. Then we reach the top and we can’t find the head. The outlines of the figure are only about a foot high, if that, and the whole mountainside is covered with rocks so we get a bit lost. Still, considering I’ve got two experts with me, one of whom is supposed to have been studying this for fifteen years, you’d think they’d be able to find the head of this Giant between them. I seem to have more idea what’s
what than them at times. At one stage I wonder whether everyone is just blagging me and Wayne the director has worded them up to send me on a wild goose chase. Eventually, though, we do work out where the head is.

What is crazy is how these rocks have managed to stay here for well over a thousand years even though, when you’re up close, you can see it’s just a few stones piled up on each other. You could easily walk up to touch or even move all these rocks as well as there’s no one else around. I could rearrange them to read ‘MUFC’ if I wanted to. In fact, come to think of it, the Giant does look a bit like a kid’s drawing of a Man United Red Devil. I pretend to take one of the rocks from the Giant’s eyeballs for the camera, saying, ‘This is coming back to Manchester with me!’ but I’m only messing about. Believe me, though, if that Giant was in Manchester it wouldn’t last until the end of the day, let alone a thousand years. Some scally would have had its eyes away, some other geezer would have had his arm. Before the week was out, the Giant would be part of someone’s back-garden path.

When they were doing the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002, they redeveloped the canal path from the city centre up to the new stadium and laid down this really nice York stone one day. They came back the next day and it was gone. Someone had it away overnight. As quick as they could lay it down, they kept on having it away. Some unsuspecting accountant or footballer in Cheshire has probably got a lovely York stone patio he paid good money for, and in reality it’s just the nicked
canal path from the Commonwealth Games.

Apparently you can see Bolivia from the top of the Atacama Giant. You can see for miles, that’s for sure, but it is pretty much just desert so fuck knows if we’re looking at Bolivia or not.

It’s a mad thing to see, the Atacama Giant, but I’m not sure I’m as convinced as Nicolás that it’s an alien astronaut that an ancient tribe had seen and then re-created in rocks. Maybe one of them saw a vision of something, but I’m not sure how much I can count this as hard, solid evidence of UFOs.

THE DAY AFTER
our trip to check out the Atacama Giant, I’m back in the desert again to investigate one of the most talked-about UFO cases in Chilean history. Back in 1977, the leader of a Chilean military patrol, Corporal Armando Valdés, was abducted one night in front of the rest of his patrol. Over thirty-five years after it happened, it is still one of the most famous UFO cases in Chile and it’s talked about all over the world.

On the night of 25 April 1977, near a remote outpost called Pampa Lluscuma (close to the border with Peru), Valdés and his boys were on a night patrol and sitting around a campfire in the early hours when they saw an amazing bright light descend from the sky. They all shit themselves. As he was the geezer in charge, Valdés decided it was on his toes to investigate, so ‘after praying to God
and ordering the light to leave . . . after demanding that it identify itself, I moved a few metres away from my men’.

But then he just disappeared in front of his pals. Gone. Disappeared. No sign of him. He eventually reappeared fifteen minutes later, but he was totally freaked out and start shouting at his pals, ‘You don’t know who we are or where we come from, but we will be back soon . . .’ Then he collapsed and passed out. He had been clean-shaven when he disappeared fifteen minutes earlier, but now he had a bloody beard. When he woke up later he said to his pals, ‘I don’t remember anything from the moment I left you.’ He then ordered them, ‘Get ready to leave because it’s 4.30 a.m.’ But it was actually 7 a.m. by that time. His watch had stopped at 4.30 a.m. but had somehow advanced five days and said 30 April instead of the 25th. All very strange.

Bear in mind this was Chile in 1977, so the dictator Augusto Pinochet was in charge, who was a no-messing kind of dude. Pinochet was Commander-in-Chief of the Army and had overthrown the government in a coup in 1973, and then he was made president by the junta. His government are believed to have killed a couple of thousand people and tortured up to 30,000, so Pinochet wasn’t a geezer to be messing around with. When people are being tortured for stepping out of line, it’s probably going to make a corporal in the Army think twice about coming out and making up some outlandish claims about being abducted, isn’t it?

We’ve arranged to meet Patricio Abusleme Hoffman,
an author who has written a book called
La Noche de los Centinelas
about the Valdés case. ‘This is the case that made Chilean ufology known worldwide,’ says Patricio. ‘However, no one bothered to conduct a serious, in-depth investigation of the case. I took up the challenge in 2002, and it took me eight years to compile the protagonists’ accounts and reassemble this “impossible story”.’

We meet at the hotel and then head out into the desert to hook up with one of the guys who was in Valdés’s patrol and witnessed what happened that night. Old Valdés himself doesn’t give interviews any more. He became a born-again Christian and an evangelical teacher and doesn’t want to talk about what happened that night.

The dude we’re meeting is Humberto Rojas. The incident happened near Arica, a port in northern Chile – we’re meeting him near there so we can get more of a feel of what took place that night. As we start the climb into the desert hills, the road feels a bit like Snake Pass, the road over the Pennines between Sheffield and Manchester, but then it quickly becomes more desolate. By the time we meet Humberto it’s already getting dark. Our director, Wayne – who’s a top bloke who’s won two BAFTAs, as he likes to casually slip into conversation now and again – wants me to meet with Humberto at night, around the campfire out in the desert, so I can imagine what it was like for him and his pals back in the day. He didn’t get his BAFTAs for nothing, you know.

Humberto seems a pretty cool dude, with his little
pork-pie hat perched on his head. He can’t speak English so Patricio has to translate for us. He tells us how he and the rest of the patrol were sat around the campfire that night, ‘telling stories, singing and telling jokes to pass the time and try to ignore the cold’.

Humberto remembers his pal Pedro Rosales seeing the light first and screaming, and then giving them a shout to come and look. Humberto ran outside with his other pals to find a large, incredibly bright object moving around in the sky about 600 metres up the valley from where they were stood.

‘The light came down and before it touched the hillside, another light came out of the big one. That light that passed before us illuminated the whole area, it was lit up as if it was daytime. We all held hands because we didn’t know what it was . . .’

Never mind Humberto and his pals holding hands back then, old Humberto is obviously still freaked out about it because, as he’s telling me all this, he gets proper emotional and starts grabbing hold of my arm. I’m like, ‘All right, easy, mate.’

I was a teenager when I had my first encounter back in the seventies and I wasn’t really scared. But maybe I would have been scared if it had happened to me when I was older.

Humberto remembers, ‘Valdés asked the light to identify itself. He commanded it in the name of God to identify itself . . . and there was total silence. Suddenly we realized we had lost Valdés.’

When he was interviewed after the incident, Valdés said it was as if he had been ‘swallowed by the light’.

As I said earlier, when Valdés reappeared fifteen minutes later, he was in a bit of a state.

‘Suddenly Valdés fell in front of us,’ Humberto tells me. ‘Valdés was crying and calling for his mother. His eyes were wild. Then he started shouting: “You don’t know who we are or where we come from, but we will be back soon . . .”’

Sitting round the campfire here, under the desert sky, it’s impossible not to get swept up in Humberto’s account of what happened that night. As with any old campfire story, there’s some debate about the finer details, and I ask Humberto what he thinks was going on.

‘I really believe they were UFOs. I think we are not alone in the galaxy. I think that the sensation never leaves you, you always feel like you are being watched from the skies.’

I do believe there is something to Humberto’s story and he seems like a salt-of-the-earth bloke to me.

Shaun’s X-Files

Bizarre phenomena of the ‘Missing Time’ kind experienced by Corporal Valdés are often associated with alien abduction, the most contentious side of ufology. Another of the most famous examples is the case of Betty and Barney Hill, who I mentioned earlier (although I’m a bit suspicious about their story). The first widely reported alien abduction
in the USA, it’s supposed to have taken place in 1961. After seeing a cigar-shaped UFO whilst out driving, they awoke in their car to find their clothes ripped, their watches stopped at the same time and with apparently no memory of the previous two hours.

What’s really freaky is that as Humberto finishes telling us his story, we spot a mysterious light in the night sky in the distance. We stop filming and all of us – me, Humberto, Patricio, my manager Warren, Wayne the director and all the film crew – just stand there, amazed at this strange light in the sky. It seems to be changing colour, from red to green, and moving, then stopping and then setting off again. Wayne is convinced it’s a star but you can see why some people might mistake it for a UFO. He may be right, but it’s refreshing to be in a country where many people’s first instinct is to believe rather than disbelieve, and a timely reminder for me to keep my eyes on the sky for the rest of my trip.

Next morning we are back in Santiago, the capital. We’re off to investigate what sounds like a properly bonkers story. Even by UFO standards, this case is properly off the hook. It’s an alien-contact story that has been around in Chile since the 1980s and it’s pretty wild, claiming that aliens aren’t just visiting Earth, but living here among us.
Well, not exactly among us, but living on a ‘secret island’ off Chile. It all sounds pretty far out to me – a secret island full of aliens? Surely there aren’t any secret islands now that we have all this satellite technology and Google Maps and what have you. ‘Secret island’ all sounds a bit Robinson Crusoe. But that’s what I’m here in Chile for – to investigate some of the most bizarre things that are alleged to have happened here.

We’ve arranged to meet a geezer called Sergio Alacaya, who has spent fifteen years investigating this weird ‘Friendship’ case.

Shaun’s X-Files

The first reported contact from the mysterious group calling themselves ‘The Friendship’ was in 1984, when a radio operator called Octavio Ortiz claimed to have made contact with a mysterious group claiming to be ‘not of this world’. Many witnesses reported seeing UFOs off the coast of Chile around the same time, although this has been explained by the authorities as a French stratospheric balloon. The captain of a ship called
Mytilus II
also claimed he had been hired by ‘some gringos’, who took him to an island and ‘outfitted his ship with strange equipment’. They told him they were associated with UFOs that had been spotted. Ever since, stories have persisted about an ethereal group of beings who live in secret on one of the thousands of remote islands in southern Chile
who possess magical healing powers. Rumour has it that either they have regular contact with aliens, have aliens living with them or are part human, part alien.