Oh Shat...ner

Imagine, if you will, that you're asked by the producer of a TV show that makes dramatizations of paranormal events if you've ever experienced something paranormal yourself.  You tell him about how one day you were out riding your motorcycle in the Mojave Desert and deciding to stop to take a drink of water.  When you go to start the bike again, it won't start.  On the horizon, you can see a smudge of gray in the sky, and figuring that, since it's in the direction the road is going anyway, you'll push your bike towards it.  As you get closer, you see that it's a UFO hovering in the distance.  Once you get close, the world fades out and you remember nothing else until you wake up some time later in a different location along the same highway, now within view of a gas station.  You push the bike the remainder of the way to the gas station, get the bike fixed and yourself rehydrated, and continue safely along your way.

Out of gas?  Need water?  Follow us to Grey's Gas & Gulp!

The producer is, of course, thrilled.  This is exactly the kind of story that he was hoping for.  He turns your story into the pilot for the show and from there the story spreads.  Why does the story spread?  Because you're famous.

Who are you?  You're William Shatner, and you're currently playing Captain Kirk on Star Trek.  Later in the year you release the album The Transformed Man, which some people claim is a very 'spacey' album.  Everyone else just claims it's terrible (#45 in the worst 50 albums ever according to one source), but I'll let you decide that for yourself here, while pointing out the album released by Shatner's co-star Leonard Nimoy in the same year, Two Sides Of Leonard Nimoy.

Alright, so you're an actor playing a character that loves to get some alien booty, and now word is out that you've actually encountered aliens.  Do you downplay it, pretend that it never happened?  Of course not!  You acknowledge it whenever asked about it!  You use it to your advantage!  You make it part of your mystique!  You... secretly regret telling the story for almost 40 years?

True story.  Shatner regrets ever telling the story, because it's just that: A story.  It never happened.  Despite making it into a biography (unofficial, unendorsed, unappreciated), the story about aliens in the Mojave never happened.  Here's Shatner himself explaining it in an interview (the interviewer is his daughter, FYI):

In 2008 Shatner released his autobiography, Up Till Now, and set the record straight. The story about meeting aliens was just an actor embellishing an otherwise pretty dull story for a friend, and the whole thing took off and got out of his control.

William Shatner: Victim of his own brilliant storytelling.

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Sources:
Image stolen from NewAgeDawns.com
WilliamShatner.com
Wikipedia.org
NYMag.com
UFOEncounters.co.uk
PurpleSlinky.com
ParanormalNewsCentral.com
RockListMusic.co.uk