But then, I suppose that’s exactly what the aliens would want us to believe. And as I will be told more than once during my weekend at Awakening UFO & Conscious Life Expo: to outmanoeuvre the aliens, we need to think like the aliens.
Derrell W Sims understands this well, so he responds to the woman’s claim by simply flicking the rim of his cowboy hat, fixing her with a cold, hard stare – the kind of cold, hard stare he fixed an alien with when he was first abducted by one in Texas, aged four – and unholstering his handheld infrared camera. ‘Well, ma’am, I guess we’d better find out.’
Sims, who is 75, has an outfit, moustache, and general bearing that collectively mean he’s identifiable as Texan from several furlongs away. He is a professional alien hunter, as well as a hypnotist, private detective, karate black-belt, handwriting analyst, former CIA agent, and – something has to pay the bills – occasional estate agent. (‘Need Someone to Handle a Tough Situation?’ his business card reads, over a decades-old photograph of him pinning a tiger to a lawn.)
The possible implant is in the woman’s hand, so Sims asks her to remove her jewellery in order to run a few tests. A small crowd around us looks on expectantly. She stands stock still, offering her wrist. First the infrared camera is held up to it, to see if there’s a strange heat source. Then a Geiger counter, which checks for radiation. Then a magnet detector, which I suppose is just a magnet.
So you’ve been abducted by aliens before, have you? I ask, while we wait. ‘Oh yeah, quite a few times,’ the woman replies, in a broad Yorkshire accent. ‘They’ve spoken to me in my head.’
She tells a story about a family holiday to North Wales in 1997 when she was taken, then had her memory wiped and woke up in a muddy field in the dark a couple of hours later. The incident in 2007 is less clear-cut and involves being tied to a radiator, or something. Her hand has occasionally ached ever since.
Sims is done with his tests. ‘I hate to admit it, but you’re fine,’ he says. Everybody’s a little disappointed. ‘Well, that’s good to know,’ the woman says, flexing her wrist. She too seems a little disappointed.
I catch the eye of her husband, whose raised eyebrow I mistake for scepticism. He turns to Sims. ‘Sorry, while we’re here, can you have a look at my neck? I’m sure there’s something in there…’ Sims grits his teeth. It is lunchtime and his wife, Doris, has just returned with a plate of sandwiches. ‘Have you had it X-rayed?’ The man has not. ‘Go and get an X-ray first.’
It was somewhere between witnessing this alien-probe health check, hearing from an ‘expert’ speaker that there are highly intelligent gambling-addicted aliens who live among us and have CIA handlers to stop them cleaning up in Vegas, and reading in the programme about how we need to eat more steak if we want to prevent incubus and succubus attacks, that I realised the UFO community may still have some way to go before it is taken seriously by mainstream society.
But welcome anyway, earthlings, to Europe’s largest conference of its kind. Over the weekend of the August bank holiday, the most ardent believers in extraterrestrials and the paranormal have met to assure one another they are not alone – and that nor, of course, are we. The 2023 edition is literally taking place at Bowlers Exhibition Centre, on the industrial outskirts of Manchester. Figuratively, it’s taking place under a somewhat unexpected spotlight of relevance.
Thanks to an extraordinary congressional hearing in Washington, DC in July, 2023 might – emphasis on the might, please – go down as the year believing in aliens and unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, finally became acceptable. In the US, excitement had been building for several years, beginning in 2020 when the Pentagon released three Navy videos showing mysterious objects hurtling through the sky while pilots expressed bafflement.
After that, politicians on both sides requested more information on what the government knows, or is doing, about the matter. It led to Barack Obama being asked the same question. He didn’t laugh it off.
‘What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory,’ the former President told CBS in 2022. ‘They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.’
For once, Obama’s candour was applauded by conspiracy-hugging Right-wingers like Tucker Carlson, who felt that the Pentagon not knowing what was in the sky was, ‘from a national security perspective, a very big problem’.
Then, in July this year, came the big one: David Grusch, a former American intelligence official, claimed, under oath, that the US government has conducted a ‘multi-decade’ programme that has collected, and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UFOs.
Grusch wasn’t quite as forthcoming in the congressional hearing as he was in media interviews (he previously told reporters the government had ‘a very large, like a football-field kind of size’ alien craft in its possession), but he did come with other witnesses, including Navy commanders and pilots who claim they have seen UAP – unidentified anomalous phenomena, a preferred term to ‘UFO’ these days – fairly regularly.
Politicians took the testimony seriously, as they sort of have to. The US government has now launched the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) for service members, and eventually members of the public, to submit what they believe are alien sightings.
