Dan Aykroyd takes UFOs out for a spin

CHICAGO - Dan Aykroyd has a new video on the market, but the ex-conehead and one-time ghost-buster says he's not the star. The UFOs are.

"My recommendation is to skip through me and get to the film footage, the digital images," he said today, talking about the 90-minute Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs from Union Station Media.

"This is where the whole thing starts to become more credible," he said of footage of unidentified flying objects from around the world.

"This is the real stuff. I'm not alone on this. There are many, many people interested in UFOs," he said.

The DVD, which went on sale in the US today, is a conversation between Aykroyd and UFO expert David Sereda interspersed with footage of unexplained objects in flight and comments from experts like former astronaut Gordon Cooper. There are no jokes.

Asked if he was worried that a comic actor might not be taken seriously discussing an edgy subject like extra-terrestrial visitors, he said "It's not a concern."

"Enough people know I've had an interest in this for years," he said, speaking from New York. "People know I'm interested in the paranormal."

Aykroyd said he has had two personal encounters with the unknown.

One occurred on Martha's Vineyard, he said, where he sighted "high altitude, glowing magnesium discs traveling at 32,190km/h at 30,480 metres... wing to wing, edge to edge."

Four people with him saw the same thing, he said, and while one expert later told him it was probably a meteor formation of some sort.

"I believe they were visiting the earth, passing by on the way to somewhere else.

"The second was a telepathic experience," he said, which happened at a lake retreat in Canada.

"I was asleep with my wife and I woke up about 3am wanting to go outside into a field and look at the sky," he said, telling his wife, "They want me to see. They want me to see." She told him to forget it.

The next morning, he said, newspapers and radio reports from across the region were filled with eyewitness accounts from some of the estimated 12,000 people who saw a pink spiral in the sky.

The military later said it was a Chinese rocket, Aykroyd said, but he believes he was being summoned and regrets ignoring the call.

- REUTERS