Culture

Michael Sheen reveals he had a close encounter with a UFO

21 Aug 2026 5 minute read

Michael Sheen in a scene from Out There.

Nation.Cymru staff

Michael Sheen has revealed his memories of a close encounter with a ‘UFO’ as he stars as Shifty Gruff in Out There, a UFO comedy set in Wales.

The Welsh legend who believes he saw a UFO when he was a child, stars in the movie alongside a cast of well-known actors from Wales.

The film follows rebellious sixteen-year-old Maz, who lives in a small Welsh seaside town. She becomes convinced that a mysterious UFO sighting holds the key to her father’s disappearance. Enlisting the help of her sceptical best friend and a local UFO conspiracy theorist, the search for answers leads her on an extraordinary journey that helps her rediscover the family, friendship and sense of belonging she thought she’d lost forever.

Out There is the debut feature from writer/director Simon Ryninks. The film’s leads are newcomers Nerys Amber Stocks (who plays Maz) and Tom Moya, alongside a cast of considerable Welsh talents including Sheen, with Aneurin Barnard (Dunkirk, 1899), and Iwan Rheon (Game of Thrones, Those About to Die) alongside Alice Lowe (Timestalker, Prevenge).

Given his own real-life UFO experiences, it is fitting that Sheen stars in the Welsh-set UFO movie.

The actor has publicly shared that he witnessed strange, formation-style lights in the sky over his hometown of Port Talbot as a child.

He has humorously dubbed the industrial town the Welsh ‘Area 51’ due to a long-running local history of UFO sightings.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter ahead of Out There receiving its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this week, Sheen recalled his childhood close encounter.

He said he was 12 or 13 when he was walking home from school in Port Talbot. Coming around the side of a nearby mountain was what Sheen described as “a formation of lights.” They went out toward the sea, hovered there, and vanished. “I was looking at this and I thought, ‘I need to go in and tell the rest of my family,’” the star recalls. “But then I thought that if I go in, I might miss it. So I just stood and watched. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen,” he continues, “I can’t explain it, and I’m not saying that they were UFOs, but I don’t know what the hell they were.”

As a super-fan of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind doing the film was a no-brainer for the Welshman

“Reading this script and seeing this journey for Maz, a 16-year-old who starts to use the stars and spaceships to reconnect with her father… That journey through grief, but in a very feel-good, heart-warming, coming-of-age story, I thought the combination of those elements and the weird characters she comes across — including the one I play myself — I just love the quirkiness of that,” Sheen says. “The sci-fi elements as a way to explore things that are much closer to home.”

During the chat with the US entertainment bible, Sheen also said the movie was also an opportunity to honour his late father, Meyrick Sheen, a stalwart of the Port Talbot community, who died last year aged 85. The actor learned that his father also believed he had spotted a UFO over Port Talbot years later.

“The town has a history with the steelworks and real challenges of deprivation,” he adds, “but to look to the skies and to believe there’s something up there is a very powerful metaphor for a lot of things.”

Meyrick Sheen was photographed by Roo Lewis in 2023, who set out to capture the town as part of a project for the Port Talbot UFO Investigation Club. “I was very moved by seeing the portrait of my father in that,” says the younger Sheen, “so this script really pushed buttons for me.”

Sheen plays the wonderfully named local psychic Shifty Gruff – and the actor says he revelled in the role.

“I love those shops you go into with all the crystals and the weird UFO-ology books,” he said about Shifty’s mystic store. “I could spend hours in there, knowing full well that it’s all nonsense. But he’s into all that, and also the local drug dealer — all organic, obviously — and I love the combination of him being really dodgy, but also something really hopeful in him as well. There’s an innocence and naivety to him. You know you’d find him in your living room at a party and think, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’ve definitely met a few Shifty Gruffs in my time.”

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