Aliens in the Adelaide Hills? The truth is out there – in a Holden VR Commodore full of teenagers | Tom Bowden

There was once a time when claims like this would have you declared a weird fringe-dweller, writes Tom Bowden.

I’m a big fan of signs. I saw one the other day at the self-service checkout at Coles.

It said: “Assisted Checkout Scanning. New camera technology has been installed at our assisted checkouts to detect when items are incorrectly scanned. If you would prefer not to use this solution, please speak with a team member.”

“Yeah hi Margaret, is it? Yeah, I’ve just seen this notice up here and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind being a dear and turning the camera off so I could pop this bag of dragonfruit through as onions and these sirloin steaks through as potatoes? Cheers!”

I may have misinterpreted the sign there but I feel it was worth asking …

Other signs are less ambiguous. Like the time I got a sign we might not be alone in the universe.

Here’s how that went down.

My mates and I were driving through the Adelaide Hills one night.

I grew up there and driving dirt roads between our places to raid our parents’ fridges for food was a pretty standard Friday and Saturday night.

We were all on our Ps and I should point out that this night every single one of us was as sober as a judge.

Sunday Mail columnist Tom Bowden and a visitor from beyond the Adelaide Hills. Picture: AI image/iStock

Anyway, we were driving from house to house when all of a sudden this dark shape – about the size of a tennis court – appeared above the car, black against the night sky, and flew above us.

It was triangular and had a large light on each of its points.

You’d think a plane, or a fighter jet, this size and this low would be loud as hell, but we put the car windows down and it was silent.

It flew above us for probably all of about 15 to 20 seconds and then it was gone.

We didn’t see it zoom off or anything, it was just gone. There were four of us in the car and we all saw the same thing.

As far as “UFO encounters” go, it was pretty uneventful. It didn’t pick our car up with a tractor beam.

It didn’t carve the Coopers logo in a nearby paddock and there were no little green men checking us out.

We just saw a thing in the sky we couldn’t explain, flying in a way we’ve never seen before.

A former co-worker – who’s not weird by any stretch of the imagination – was writing a story about a reported UFO sighting when I told him about what we had seen.

“I swear to you, what you’ve just described to me – I’ve seen exactly the same thing,” he said.

There was a time when the sort of people who reported seeing something in the sky that defied our earthly understanding were considered, largely, fringe-dweller weirdos.

Nutters. Tin-hat loonies. Call them what you will. And in some cases, for good reason.

But the reality is, there seems to be at least some basis for the view there might be something out there.

With the US government in the past few years publicly acknowledging a bunch of strange aerial sightings by Navy pilots were worthy of legitimate scrutiny, and with other highly respected pilots – many in Australia – claiming to have witnessed or recorded alleged “other worldly” activity in the skies, there’s growing evidence there could actually be something out there.

Now I’m not necessarily saying I believe categorically aliens exist, or that we’re being visited by extra-terrestrial life.

But the reality is this: it’s estimated there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe (which is always expanding), with ours – the Milky Way galaxy – being just one of those and home to 100 billion stars.

Purely from a statistical standpoint, surely it’s not out of the realm of possibly there might be some other form of life out there.

But it still leaves me with questions.

Like why would they possibly have any interest in four teenagers in a VR Commodore? What’s their take on influencer culture?

And how do they save a few bucks at their shops?