Earlier this month, it released a map disclosing where the most sightings of unidentified objects have been recorded, based on reports between 1996 and 2023. Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Baghdad, Los Angeles and Dubai all feature. Other countries, including the UK, are not quite as transparent, or ready to investigate things. But where the US leads, we tend to follow. Eventually.
What this means is that all over the world, the traditional, LOL-look-at-these-loons UFO community is like a golden retriever who finally caught the squirrel it’s been fruitlessly chasing every day for most of its life: overjoyed, but not really sure what to do next, given in all honesty it never expected to actually succeed.
That’s the vibe on the opening night of the Awakening Expo, anyway, and I’m enjoying it.
‘Years ago, nobody would listen to us. We were the crazy ones, we were the nutty ones with the tinfoil hats. And we were pushing for this, yelling from the tops of the mountains…’ Jimmy Church, a US late-night radio host and emcee for the weekend, tells the few hundred gathered in the hangar for the exclusive ‘Platinum Friday’ line-up.
‘Well, I kind of miss those days, because now they want to be our friends. And suddenly, we’re not so crazy. We’re in the position of, “Well, we kind of got what we wanted…” And I’m a little uncomfortable with that. I kind of liked the old days when we were fighting the fight. Now, the attention feels a little strange to me.’
In the audience, a man in an ‘East Anglia UFO group’ T-shirt nods. A woman with vivid green hair turns to her partner and whispers: ‘It does.’ I look down at the event programme, which shows there are more than 30 different speaking slots, panels and presentations taking place over the next three days, as well as quite a lot of break periods to visit the much-needed bar.
Church, a gruff and goateed figure in ill-advised skinny jeans, is one of five men who appear on posters for the convention. Of those, three are wearing sunglasses in their photographs. Wearing shades indoors turns out to be a common feature among showbiz UFOlogists, which strikes me as a strange choice for people who claim to see more clearly than the rest of us… but in the scheme of things, that doesn’t seem the most important question to ask.
Church introduces a distressing documentary about a really sticky and foul-smelling alien being caught in Brazil in the ’90s. After that, it’s time for the Friday guest of honour, who for tenuous reasons is the Liverpudlian funk and soul DJ, TV presenter and actor Craig Charles.
‘And I thought Red Dwarf fans were freaky, but you lot…’ Charles says, as he takes to the stage. The audience do not entirely know what to do with the tone of that, but any mention of Red Dwarf, the cult sci-fi sitcom Charles has appeared in on and off for years, is seen as a positive.
Charles, who has most of his cigarette breaks interrupted by selfie requests, is good value. He keeps an open mind about UFOs and aliens, he says, and having made documentaries about alien conspiracies, he’s closer to a believer than a sceptic.
This is good enough for the audience, who even forgive him trolling Church with some of the common (but still pretty sound) sceptic arguments, like: why do UFOs crash so often if they’re so bloody advanced? And in an age when we all have brilliant cameras in our pockets, why is ‘proven footage’ of them always so grainy and rubbish? Church replies that Russia recently crashed a spacecraft on the moon, which doesn’t seem wholly relevant but satisfies Charles.
Later, attendees grow especially excited when Charles begins an anecdote about him and his brother-in-law seeing mysterious flying triangles in the middle of the night in Galway a few years ago. People lean forward eagerly in their chairs. ‘There is a caveat…’ Charles says, ‘we’d just had a massive spliff… but I don’t think that affected what we were seeing.’
On stage, Church smiles wearily, before asking him to talk more about the triangles. Charles says they were like little identical shapes, unconnected but flying in a perfect V formation, ‘almost like geese’. Overwhelmingly, it sounds as if Craig Charles once saw some geese.
As well as birds, there is documented evidence of people seeing peculiar things in the sky since at least the Roman times (in 228 BC the historian Livy saw ‘phantom ships […] gleaming in the sky’), but modern UFOlogy started around the 1940s. Ever since, there have been spikes in interest every few decades. A sceptic might note that these ripples coincide with innovations in aerospace technology, or investment in space programmes, or US tensions with Russia, or general fear of outsiders invading. Believers would say those are just that: coincidences.
The next morning at Awakening Expo, almost 2,000 people – paying between £100 and £200 for different classes of tickets – shuffle into the exhibition centre for the first full day. There are all sorts, but the profile of an average attendee might be: white, male, early middle-aged, bearded (goatees are very popular), wearing a sci-fi T-shirt of some sort, and armed with one of those vapes that’s the size of a small hatchback. They’re all very nice, too.
