Alien hunter has landed! (From Cotswold Journal)

Alien hunter has landed!

12:00pm Saturday 23rd March 2013 in News By Freya Leng

HE hunted aliens in the Amazon rainforest with Neil Armstrong and was part of a world recordbreaking caving team, but the Rev Arthur Champion has packed all that in to take up residence as assistant vicar in Bourton.

Mr Champion, aged 61, has taken up the post at the benefice of Bourtonon- the-Water with Clapton and the Rissingtons, working alongside current rector the Rev Rachel Rosborough.

Before being ordained in 2008, Mr Champion was part of a 1976 expedition to the Amazon – of which Mr Armstrong was honorary president – to investigate claims by Swiss author Erich von Däniken that caves in the rainforest had been formed by lasers from space. Von Däniken was famous for his book Chariots of the Gods? in which he theorised that early religions and technologies were inspired by extraterrestrial visitors to Earth.

Although Armstrong – the first man to set foot on the moon – did not initially travel with the team, once they had established the caves were not the work of mischievous little green men but were littered with seashells and fragments of pottery, he joined the expedition to see for himself.

Mr Champion said that as the team’s health and safety officer, it was his job to make sure the Apollo 11 hero – who died last year aged 82 – was securely strapped in when being lowered into the caves.

“The one thought that came to my mind was that all those men in white coats had spent so long making sure he was safe in space but here it all came down to me tying a knot properly.”

Prior to his alien-hunting, Mr Champion was part of an Anglo-American team that broke the world depth record in 1974 in the French Pyrenees and is still part of a cave rescue team based in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire.

Before moving to Bourton he served congregations in Badgeworth, Shurdington and Witcombe, and also works as a global health and safety manager with a Swiss insurance company.

Mr Champion said both he and his wife Margaret, who recently became grandparents for the first time, were looking forward to getting to know their new home.