Rise and shine with Shaun and Jenny

JENNY RANDLES finds that not much has changed in 30 years of morning television’s UFO coverage

Over the years I have done many TV interviews about UFOs. One show that

I recall fondly is the two-hour plus live magazine This Morning, on air now for 33 years. The five-days-a-week series has won multiple awards and its presenters are household names. Like most shows of this type, it has an item on UFOs now and then – there was one in September, when musician and long-term UFO enthusiast Shaun Ryder (right) was invited on to chat and take phone calls from viewers.

This was of interest to me because I did the first such feature on This Morning on 30 March 1989, just a few months after the show started. A studio had been created on the dockside in Liverpool, with a floating pontoon as part of the set, Granada’s husband and wife team of Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan were presenting, and I was ferried by car from Stockport to Albert Dock just after dawn.

I could not help but compare my first episode of This Morning (I did others later) with the one involving Shaun Ryder, so I thought I’d engage in some musing about how ufologists interact with the public, and the nature of ‘public’ UFOs.

How much has changed and how much stayed the same across a third of a century? Not much, in how the item is presented. Guest explains why they believe in UFOs; viewers call in with their stories; guest analyses them. After all, this is the essence of UFO investigation – though as I’ve pointed out in interviews, you cannot analyse a case fully in just five minutes over the phone. Yet live TV requires you to try. Was it really a UFO, or just a balloon? Probably not, or maybe, isn’t the most satisfying answer, but it’s often the only honest one we can give.

Of course, you may be asking why is Shaun Ryder now a UFO expert? In his ‘day job’ Shaun began as front man of Manchester band Happy Mondays, part of the Factory Records label in the Eighties and Nineties and the focus of the city’s lively music scene. By chance, one of the Granada Reports TV presenters alongside Richard and Judy was Tony Wilson, who ran the Hacienda Club and founded Factory. I knew Tony at Granada and did a couple of late-night art shows he presented for the network from the iconic Granada building (where our local UFO group held meetings; it’s since been flattened and ITV moved down river to a spanking new Salford Quays complex).

So why was Shaun the go-to UFO expert in 2021? The Twittersphere found the idea hysterical, but his interest is very real and not recent. It goes back to something that happened when he was 15 and living in Salford.

Back then, I lived in the area too (I was in Irlam, and Shaun in Irlams o’ th’ Height). It was mid-1978, around 7am; it was just getting light and Shaun was at the bus stop heading into town where he worked as a messenger boy. A local schoolboy caught the same bus daily; they knew each other by sight and both witnessed what happened. (That by now 50-something has never spoken of what he saw; if you are reading this, then please do!) Shaun says an object appeared and zig-zagged across the sky. It had lots of lights and Shaun’s mind considered the possibility of an alien invasion. “I had never seen anything like it,” he says. He did not go public as he was just a kid. It moved so fast that he knew right away: “It wasn’t ours.”

The media ‘solved’ one UFO case around that time as a Rugby stadium on the blink – an odd explanation (though Shaun calls it something else). Our UFO group was pragmatic, as lots of people saw that incident at the same time, and, contrary to intuition, UFO researchers regard mass sightings like this as almost always caused by an Identified Flying Object. Close encounter UFO experiences tend to be focused as to people and place (if UFOs were something real and extraordinary and yet so overt that they showed themselves to cities full of people, then the debate would long have been over).

This event was just the start for Shaun. Other things happened later, although he understands – given his freely admitted time spent around the recreational drugs and music scene – that some people might be sceptical. His teenage experience, though, needed no such caveat – and, there was another witness.

On This Morning the viewer calls to Shaun had barely changed since that day 32 years ago when I sat in the chair. He dealt with a couple of callers in his inimitable way, but nothing dramatic emerged. A woman who had been at Stonehenge had a UFO turn up on a photo of the base of the stones. It was clear to me in seconds, from long experience of similar ‘UFOs’, that this was a lens flare; a reminder that not a lot has changed across the years in terms of UFO reporting or the hard task of on-the-spot analysis of something that might have changed a caller’s whole outlook on life. However, digging into that period in 1978 brought forth an unsolved case I had long forgotten from around the same time as Shaun’s.

It was 21 July 1978 in a house between Irlam (where I lived) and the other Irlam (where Shaun caught his bus) and right beside Salford Quays (now host to the new ITV studios). There were two witnesses, who by chance had seen me being interviewed on Granada TV (possibly by Tony Wilson). They had contacted ‘UFO expert’ Patrick Moore, who told them they’d seen a meteorite. That is obviously absurd, but he talked them out of any thought of it being a UFO until they saw me on TV, solving a case but admitting that some sightings remained puzzling.

One midsummer evening this recently retired couple were admiring the lovely sky when a strange object appeared. It resembled a child’s drawing of the Sun – a dark, flat disc in the centre, with rays shooting out all around that were at least 10 times the diameter of the central object. They estimated there were 30 or 40 of these ‘antennæ’ and they observed the object for about 90 seconds (the husband had time to fetch binoculars, so this was not an overestimate). The object moved slowly and silently in an arc of 45 degrees across the sky, heading southwest. But there was no change in perspective as it moved – this was particularly noticeable to the wife, a gifted artist who immediately saw the anomaly.

This UFO disappeared in an odd way too. The rays ‘extinguished’, as if made up of a slew of lights going out one after the other in sequence as the object moved away. Remarkably, despite the nature of this event above an urban area on a lovely evening, nobody else saw this event. Half of the city should have. So why was it just this couple?

As I said earlier, sometimes the more interesting cases appear to be more in the nature of a personal display than an event that anyone in the right place at the right time can witness. UFO encounters are strange. Which is why we love them I guess.