Some wander around dressed as Star Wars characters. Others clutch pints of breakfast lager and pose for pictures with plastic aliens. Stalls, offering £30 numerology readings or essential oil car diffusers, sit alongside tables where the scene’s celebrities, such as Derrell W Sims the alien hunter, are available for meet and greets (and implant checks). I nod to a man dolefully playing a handpan drum – an instrument that kind of resembles a UFO, I guess – in a corner. He will keep playing all weekend.
The masses are energised early by a talk from the well-spoken and wonkish Nick Pope, who examined UFOs in the 1990s for the UK Ministry of Defence before that unit was disbanded. He thinks Britain is woefully behind on the issue, and says that if the public and government couldn’t handle a pandemic, which it openly plans for, without having a national breakdown, well, imagine how unprepared we are for aliens.
You cannot argue with that, but you can argue with the extent of the cover-up claimed by so many UFOlogists, which gives remarkable credit to politicians: 15 presidential administrations and as many British governments would have had to maintain the world’s greatest concealment of data, evidence, DNA and physical alien objects, if what’s often asserted is true. Astounding efficiency, for people who can rarely make trains run on time, let alone write handover notes for one another.
On the bright side, climate change wouldn’t be so much of a problem, Pope says, if we’d just fund space programmes. ‘There is no planet B, as they say. Well there are plenty of planet Bs, of course. The problem is that at the moment they’re out of reach.’ Remember, Pope adds, ‘the sceptics have to be right every day; the believers only have to be right once.’
Buoyed by thoughts of my future living on Uranus, by mid-morning I find the Glendenning girls from Scarborough: sisters Tracey and Claire, and Tracey’s daughter Taniya McLaren. They’ve been on the wine. ‘Might as well make a weekend of it, right?’ Tracey, 59, says.
It’s her third time at the conference, which has run on and off since 2015. ‘I’ve always been interested, and I’ve had loads of UFO experiences, so I’m a keen enthusiast. I call myself a bit of a UFOlogist, I suppose.’ In Scarborough, she’s seen suspicious lights and shapes in the sky plenty of times over the years, including one intense two-hour display.
And did you get any footage? I ask. She frowns. ‘So what happened was, I got the camera to film, filmed what I thought I’d filmed, but when I played it back, all you could hear were our voices going, “Wow, look at that!” So no, there’s no footage.’
In fact, she’s seen so many UFOs that she thinks there might be a portal in her house, but can’t understand why aliens would want to trouble Scarborough. The woman who doesn’t have an alien implant in her arm expressed a similar feeling during her medical check-up with Sims.
‘No, you were created wonderfully. There is nothing like you in the universe. You know what a Grey alien’s IQ is? Eighty. He’s a moron. So there are things about you that are unique, and they’re interested in that,’ Sims told her. Nobody can be you-er than you. It was a lovely sentiment – the kind you hear from Dr Seuss, or Lizzo.
Anyway, Tracey doesn’t care for the sceptics. ‘People can think what they bloody want of me. I know. It’s my truth, and if nobody wants to believe it, it doesn’t matter to me.’ Taniya, 36, is a hairdresser in York, and a firm believer: ‘You know when they set the nuclear bomb off? That’s when the aliens came down and said, “Oi, you shouldn’t be doing that.”’ Her sister once saw an alien sitting on her windowsill and ‘lobbed a shoe at it’. She laughs. ‘I don’t talk like this at work, it’s because I’ve had a few drinks. But I come here for my mum really, it’s nice to get her out.’
In hangar two, Jonny Enoch, an American ‘esoteric author’ and researcher begins a talk. His oratory is part faith healer, part neglected Trump scion, but his conviction is total. ‘We know this,’ he repeats firmly, after saying something we absolutely do not know, like some aliens are particularly good at collecting their own waste.
There are, he says, at least six types of known extraterrestrials, each of which he introduces with a CGI mock-up. For some reason, at least four are portrayed as weirdly sexy (this is a theme in the graphics displayed during talks all weekend). I’ll summarise the most common ones now, so you know what to look out for.
First up, the Greys. Your common-or-garden ET, these are the yay-high bald fellas: big heads, big eyes, curiously silent under questioning. And as Sims says, morons. They’re all over the place, because they can time travel.
Then there are the Reptilians, who are big lizard-folk. ‘For the record, I do not believe the Queen was one of these,’ Enoch states, with pathological sincerity.
Up next are the Tall Whites, who may sound like a Starbucks order but look just like Tilda Swinton. They’re white-haired, blue-eyed, statuesque, live for hundreds of years, and are formidably clever. ‘Their favourite thing to do is to go to Las Vegas and gamble, so they have CIA handlers… We know this.’ Is it problematic that the perceived best and smartest alien is also the most Aryan? If it is, the thought hasn’t occurred to those in hangar two.
