‘It happened to me too’
“Iwas about five years old. It was the summer holidays. I was on a cot outside our house in Dehradun. I looked up and saw a lit-up red disc hovering above a bank of clouds. It was soundless. I asked my grandmother what it was. She didn’t know. I asked my elder sister. She guessed it was a helicopter. So why is there no sound, I asked? She looked up but the craft had vanished.”
That’s Kamal Pant’s tale from 1987, an event that he believes was an encounter with an extra-terrestrial space vessel. It left such an impact on him that he decided to study UFOS informally.
“To me the knowledge of why they are here is more important than that they are here,” says Pant, now 39 and a software engineer, “They are reaching out to us and welcoming to us into the cosmos. And that is the answer that will create discomfort in you and at the same time free you from fear, doubt and disbelief.”
In 2014, Pant says he also photographed and filmed “a mothership taking off from and landing on the moon”. He mailed NASA about it. He heard back a month later, via email. “Someone from there asked me to ‘stay away’.”
Does he have this email, Wknd asked. “No. My system got corrupted a day later, and some of my videos vanished. My computer had been tampered with.”
This is often how it is with first-person accounts of encounters with aliens.
As with Fox Mulder in the X-files, there are unshakeable memories, inexplicable experiences and nefarious forces at work at every turn. The evidence vanishes, the incontrovertible proof is lost, the story is all that is left. “You gotta believe me, Scully,” might as well be the anthem of the UFO enthusiast.
DESTINATION: EARTH
The US has reported the most UFO sightings, but India has documented its fair share since the 1950s. (Scan the QR code alongside to watch a video on some of the encounters recorded in India.)
One of the earliest accounts on record is from March 1951 New Delhi, when 25 members of a flying club saw a cigarshaped object in the sky that they said was about 100 ft long. One of the most recent accounts comes from Hitesh K Yadav, 23, founder and head of the bi-monthly zine UFO Magazine India (he also heads a team of volunteers that investigates UFO sightings and encounters across the country).
“The most recent sighting happened on June 27, from 10.50 pm to 3 am at Manipal, Karnataka. Four dots of bright light appeared in the sky, without apparent origin,” Yadav says. The footage reached him through his network of UFO scouts. His own encounter goes back a bit, to 2002. He saw an alien at his home in Chandigarh, a 4-ft-tall greyish creature that he awoke to find floating outside his room, before it gently vanished.
It’s a close-knit network, the web of believers. Running an investigative initiative similar to Yadav’s is Ramkrishan Vaishnav, 31, an entrepreneur from Rajasthan and founder of TOP (The Other Planet) Research Group, set up in 2008 to investigate UFO sightings. Among the volunteers at TOP is Pant, who saw the hovering red disc as a child.
“This is very difficult area to pursue,” says Pant.
There are naysayers and people are always questioning the sightings. “There was a point last year when I almost quit. But then I reminded myself that different people have different opinions. I think the ETS have been here, around, for many thousands of years. Broad-minded people know that we are not alone in the universe. That keeps me going.”