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Musicians & UFOs – 15 Close Encounters with Flying Saucers

We’ve uncovered cave paintings, medieval and renaissance artwork, military radar videos, and have sightings of UFOs even up to this day. It’s no real surprise that some of our favorite musicians have had their own close encounters with unidentified flying objects.

What is surprising is that they’ve admitted to it, sometimes on national television, since that usually seals the deal on your career.

That’s how we know they aren’t joking. They put their reputations on the line to tell the truth.

Below we have the summaries on 15 experiences between some of the top members of the music community and unidentified aerial phenomenon. While there are dozens more from big names and countless from people like you and me, these are the highest profile instances of UFO sightings.

Elvis Presley

elvis presley

Elvis was a strange cat from the day of his birth, according to his friend and hairstylist Larry Geller:

“His father told us he’d gone out to have a cigarette at 2am during the delivery and when he looked up into the skies above their little shack, he saw the strangest blue light. He knew right then and there that something special was happening.”

That sounds a little too much like a public relations stunt to stir up some Christians, but Elvis himself, along with Geller again, said they were driving through the desert and saw some moving lights. Elvis said, “They were moving far too quickly to be airplanes, so we just chalked it up to UFOs.” You can find more quotes from the king regarding other experiences as well.

John Lennon

john lennon

Lennon’s sighting was a high-profile sighting. He spoke about it on TV, wrote about it in the liner notes of the 1974 Walls and Bridges album: “On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O.” John says he was peering out his New York window in his usual poetic mind state when he saw:

“A thing with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top.”

He said this was as close as 100 feet away above the top of the next-door building. His girlfriend May Pang went on record saying, “As I walked out onto the terrace, my eye caught this large, circular object coming towards us.

It was shaped like a flattened cone, and on top was a large, brilliant red light, not pulsating as on any of the aircraft we’d see heading for a landing at Newark Airport. When it came a little closer, we could make out a row or circle of white lights that ran around the entire rim of the craft – these were also flashing on and off. There were so many of these lights that it was dazzling to the mind.”

John Lennon even drew pictures of his UFO sighting, which we’ve covered in the past, as well as mention it in the song Nobody Told Me.

Robbie Williams

robbie williams

Robbie says he’s had several visitations ever since he was a young boy, but not from a distance like many others on this list. A close encounter of the 3rd kind entails being in physical proximity with some type of entity. While listening to his own song called Arizona…

“I stood on the balcony and there was this big ball of gold light that turned up – we thought it was Venus or Mars or something. Then the song stops playing and it disappears. But then we put Arizona on again and the ball turned back up. It happened four times.”

That sounds crazy, but as Carl Jung and Jacques Vallée have nearly proven that “mythological weirdness” is a fundamental aspect of these types of experiences, like a defense mechanism of the beings to make sure nobody believes you.

Jimi Hendrix

jimi hendrix

Apparently Jimi Hendrix was obsessed with science fiction and space due to his early time spent watching Flash Gordon. This interest was only heightened when he and his brother Leon both witnessed the same UFO out of their backyard window.

Others have documented this interest, such as his teachers remarking his UFO doodles in his school books. All of us can attest to this by listening to his own musical content, which is full of space themes and psychedelia.

Tom DeLonge

tom delonge

The whole Tom fiasco is getting out of hand with his claims of having government insiders feeding him information (update: it’s true, look it up!), but regardless, this Blink 182 guitarist takes the entire UFO field very seriously, likely due to his own series of sightings and experiences:

“My whole body felt like it had static electricity, and I open my eyes and the fire is still going, and there’s a conversation going on outside the tent. It sounded like there were about 20 people there, talking.”

This was in 2015 when DeLonge camped out near Area 51. His conclusion was that aliens had literally gathered outside his tent and carried on a group talk, and that he could feel that they weren’t there to hurt anyone, but to “work on something.”

Sun Ra

sun ra

I doubt anyone is surprised that Sun Ra Arkestra has had what he called “space experiences,” based on this taking up nearly 100% of his musical content. His stories are more than a little bit further out than others:

“I was told that they wanted me to go somewhere; that I had the type of mind that could do something to help the planet. I was going out, but it was a very dangerous journey. I had to have a procedure and a discipline; I had to go up there like that in order to prevent any part of my body from touching the outside, because I was going through time-zones, and if any part of my body touched the outside I couldn’t get it back… I went up at terrific speed to another dimension, another planet.”

Unlike Carlos Santana & Metatron, Sun Ra was offered to be the spearhead of a movement to guide the planet and governments in a certain spiritual direction. “And I said I wasn’t interested.”

Lupe Fiasco

lupe fiasco

Lupe, a rapper who refused seemingly corrupt major label record deals in order to maintain his integrity, is no stranger to high strangeness and conspiracy. In Chicago as a child of 11 years of age, Lupe says:

“I remember waking up and being shocked, like I was surrounded by all of this electricity. I was trying to call and wake my cousin up and I couldn’t move. I was surrounded by all of this blue electricity, it was really weird.”

