Guillermo del Toro Says His Real-Life UFO Sighting Left Him Surprisingly Disappointed

Recent weeks have seen an increase in the number of people who are willing to discuss alien visitations and UFOs. As it turns out, the reveal that the Pentagon has been monitoring these events has led a lot of people to feel more comfortable about discussing their own personal experiences without being accused of lying or getting too drunk to be able to tell fiction from reality.

For the most part, people who have been sharing these experiences have been recounting a sense of wonder and mysticism that surrounded their close encounters.

Not Guillermo del Toro, though; in sharing his own UFO story, the director of the Oscar-nominated The Shape of Water is more interested in critiquing the appearance of the flying saucer he spotted. In del Toro's critical opinion, the strange UFO that he once honked a horn at really needed a better design.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, del Toro stated:

You sound like a complete lunatic, but I saw a UFO. I didn't want to see a UFO. [LAUGHTER] It was horribly designed ... I was with a friend, we bought a six-pack. We didn't consume it and there was a place called Cerro del Cuatro, 'Mountain of the Four,' and outside, in the periphery of Guadalajara. We said, 'Let's go to the highway.' We sit down to watch the stars and have the beer and talk. We were the only guys by the freeway.

And we saw a light on the horizon going super-fast, not linear. And I said, Honk and flash the lights." And we started honking ... And it went from there to here—like 1,000 meters away—in less than a second and it was so crappy. It was a flying saucer. So clichéd, with lights going like this. It's so sad. I wish I could reveal they're not what you think they are. They are what you think they are.

Seriously, like I have never been that scared ever in my life. We jumped in the car, drove really fast. I kept looking. It was following us. And then I looked back and it was gone. So, you know, judge me. I have no implant.

 Alas, as much as the creator of Pacific Rim would have liked to be impressed with what he was seeing, it turns out that a lifetime of creating designs for weird and wonderful monsters meant that when he was actually face-to-face with what he believed to be a UFO, he couldn't help but be a little underwhelmed.

Of course, it's hard to take del Toro seriously an objective witness considering his sobriety at this time. Drunken UFO sightings are often attributed to a single, obvious explanation, and in this instance, it sounds like the easiest possible explanation for what the acclaimed filmmaker saw is that he was simply too inebriated to correctly identify a plane, drone, or other completely pedestrian flying object.

Just because del Toro himself wasn't able to identify what he was looking at, it doesn't mean that this was a UFO.

It's also a little difficult to take him seriously as, immediately after describing his UFO experience, he went on to talk about one of the times he saw a ghost. del Toro is a fantastic storyteller, and sometimes it's hard to know when to stop when your imagination is this active.

That said, while many professionals remain skeptical about the reality of UFOs, it isn't entirely impossible that some of these sightings don't come from extra-terrestrial sources. Even if aliens aren't visiting us themselves, we might be getting spotted by automated drones that are seeking throughout the stars for signs of intelligent life. This kind of alien-hunting system is definitely one that humanity would put in place ourselves if we had the technology.

For now, we'll have to assume that del Toro is merely a master of monster fiction, but who knows? Perhaps, one day, the acclaimed director will be vindicated in his claims that UFOs are real.