By Lee Speigel
When Reg Presley died on Feb. 4 from cancer at 71, stories lightly touched upon a side of his life that was separate from his role as the lead singer of the '60s rock group The Troggs.
Presley, best known for the garage band classic "Wild Thing," was obsessed with UFOs, extraterrestrials and crop circles -- those often-mysterious patterns that turn up unexpectedly in farmers' fields, most notably in the U.K.
Presley and The Troggs continued to tour all the way into 2010, when Presley suffered a serious stroke, resulting in his retirement from the music business.
Even while The Troggs were touring, Presley's interest in UFOs and crop circles led to his hosting a local cable TV show in the U.K. called "The Reg Presley UFO Show," and he later published a book, "Wild Things They Don't Tell Us," in 2002.
In the mid-1990s, Presley began devoting "huge amounts of time and resources to personal investigations of what he felt were neglected areas of science -- notably alien spacecraft, lost civilizations and alchemy," reports The Telegraph.
According to The Telegraph, in 2006, Presley talked about how he'd respond if aliens landed and invited him into their ship.
"I hope I would have the bottle to go. Because I'd like to ask them a lot of bloody questions. And they've probably got all the answers," he said. "These beings may be 20 million years in advance of us. What kind of technology must they have? You could come back to Earth and not know a soul on the planet. But perhaps you would have seen something that would save the whole human race. And maybe some people have done that."
Watch this 1993 excerpt of "The Reg Presley UFO Show" which includes a video of a UFO he shot in 1992:
