‘I met 40 people who claim to have seen aliens: this is why I don’t believe them’
Before collecting any fragments of alien spaceships, you must complete a routine safety assessment – according to the UFO Field Investigator’s Manual.
The book reads: ‘Check the area for strong smells, burning eyes, unusual or loud sounds.’
It adds that if high levels of radiation are discovered, you’re advised to seek further help and proceed only with the correct items of PPE.
The extraordinary, it turns out, begins with a rather mundane checklist.
It was one of the many contradictions uncovered by journalist and alien-hunter Danny Lavelle when he attended the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) boot camp in Arizona.
Armed with the knowledge that half of Americans believe aliens have visited Earth*, for the past decade Danny has been hunting for evidence of extra terrestrial life.
‘It may be a mathematical certainty that aliens exist somewhere in the cosmos, but I’d never had any reason to believe they’re here at all,’ he tells Metro over Zoom from his home in Saddleworth, Greater Manchester.
‘The evidence is non-existent. Though it would be awesome if they did.’
As part of his research, Danny was keen to carry out his search alongside expert UFO hunters and looked online for groups that offered training.
After stumbling upon MUFON, Danny found himself standing in a car park under the hot Arizona sun in 2023, listening to Phoenix resident Stan Milford explain how he found a 20-foot-long spacecraft while out walking his dog.
Peering through the windows, pensioner Stan saw grey figures with large eyes. Then the craft suddenly took off into the air and disappeared over the horizon, he told the boot camp attendees.
‘I looked around at the group and was expecting people to wear the same incredulous expression as mine,’ remembers Danny, 39. ‘But on the contrary, they were enthralled, hanging on to Stan’s every word.
‘They were even laughing in the wrong places, meaning they were laughing with Stan rather than at the absurdity of what was coming out of his mouth.’
Danny describes the bootcamp session as ‘six hours spent in a car park listening to “paranormal rangers” tell ghost stories.’
He adds: ‘It was like a Rotary Club meeting. Just a sea of grey hair, like train spotting, but for aliens.
‘One man, whom we’ll call “Cal”, told us he woke one morning face down on his bed in a pool of his own blood. He visited his doctor, who extracted a metal object from his nose. Cal didn’t know how it had got up there, so the doctor sent it off for analysis.
‘When he rang up later to find out what it was, the doctor came on the phone and apologised, explaining the lab had lost it.
‘Cal told me that he had good reason to believe the doctor, who had worked for the government, had passed the object on. I imagined that he meant it had been handed to some clandestine government alien-hunters like the Men in Black,’ adds Danny.
Cal also claimed that he’d been woken one night by a bright light and saw creatures with grey hands crowding his bedroom.
‘It was bizarre – but I also found the boot camp charming, because this is the front line: people chasing the aliens,’ says Danny.
Danny was first inspired to hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial life after reading a story in the New York Times in 2017 entitled ‘Glowing Auras and Black Money inside the Pentagon’s Secret UFO Programme’.
The article claimed that the US Government spent millions investigating reports of unidentified flying objects while keeping its work and findings secret.
After reading it, he decided this was down to one of three things: ‘Either we’re in the middle of an alien invasion, there’s some really confused people working in intelligence – or there’s a big con going on. I found myself dropping everything and wading into it.’
Over the course of his investigations, Danny has since spoken to around 40 believers, including Alan Godfrey, a retired police constable who believes he was abducted by aliens in 1980 while trying to corral escaped cows in a housing estate in the sleepy Yorkshire town of Todmorden.
Danny also chatted to the late Nick Pope, known as ‘the real Fox Mulder’, who worked for the Ministry of Defence for 21 years, about his investigation into the Rendlesham Forest incident when US Air Force security personnel claimed to have seen strange lights in Suffolk woodland.
It’s one of the few incidents, he hasn’t been able to explain away.
‘I genuinely thought these guys in the forest did see something, whether it’s aliens or not. That one remains interesting to me,’ admits Danny. ‘I still don’t think there’s been an adequate explanation. It’s all just very murky.’
It was in 2023 that he finally decided to tour the United States, visiting Arizona, Boston, New Orleans, New York and Washington, as he hunted for alien life and met people who swore blind that we are not alone.
Documenting the adventure in his book, Chasing Aliens: Faith and Conspiracy in the UFO Heartlands, Danny reveals that he ended up feeling very disappointed.
‘I really did think maybe I’d have a moment where someone would pass me a dossier in a car park, and it would lead me to the hangars with the aliens in it.’
But it didn’t – so in the absence of leaked government evidence, Danny hunted for UFOs himself, heading to Sedona, Arizona. Famous for supposed energy centres known as ‘vortexes’, with its dark skies unpolluted by light, it has become a hub of alien-hunting.
Once again, he was left disappointed, so visited the home of Harvard scientist Avi Loeb, who has searched the Pacific Ocean bed for proof of alien life on Earth, and interviewed Jacob Chansley, better known as the ‘QAnon shaman’, a conspiracy theorist who believes he is a Starseed – an alien soul in a human body.
Jacob told Danny that we all have cosmic capabilities that have been blunted by our exposure to vaccines, pesticides and preservatives.
‘Starseeds are people who actually believe they’re aliens, that they can connect to past lives on planets where they lived as dolphin people or lions,’ explains Danny.
‘But what I found really interesting about Starseeds once I dug deeper, is that it actually has fascist roots. Their whole belief system is that they’ve got this upgraded DNA that allows them special access. It has symmetry with eugenics and far-right thinking.
‘It was funny, but given the sort of post-truth era we live in, it’s also harrowing and no surprise that all this stuff began when Trump got into office – this age of unreality.
‘What has really pushed this back into the mainstream is that the truth just doesn’t matter anymore,’ he adds.
Rather than offering credible footage of flying saucers or access to a genuine alien autopsy, Danny says his tour revealed something far more ordinary: a pervasive loneliness within a godless society.
‘I didn’t realise that aliens were so personal to people. It was akin to faith – and that was really eye-opening.’ he explains.
‘There’s something quite beautiful about that, but sad in a way – and lonely. A lot of people who believe in aliens see them as patriarchal figures who will descend from the heavens and impart this amazing wisdom to us all.
‘This idea that aliens would come here with their advanced civilisation and gift us with utopia – that’s a lovely, aspirational thing to believe in. I completely understand it.’
And while he may not have found any sort of evidence of alien life, Danny says he did come home with a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
‘We’re all suffering in some way. It is hard when you’re an adult and you have no one holding your hand anymore,’ he adds. ‘This is probably why we look to the unknown for help – and that’s the thing about the unknown. You can fill it with whatever you want.’
So after everything, does Danny believe aliens might still be out there? ‘If they are, they will find us.’
Danny’s book Faith and Conspiracy in the UFO Heartlands will be published on 30 April.
*YouGov