ROBBIE: 'All I'm interested in is finding aliens'

His former Take That comrades have been enjoying a hugely successful comeback album and tour and the band is set for further exposure with a forthcoming West End musical based on their hits.

But these days we hear little of the cheeky rebel who split from the group to launch the biggest-selling solo career that Britain has ever seen.

Under his mammoth £80million deal with EMI, Williams was meant to be releasing a new album this autumn. But that has been postponed and one recent rumour – eventually denied by his management – was that he was on strike.

Otherwise, Robbie has vanished. He might as well have been abducted by aliens.

Actually, that’s not so far from the truth – or at any rate, aliens are part of the story. It emerged this weekend that the 34-year-old singer has developed an obsession with spacecraft from other worlds visiting our skies. Having turned his back on stage shows, he has holed himself up in his Los Angeles mansion to indulge a fixation with UFOs.

This revelation comes courtesy of journalist and broadcaster Jon Ronson who specialises in winning the trust of people with extreme or bizarre beliefs. Having previously investigated the shadowy Bilderberg Group of world leaders and befriended oddballs and outcasts from David Icke to the Ku Klux Klan, he has now given us a glimpse into the weird world of Robbie Williams.

The star – who has battled drink, drugs, ballooning weight and depression and once admitted himself to rehab on his birthday because he was washing down prescription pills with 20 cans of Red Bull and 36 double espressos a day – first contacted Ronson three years ago. He wanted the journalist to organise an over­night stay in a haunted house for him.

That never came off but the two stayed in touch and earlier this year Williams e-mailed out of the blue. He wanted Ronson to accompany him to a UFO conference in Laughlin, Nevada, to hear testimony about being abducted by aliens.

“At first I wonder if he’s gone a bit crazy but I don’t think he has,” says Ronson in a recording of their trip, to be aired on BBC Radio 4 next month. “He’s just doing what lots of people do, including me – spending a lot of time on paranormal websites.”

Scarcely recognisable behind a bushy beard that makes him look more like a lumberjack or a Montana survivalist than a sex symbol rock star, and admitting that his current fixation has made him question his own sanity, Williams nowadays spends hours every day reading internet sites on alien conspiracy theories and watching DVDs with such titles as UFO Space Anomalies and Secret Space: What Is Nasa Hiding?

Referring to predictions that the world is going to end in four years time as if they are a matter of common consent – “You know, with the run-up to 2012, everyone going mental about that, about Armageddon and all that business,” he says casually – he is immersed in paranormal folklore as part of a respite from his normal routine.

“I’ve been working since I was 16. I’ve put out 10 albums in 10 years and it takes its toll. I’m just having a break. I’m classic ‘don’t show me any debunking stuff’, because I want to believe.”

He says he thinks alien spacecraft are always in our skies and that we only see them when their protective shields fall off.

He and Ronson set out by private plane for Nevada, accompanied by Robbie’s girlfriend, actress Ayda Field, and a record producer friend called Brandon. At the conference, where he arrives incognito, Robbie quizzes a scientist who specialises in examining evidence of alien visits, asking: “Do you worry that the aliens might want their stuff back? Do you get scared they may want to come and get their transmitters back?”

He also befriends Ann Andrews from Lincolnshire, a speaker at the conference who has written a series of books about her son Jason, who believes he was contacted by aliens telling him he had been put on Earth to be a psychic sage.

When Brandon asks Andrews if she has undergone any psychiatric examination, Williams admits: “Question­ing someone’s sanity when this is happening to them is perfectly acceptable. I question my own a lot.”

But he sees no reason to doubt the accounts. “With all of this stuff, whatever Ann Andrews has got to say, it’s kind of, ‘Well, if you’re saying it, I’ve no reason to not believe you up until there’s evidence I shouldn’t’. For me it’s, ‘Why would you lie?’”

Robbie also sympathises with her pred­icament in deciding whether to believe her son’s stories. “It’s either believe everything the boy is saying or remain steadfast to earthly beliefs and have a black sheep in the family. For her own sanity she has had to believe it. It’s like your son turning around to you at 21 and going, ‘I’m a gay’. For me right now, everything that she has said is true,” he says.

When Robbie speaks to Andrews, he tells her that he sympathises with her son’s plight in being ostracised by his local community. The bonding experience leaves him with tears in his eyes.

“Tell him to drop me a line if he wants. It must have been a terrible time for you and an awful time for him. It’s just so sad to hear it happens. It’s happened to me. I think joining Take That was like leaving on a spaceship and coming back and all your friends going: ‘He’s weird now.’”

Williams comes away from the conference with 15 new UFO DVDs, having promised to consider a request to become its official celebrity spokes­man. “I’m absolutely loving it, really loving it. Fabulous,” he tells the organisers.

Ever since his dramatic departure from Take That in 1995, the singer has always worn his personal problems on his sleeve. In interviews he has bared all about the frustrations of devoting his adolescence to the gruelling regime of Take That and the loneliness of stardom. He seems to personify the adage that fame and fortune do not necessarily bring happiness.

But it emerges that his current compulsion to read about UFOs derives from long before he was plucked from obscurity in Stoke-on-Trent for boyband superstardom.

“Mum was a tarot card reader,” he tells Ronson.

“In the shelf just outside her room there would be the books about the world’s mysteries and elves, demons and witchcraft. She’d have people round to read the tarot cards and read their palms. We’d talk about spirits, we’d talk about ghosts, we’d talk about the other side.

"And I was that scared that I never talked to my mum about it and just lived in fear of all this kind of stuff. I want to find out why things that go bump in the night make me scared.”

His interest resumed when he gave up reading newspapers, because stories about himself upset him too much. He reveals that he once inv­ited TV psychic Derek Acorah to his home for a reading but was disgusted when a story subsequently appeared under the headline I Helped Robbie Williams Talk To His Dead Gran. He has not spoken to Acorah since and says he is nervous about exploring his interest in unexplained phenomena.

“Every time I put my foot in the water as regards to this kind of stuff, or paranormal stuff, I meet charlatans. You come across people that make you go: ‘Oh no, you’re supposed to be the expert but you’re obviously mental. And none of it is true.’ I’ve been really disappointed,” he says, admitting that this has shaken his wider faith. “This might happen with UFOs, too, and then I might be able to get on with my life.”

Ronson has mixed feelings about the singer’s latest fixation. “When he used to look himself up, all the lies that were written about him would make him miserable so I think it’s healthy that he doesn’t look himself up any more,” he says.

“But the world he is now obsessed with has its many liars, too.”

However, he does find one positive aspect about Williams’s obsession. “I leave him standing on his balcony with Ayda and he does seem happy, gazing up at the sky, even if there’s nothing paranormal up there,” he said. In the tortured, discontented world of Robbie Williams, one should be thankful for small mercies.

** Robbie Williams And Jon Ronson Journey To The Other Side, Radio 4, May 6, 6.30pm.