He continued this story during his Power 106 FM (KPWR) interview, saying that during his paralysis around 7 AM in the morning, he saw a black disc fly down into visibility, hover, and then shoot off into the sky. The best part? He says this encounter left him with what appears to be a surgical scar on his ankle.

Kesha

kesha

After a long hiatus full of legal issues, Kesha is back and promoting her new album Rainbow. Of course a portion of the questions she receives revolves around the song called Spaceship, which seems important since the album artwork also features UFOs. Kesha was hanging out in Joshua Tree National Park in California when…

“I look up in the sky and there’s a bunch of spaceships. I swear to God, there were like five to seven and I don’t know why I didn’t, like, try to take a picture of it. I just looked at it. I was sitting on a rock and I was like, ‘What in the hell is that?’ I was trying to figure it out and then they went away. And then they came back in a different formation.”

Kesha promises that she was completely sober at the time, increasing the trust-factor of her testimony.

Lemmy

lemmy

Lemmy Kilmister is the frontman for Motörhead. In a filmed discussion about their album Bad Magic, Lemmy calmly recounted that a spaceship…

“Came over the horizon at a thousand miles an hour and stopped dead. I know they’re out there. I don’t have a problem with it.”

This occurred at Rock in Rio in 2011. This is basically how my own UFO sighting went down, in terms of my reaction. It didn’t surprise me since it’s basically a settled fact at this point. I was like “Huh, I finally saw one, neat,” and went on about my day. The one I saw was way off in the distance though. If I saw one up close, I’d have a freak out session for sure.

Keith Richards

keith richards

Richards, the guitarist for The Rolling Stones, was frequented by two groups constantly at his home, the Redlands estate, in West Sussex. These groups were the police and the aliens.

“I’ve seen a few, but nothing that any of the ministries would believe. I believe they exist – plenty of people have seen them. They are tied up with a lot of things, like the dawn of man, for example. It’s not just a matter of people spotting a flying saucer… I’m not an expert. I’m still trying to understand what’s going on.”

His worldview is larger than most, encompassing the UFO issue as far back as the birth of mankind. He says that an authority on the matter has assured him that his house was once, and perhaps still, a landing site for non-terrestrial spaceships.

Black Francis

black francis

Francis is not shy about putting this topic out there into the public consciousness. He mentions several times, whether in his solo work or his group albums with Pixies, sightings of silver, cigar-shaped craft. Whether or not he himself has witnessed a saucer is up for debate, as the common story out there is one his mother and cousins experienced when he was still less than one year old.

“There was a flying saucer floating above the house for half an hour and everyone just stood there and watched it… it was just hovering. Then the state police came and chased it but they couldn’t catch up with it. My mother’s weird but she’s not that weird. She’s got no reason to make this stuff up.”

If I was him, I’d feel no reason to doubt several members of my family along with being able to search the police records for the event (something I’d definitely try to corroborate).

Reg Presley

reg presley

Reg, singer for The Troggs, takes his involvement in the field of extraterrestrial visitations seriously. By serious, I mean that he’s been reinvesting his royalties since 1994 into the crop circle investigation along with visiting UFO hotspots and using helicopter surveillance to try to catch a cornfield formation in action.

He even launched a local cable show called The Reg Presley UFO Show and released a book in 2002, entitled Wild Things They Don’t Tell Us (a reference to his band’s hit song Wild Thing). I guess he probably turns a profit on it after all.

Ryan Adams

ryan adams

Singer-songwriter Ryan Adams said that in 2013 he was driving through the night in Glendale, California when his sighting occurred. Oftentimes you can question yourself on what it was you saw, but Adams said the object he saw was being chased by helicopters. Adams didn’t get a chance to take a picture though:

“Enough people are dead from texting and driving.”

It’s hard to say what was more responsible, but at least we know Adams is a safe, mature driver!

Sammy Hagar

sammy hagar

Hagar, a frontman for Van Halen, recounted his 1970’s experiences in his autobiography:

“It was real. They were plugged into me. It was a download situation. This was long before computers or any kind of wireless. There weren’t even wireless telephones. Looking back now, it was like, ‘They downloaded something into me!'”

Anyone who’s gone deep into these topics knows that Terrence McKenna had a lot to say about “interdimensional information trading stations,” related to his popular machine elves topic. Sammy Hagar mentions at one point that he was also witness to a “car with no wheels.”

Ace Frehley

ace frehley

Mainly known as the lead guitarist and a founding member of KISS, Ace Frehley designed his costume as “The Spaceman” due to his UFO sightings at his wooded home in New York.

“As far as UFOs, I see them all the time in upstate New York where my place is. I live in a wooded area and objects that can’t possibly move in anyway a man-made craft can, have flown over me.”

It was significant enough of an event for Ace that he went on to name some of his solo albums with titles like Second Sighting, Anomaly, Space Invader, and Frehley’s Comet.

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