Back in 1979, Yaphet Kotto came face-to-face with a Xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s Alien. But as it turns out, it wasn’t even the actor’s first encounter with an alien being.

Speaking with VICE reporter Noel Ransome, Kotto (who also starred in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare) just revealed something he had only previously told to his wife, rabbi, and a psychologist. Kotto explained that dating back 50 years now, he has been having encounters with what he believes to be alien lifeforms.

“It started when I was about nine or ten years old. I remember being told I couldn’t go outside, so I was looking out at the streets of Bronx New York watching the kids play stickball in a kneeling position,” Kotto told Ransome. “When I turned around, a figure was behind me, it was at least five or six feet tall with an elongated head. It appeared, then jumped to the back of me and disappeared. From that moment on, it was one experience after another which culminated into my sighting in the Philippines.”

Kotto continued, relaying the Philippines experience…

“I heard my wife and the waiters calling me to come outside in very anxious voices. So I went out and when I got there, I saw the same huge circle of smoke over the house. When I asked them what they saw, they said they saw a UFO as big as the Yankee Stadium turned upside down and they were freaking out. Two or three nights later, I saw it. The thing blotted out the entire sky. The moon and everything, it was huge. I just remember saying, Jesus Christ. I mean I got nervous man because you don’t see something like that without being vulnerable to becoming psychologically blown away. You get scared to put it quite frankly. That messed me up for a good three or four days.”

In addition to seeing several UFOs and potentially even being abducted by aliens throughout his life, Kotto also revealed that he experienced some strange things on the set of Alien – a project he was drawn to because of the script, he says, not because of his own experiences with real-life extraterrestrials.

“Now I’ll admit, there were things that I alone was finding on the set of Alien—the spaceship,” Kotto recalled during the chat. “That mechanism that Sigourney Weaver throws to put the Sulaco (fictional spacecraft) on automatic destruct. There were symbols there. Symbols that had nothing to do with the ship in the film and I kept finding these symbols. They were like Egyption symbols and I started trying to decipher them, which I was able to do.”

Kotto insists that he has nothing to gain from coming forward about his experiences. He’s not writing a book or promoting a movie. Rather, he just couldn’t keep them a secret anymore.

“I’ve gotten to a place where I can no longer hold them privately. They aren’t going to go away and I honestly believe these species are close to making themselves known in this century, to this generation,” he explained. “I believe their purpose is to make sure we don’t kill ourselves. We’re losing our rivers, lakes, mountains and our caps are melting. We need to take a serious look at what we’re doing and they’re going to help us do that.”

Be sure to read the full interview over on VICE, as we’ve only scratched the surface!