I've travelled in a UFO: Japan's new first lady

TOKYO: Japan's next prime minister might be nicknamed "the alien", but it's his wife who claims to have had a close encounter with another
world.

"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.

"It was a very beautiful place and it was really green." Yukio Hatoyama is due to be voted in as premier on September 16 following his party's crushing election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Sunday.

Miyuki, 66, described the extraterrestrial experience, which she said took place some 20 years ago, in a book entitled "Very Strange Things I've Encountered".

When she awoke, Japan's next first lady wrote, she told her now ex-husband that she had just been to Venus. He advised her that it was probably just a dream.

"My current husband has a different way of thinking," she wrote. "He would surely say 'Oh, that's great'."

Yukio Hatoyama, 62, the grandson of a former PM, was once nicknamed "the alien" for his prominent eyes.

The former actress said she was now "burning" with desire to make a film in Hollywood. She playfully added the lead actor would be Tom Cruise, "because I know he was a Japanese in a previous life".