Robbie Williams obsessed with aliens

On this blog we're big fans of stories concerning irrational turns taken by major celebrities, be they YouTube videos of Tom Cruise (they're in the public domain, okay) or stories of Madonna telling a Vanity Fair reporter that our souls choose the gender of our children.

So imagine our delight when it turned out that fading pop superstar Robbie Williams has retreated into the world of alien conspiracies. The Sun recently caught up with Robbie at a UFO convention in Nevada, where he confirmed "his belief that UFOs are 'there all the time' but only show themselves on Earth when they make mistakes and their 'protective shields' come off".

Sporting a new look that may disappoint his female fans (think an overweight Fidel Castro) Robbie meets a mother who claims her son is regularly abducted by aliens, and who believes he is "an 'Indigo Child', who has been put on Earth as a psychic sage. She's taken photographs of him being abducted, but they never come out "because she is not a very good photographer and only owns a disposable camera".

It turns out Robbie's always had an interest in the paranormal, telling the Sun that “Mum was a tarot card reader. On the shelf just outside her room there would be the books about the world’s mysteries — elves, demons and witchcraft. She’d have people round to read the tarot cards and read their palms. She’d talk about spirits, ghosts . . . the other side. I was that scared that I never talked to her about it and just lived in fear of this stuff.”

He says he's tried visiting psychics in the past but has always found them to be "charlatans" and now he's hoping the same won't happen with his interest in UFOs. For the moment he's happy to spend "hours holed up in his LA mansion researching UFOs on the net and watching DVDs about alien conspiracies".

Robbie's not the first celebrity to develop an obsession with alien conspiracies (Blues Brothers and Ghostbusters star Dan Ackroyd believes alien/human hybrids might be walking among us) and, as our exclusive graph reveals, there seems to be a correlation between fame and increased irrationality. But then again, they might be the rational ones...

Tune into Radio 4 tonight at 6.30pm, when Robbie Williams will be talking to Jon Ronson about his interest in UFOs.

A Blues Brother and the Little Green Men

Here's a great story. In an interview this week with the Guardian to promote his new movie Dan Ackroyd, star of 80s cult comedy musical The Blues Brothers, talks about his belief in UFO sightings and alien abductions. Ackroyd is a "Hollywood consultant" for the Mutual UFO Network, or Mufon, and believes their website definitively answers the question of whether extraterrestrials have visited this planet. He believes there may be alien/human hybrids walking among us, and thinks some aliens with "malevolent purposes" may be "taking cows' lips and anuses for delicacies".

Perhaps even more bizarre than Ackroyd's conviction that aliens have visited is his reason for believing this. You see, he thinks it was "presumptuous" for humanity to abandon the idea that our planet is the centre of the Universe, and subscribes to the idea that aliens visit us precisely because we are the centre of the Universe: "They're visiting because this is the planet that produced Picasso, the atom bomb, penicillin. . . there are so many advances in science, art and culture."

But surely, asks the interviewer, they are more advanced than us if they are able to travel here? Not to worry, Ackroyd has the answer to this: "Oh, they have technology better than ours, but they didn't paint like Renoir, they don't dance like Mick Jagger, they don't write like Samuel Johnson or William Faulkner. They are envious of us. We have the most beautiful planet – the Rockies, the purple fields of the United States, the Lake District, the Pyrenees, the turquoise seas of the tropics. They don't have that. They may have gelatinous pools and they've got the technology to flip from planet to planet or dimension to dimension but, you know, Keith Richards didn't come from there."

I don't know about anyone else, but I love the idea of aliens coming to Earth just to see Mick and Keef.