Up Till Now: The Autobiography

they’d know that the actor who played Captain Kirk on Star Trek was out there. If they wanted publicity, what could be better than contacting Captain Kirk? I’m not making any of this up.
    I was riding with five guys and we were using the buddy system— keep the man behind you in your rearview mirror so if anything happened you could help. I was last in line because they were all faster than me, looking up into the sky. Unfortunately, about a century ago miners would dig gravelike holes in the ground, maybe three or four feet wide, six feet long and six feet deep, to see what types of minerals might be found. If they found nothing of interest they’d abandon the hole and dig another one a half mile away. So the desert floor is pocked with these holes. So I was looking into the air, last in line, and I drive into one of these holes. Boom! I was going 30 miles an hour and I went straight into the hole and flying over the bike. I was wearing protective leather clothing so I got bruised a little, but not hurt. Unfortunately, the stuntmen forgot all about the buddy system and disappeared. All true.
    I’m alone in the broiling desert, I’m covered head to toe in a helmet and leathers, and the bike is in this hole. I had a big decision to make: I didn’t know whether I should take off the helmet and leathers and die of sunstroke or keep them on and die of heat prostration.
    I managed to get the bike out of the hole but it wouldn’t start. This was a beautiful Bultaco and I didn’t want to leave it there because I was afraid someone might steal it. So I started pushing the bike and falling down. I actually managed to find a road and pushed the bike until I found a gas station. It wasn’t that far. The mechanic found a wire that had been disconnected, reattached it where it belonged, the bike started, and I drove home. Truth.
    Not too long afterward I was being interviewed for a television program and the interviewer said, “I heard you love riding motorcycles.”
    “Oh, I certainly do,” I said. I told him the whole story, driving with head in the air, big potholes, flying through the air, live or die, lost, where to go, start pushing the bike and then... and then this isthe part I made up: “And then I saw somebody standing on a ridge, dressed in a silver suit. He was sort of gleaming in the sunlight, this man from out of nowhere standing atop a ridge in the desert. I didn’t know what to do. And he motioned to me, follow me. And I follow him, and I follow him and I don’t know whether I blanked out from heat prostration or sunstroke, but suddenly he was gone and I was in a place where I could be saved. He had led me to civilization. I was able to fix my bike and I know now that an alien saved my life.”
    It’s a wonderful story and every bit of it is not true. But the tabloids picked it up and ran it: “Shatner Saved by Alien.” I loved it. I’d put one over on the gossip rags. Several years later a man named John Newland called me. John had produced and directed the series One Step Beyond, which purportedly investigated and dramatized paranormal phenomena. Newland had taken LSD on camera before anybody knew what it was. The show was off the air but he was doing a special One Step Beyond with celebrities, hoping to bring back the show. Because I was Captain Kirk he thought I’d be the perfect guest. “Has anything sort of strange ever happened to you?” he asked.
    “No, not really,” I said. “Well, here’s a letter that somebody wrote about witnessing an airplane crash on the Simi Valley Highway that never happened. Could this have happened to you?”
    Obviously he wanted me to say something happened. “No, I don’t . . .” and then I remembered. “That never happened—but I’ll tell you what did happen.” Looking up, hole, push, silver suit, saved.
    “Perfect. You can be the star of the special.” I wrote the script, an alien saved my life. We filmed it at Moses Lake in Washington. Rather than holes dug in the ground, there were large sandbanks. A Canadian stuntman was hired to play me. I drove the motorcycle to the top of the sandbank and stopped; they moved the cameras to the far side of the rise and the stuntman went flying over the top and took a terrible spill. That was the dramatization of the fall I took with my bike.
    Unfortunately, the stuntman hit it wrong and broke his back. He was lying there in the sand unable to move. It was awful. I wentrushing over to him. The