Why Won’t the Australian Government Let Us Hunt UFOs with Lasers?

Photo courtesy of iStock

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but when you’re trying to communicate with aliens, lasers are really helpful. According to UFO chasers like Australia’s Peter Slattery, the tiny beams of intense light cause UFOs to “power up,” meaning they flash their lights on and off, like a car blinking its headlights at a nearby hitchhiker.

Unfortunately for Peter and other Aussie UFO hunters, the government frowns on those who point lasers in the sky. Since lasers could blind airplane pilots coming in for a landing, flashing these devices near flight paths can lead to as much as four years in prison. The conflict between the would-be first contactors and plain ol’ earthly pilots has been a topic du jour in the Australian media as of late, so I called Peter up to see how he was managing the attention.

VICE: So why lasers?
Peter Slattery: There are people who have been using lasers around the world for going on 15 years. We use them to point out the craft, to follow the beam up with the camera to capture the craft with the zoom [lens], and to do a one-two sequence to get a reaction from the craft.

As in powering up. Why do they do this?
We’re communicating; that’s what we’re doing with them. We can even flash them with lasers to get the crafts to change direction.

In that sense are lasers vital to what you do?
I don’t always use them—I’ve basically stopped using them because of all this uproar. I don’t need all this crap from the media when they’re not even looking at what we’re doing.

How we use the actual lasers, getting back to that, is we do group meditation, where we connect as one consciousness to these beings. Some of them do speak, but 99.99 percent of the time it’s telepathic. They’re from a higher plane, and they pick up on intent: good intent, good will. If your heart and mind are open, these things will happen. So I’ll take a few people out who’ve had experiences, and we’ll do group meditation with some energy work like yoga or tai chi.

Aren’t these lasers super dangerous for planes?
You can tell the difference between a plane and what we’re filming. Now if you look at the videos of planes next to a craft, in situations where I did not use lasers, you can see the total difference between the unidentified flying object and the plane.

Can you really be certain enough to risk the safety of planes?
We know it’s a plane or craft straightaway from the navigation lights on the plane. Plus the commercial jets fly at about 30,000 feet, so a laser won’t even touch the darn plane. The only time a laser will hit a plane is when it’s landing, because the lasers only go two kilometers [1.2 miles]. So there’s no way—unless I’m sitting at the airport waiting for the plane to come in—that I can even hit it. Now you’ve got little commercial planes that sometimes fly around 2,000 feet, but in my area that’s only during the day. At nighttime they’re either landing at the airport or are 30,000 feet in the air, where there is no way the laser can hit the plane.

Beyond staying away from the airport, do you have precautions that you take to make sure you don’t hit a low-flying plane?
You can just see it’s a plane by the green, red, and white navigation lights. I’m not interested in planes. You’d have to be dumb as dog shit to not know what’s a plane.

Do you think all this attention is totally about safety, or a reaction to what you do?
I think it’s just people wanting a story. If the people at the aviation agency looked at the facts, they’d see that a laser can’t even touch a plane in flight; a plane shouldn’t be flying low enough to be hit by a laser. There has not been one report in the area of a laser affecting an aircraft since I’ve been doing this.

Do you think you would face these obstacles if you were using lasers for a more traditional pursuit?
Well, put it this way: When they talk to the aviation agency, because they haven’t seen a UFO, they automatically think this isn’t a possibility, so straightaway they’re going to say, “He’s just flashing these at planes and helicopters.”

Is using lasers a right, considering they’re essential to your investigations?
I think it’s the right of anybody to do what they want as long as no one is getting hurt or harmed. As I said, there have been no actual reports of someone hitting an aircraft in my area; there is no way a laser can hit a plane unless it’s landing. That’s what you are all forgetting.