Page 10 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - Vol 24 No 2 - February 24 2015

UFOs Exlored In One-Man Play
UFO phenomenon
explored in new one-man
play (with video)
Pat Donnelly - Montreal Gazette
In an age when miniature drones are
available to the masses, an increase in
the number of UFO sightings is
inevitable.
If a strange object lands in the back yard, it
could just be delivering a book from Amazon.ca
to the wrong address.
Most of us have never taken reports of
unidentified flying objects very seriously. But
the stories attached to them hold a peculiar
fascination, stirring our curiosity about whether
life exists on other planets, or within other
galaxies.
Playwright/actor Damien Atkins has
taken the time to thoroughly investigate the
UFO question in order to write his one-man
play, We Are Not Alone, which is about to make
its world première at the Segal Centre Studio.
About five years ago, he said, director
Chris Abraham of Crow’s Theatre in Toronto
suggested they do a play together. Atkins, a
multiple Dora Award winner and the youngest
playwright ever to be produced at Stratford
(Good Mother, 2001, at the age of 26), came up
with the idea of exploring the subject of UFOs.
“I had a couple of ideas,” he recalled. “I
wanted to write something about getting older.
And I wanted to write, somehow, about UFOs.
This is the play that resulted.”
Asking whether he actually believes in
UFOs or not, I soon discovered, was not a good
question to begin with as he has learned to
artfully evade it.
Finally, he came up with, “I guess I do,
ya.”
It’s a bit of a dicey question, he
explained, because to many people who do
believe in UFOs, “it’s not a question of belief.”
OK, then what is it?
“Well, they would say, and on some
level I agree, that there’s too much actual
evidence to not agree,” he said. “So the nerdy
guy in me says to you that technically the
existence of UFOs is not actually in question.
Most studies or investigations say that 95 per
cent of UFOs have some kind of rational
explanation. Like they are an aircraf, or a star or
a satellite. But five per cent is usually the figure
they give for events that just cannot be
explained by any kind of earthly phenomenon.
Then you are at a crossroads of where you want
to go. Usually when people ask me that question
— and it’s in the play, too — what people are
asking is, ‘Do you believe that those UFOS are
extraterrestrial space craft?’ And that’s a hard
one, right?”
Then he asked if I believe in UFOs. I
replied that I wouldn’t want to answer without
researching the subject, but many things in life
do remain mysteries. (Like missing socks in the
dryer and how to get straight answers out of
playwrights, for instance.)
Atkins then began to talk about his
research, citing two principal sources. The first
was a New York Times bestselling book by
American investigative journalist Leslie Kean
titled UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government
Officials Go On the Record, published in 2010.
After reading it, about four years ago, he
interviewed the author.
“She really comes at it from a
journalistic perspective,” he said. “She wants
things that she can verify, that she can check.
It’s a book kind of written for skeptics. And it all
adds up to something compelling.”
Gradually, he worked his way through
many other books on the subject, mostly of the
“open-minded believer” kind, and viewed many
documentaries.
His second main source was a
conference in Arizona called the International
UFO Congress, which was held at a posh
hotel/casino just outside Phoenix in 2014.
Atkins attended, along with the play’s co-
director, Christian Barry. It was there that he
recorded conversations, collected anecdotes and
observed memorable characters.
“It was like any other conference, a
teacher’s conference or whatever, ” he said.
“That’s what was so fascinating and alarming
and funny and mundane about it. You go in and
you sign up for various packages. I think I got
the full package. There were presentations.
Some of them were kind of rigorously scientific
and some were completely unscientific. You
hang around and you meet people. There was a
whole room of vendor booths. It was
tremendously strange. Then there was a room
where they had what they called experiencer
sessions where people could just go in and talk
about what happened to them. It was an
incredibly rich experience.”
He and Barry even went for a walk in
the desert with a woman who claimed to be a
human/alien hybrid.
They were upfront about their mission,
he said. “We did not conceal the fact that we
were writing a play.”
Back in the rehearsal hall after the trip,
Atkins talked about his adventures for about
two hours. Unbeknownst to him, his words were
recorded and the transcript became part of the
play along with the original draft and transcripts
of interviews done on the trip. About 20 to 25
drafts later, We Are Not Alone came into being
in its present state, framed within a set designed
by Julie Fox.
“Julie’s set design taught me about the
dramaturgy of my own play,” Atkins said,
praising the unique, lengthy, hands-on
collaborative approach of Crow’s Theatre.
Judging from past productions, it usually works.
We Are Not Alone, written and performed by
Damien Atkins, plays Feb. 22 to March 15 at the
Segal Centre, 5170 Côte Ste-Catherine Rd. Tickets,
$24.50 to $49. Call 514-739-7944 or visit
www.segalcentre.org
Ex-UFO sceptic baffled by
mystery
Queenstown man Verdun Waghorn wants to
know if the truth is out there.
The former UFO sceptic-turned-
sympathiser was fossicking for rocks by the
Dart River bridge on the Glenorchy-Routeburn
road.
About noon, he took 20 photos of the
surrounding landscape to show his family.
Looking through the images that
evening, he noticed one showed a small, dark
shape in the western sky towards the Humboldt
Mountains.
He is sure he neither saw nor heard an
aircraft at the time, and has been puzzling over
the object ever since.
In response to an Otago Daily Times
inquiry, an Airways New Zealand
spokeswoman confirmed air traffic control had
no record of aircraft in the area at that time.
Waghorn said the object appeared in
only one of the photos, so he felt confident in
ruling out that it was a speck of dirt or small
insect on his lens.
He had always been sceptical about
UFO stories, ''but now I sympathise with them''.
"I'm sure there's a reasonable, rational
explanation - I don't think it's green men from
outer space - but whenever I look at it, I think
it's such a weird shape.
"It doesn't look like a bird or a plane -
it's got me baffled." []