Dan Aykroyd believes.

In 2012, David Sereda sat down with Dan Aykroyd and recorded a video interview about UFOs. That interview formed the basis of what is now Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs. The entire documentary is available on YouTube, and you can see it at the bottom of this article.

Aykroyd says he’s been interested in UFOs since he was a kid. His interest was piqued by both real life and fictional events, including a Life Magazine article about UFO sightings over Washington, DC in 1952, as well as the film The Day the Earth Stood Still.

He believes aliens do visit Earth, and he thinks he knows why.

“If you look at the way mankind in the last 100 years has basically started to turn this planet into a cinder — three or four holes in the ozone layer because of industrial production around the world, nuclear testing, wars — I’m sure that, just in theory, if there were another species in the universe monitoring us or near us, they would be very interested in what we were doing to this planet, to this planet’s atmosphere, and to possibly neighboring bodies. And I think, in terms of the extraterrestrial machines that are coming and going, that may be part of a motivation.”

Back in the late 1970s, when Aykroyd and fellow Saturday Night Live cast mate John Belushi came up with their now-famous Blues Brothers sketches, they modeled their look partly from a John Lee Hooker album cover. But Aykroyd would also tell interviewers the outfit based on the “men in black” that would reportedly show up at UFO sightings and warn people to keep quiet. This was long before the Men in Black films.

Aykroyd also told documentary makers that he had an experience with “men in black” himself while filming a series for SyFy called Out There, about alien encounters. He said he saw these men in black very briefly before the show was shut down and went on to remain unreleased.

Recently, Aykroyd told The Sunday Times Magazine that aliens do visit Earth, but they do not make contact with the general population for a good reason.

“(It’s) because we are a violent species. They don’t want anything to do with us. They watch us. There were two white orbs over (New) Jersey when the second tower went down on 9/11. They were on CNN for about two minutes… They never showed it again.

“Can you imagine what was going through their advanced minds when they saw what happened on 9/11? These humans crashing our highest evolution in aviation into our highest evolution in architecture and metallurgy, like kids wrecking toys in the sandbox. They are disgusted with us. And rightly so. Because we are a depraved, disgusting species.”

Aykroyd claims to have had an unsettling personal experience with alien contact.

“I woke up in the middle of the night, and I said to my wife, ’They’re calling me. They’re calling me. I wanna go outside. They want me to go outside and see,’ She said, ‘Who?’ [I replied,]’Something outside wants me to go outside and see.’”

Aykroyd did not go outside. He went back to bed.

“But the next day in the media, in newspapers, in radio, all over upstate New York, and in Ontario, Quebec, and Vermont, people spoke about this urge they had to go out of their houses at 3:00 in the morning and look up at the sky. And 12,000 people shared this urge. And they went out and it was a big, big news story. And of course, the Air Force said that a Chinese rocket had exploded over New York state. But what people saw was a massive, miles-high pink spiral in the sky above the Great Lakes.”

Aykroyd related another such happening in Canada a few years later. He believes there are going to be more of these shared experiences.