Fishy aliens now. They’re underwater, obviously, like in Avatar. Then the Felines, who are best imagined as the lion from the Wizard of Oz wearing a Canadian Mountie uniform. You get the idea; there are a lot of them about, and remarkably they’re all humanoid, with forward-facing eyes, four limbs and an upright stance. The chances.
Many serious UFOlogists complain about smart-alec journalists occasionally covering their subject, then relentlessly taking the mickey. They will likely do so about this very article. But the spotters’ guide to aliens reflects the essential tension in the UFO community at the moment: as serious and mainstream as things are becoming, as inexplicable as some of the evidence is, as close as we get to full disclosure of government cover-ups… It is still frequently preposterous, or at least easily strays into that territory, to the occasional chagrin of more serious researchers.
An issue is that believing requires a certain mindset, one that is open to conspiracy theories – and with that mindset, it’s difficult to stay disciplined enough to ignore other potential deceptions. Because that’s the thing about conspiracy theorists: if you can convince yourself you’re being lied to about one thing, what’s stopping you convincing yourself you’re being lied to about everything?
It explains why, over the weekend at Awakening Expo, I hear punters talk about Covid jabs controlling us, the CIA rigging elections to keep Trump out, the moon landings being faked, and the reason that the mobile phone signal in this area of Manchester is bad: because the aliens know this convention is happening and want to p–s everybody off.
It’s a difficult subject to regulate, basically. And there are also a lot of fast talkers out to make a quick buck. ‘Oh, there are a lot of bad actors in the industry, a lot of absolute crap out there,’ says Steve Mera, a paranormal specialist from Bolton who runs Awakening Expo. ‘They don’t help, and put it in the wrong light or perspective. Most people who do TV shows about it don’t know what they’re talking about. A lot of hoaxing goes on, but there are a lot of true phenomena, and it’s changing people’s lives for ever.’
Mera, 59, has operated in this community for more than 40 years, investigating ghosts, UFOs, alien abductions, strange energies in government buildings, the lot. And thanks to TV shows, conventions and magazines, he has done more to bring it to a wider audience than most. He wears a mismatched grey three-piece suit, has a goatee, obviously, and has done well for himself: one of his cars, currently being ogled by bouncers in the car park, is a heavily modified black Ford Raptor pickup he imported from Africa and converted into an alien-hunter vehicle.
I wonder if all the entanglement with mythology and sci-fi bothers him. ‘No no, this is what we wanted. Most of the people here realise we need new people coming forward. We need to attract a younger audience, and drag teenagers away from their PlayStations. I’ve seen guys here who are 16, 17, 18, and that’s amazing. They need to be the trailblazers.’
Some things have been bugging me, I confess, as we chat in an empty hangar between talks. If aliens are real, and interested in us, why are they so sneaky and fleeting? Why do they zoom past military air bases and crash into areas of the US where people are already prone to believing in conspiracy theories? Why don’t they just pop up and say hello?
‘Because they’re deceptive, they have their own agenda, they do what they want to do. They don’t care about us,’ Mera says. ‘They’re not going to stop on the White House lawn and say, “We’re here,” because they have a job to do, and we’re a test, like a petri dish.’
Have you seen one? I interrupt. ‘Oh my God, loads.’
Clearest sighting? ‘About 30 feet away, in Palm Springs. About the width of this hangar. There were five small beings. They were about this big, child-sized. Big heads. No clothing. It was night in the middle of the desert, so we hot-tailed it out of there.’
I think I know the answer to this, but – any video footage? ‘No. It only appeared in the sky when we put the cameras away. Which is interesting…’
The hangar begins to fill up again. Mera, a kind and gentle-seeming man who ‘couldn’t care less’ if anybody thinks he’s deluded, is needed elsewhere, so makes his way back through the bar. The Glendennings raise their glasses at us as we pass. The woman without an alien implant in her arm is in a lively dialogue with the author who wants us to eat steak to deter demons. The handpan drummer is still handpan drumming.
‘The biggest turning point over the last 12 months is that when you talk about UFOs, you’re no longer the elephant in the room,’ Mera says. ‘We appreciate that there are things around, and they’re not from our neighbourhood. You’re not so strange, you don’t get so shunned. And that’s great for us, because we’ve been trying to shift this stigmata [sic] that we’re all nuts. Those things are real. And the future is the thing. Because they’ll keep it a secret as long as they possibly can.’
The future is the thing, all right. I peel off towards the exit. The aliens may be super-smart, and they may look like Tilda Swinton, but if they ever do make an official visit to Planet Earth, I bet they won’t be prepared to meet this lot.
Strange things go on. That much we do know.