Ten Musicians Who Claim to Have Seen Aliens
For something light-hearted in these trying times… Or perhaps not so light-hearted if an alien invasion is just around the corner, which, if you asked some of the following musicians, might just be the case.
Before that though, a disclaimer: Musicians, alcohol and drugs are, for the most part, like bickering siblings — they don’t always get on, but again, for the most part, in the end, they’re there for each other hand in hand. So these ‘sightings’ should be taken with a punch of salt. Maybe aliens do exist, but credibility is somehow lost when one is off one’s nut on acid…
So without further ado, here’s ten musicians who claim to have seen aliens.
Shaun Ryder
Remember that aforementioned music, alcohol and drugs connection, well, case in point, enter Mr. Shaun Ryder.
Icon of the Madchester scene, Ryder has never shied away from discussing his various alien encounters — they even prompted a TV documentary on the dubiously titled, History channel.
Ryder’s first two UFO sightings happened in his teens and they have informed his lifelong intrigue of extraterrestrial life. At a bus stop in Little Hulton, England, in the early hours of the morning Ryder saw his first UFO above him before it quickly left. A few months later at another bus stop — I don’t get the bus stop thing either — this time in Salford, England, Ryder allegedly saw a fleet of “Hundreds of lights going across the sky”, that he believed to be UFOs.
It doesn’t stop there either. After finishing filming his UFO documentary at a UFO hotspot Ryder alleged that he saw yet another UFO so close above him that he assumed it to be a model someone had made as a joke.
In all honesty, with the drug usage Ryder is famed for, he could’ve been abducted and been none the wiser to a few probes. Ryder insists however, that he has always been stone-cold sober for each of his sightings.
Jimi Hendrix
Remember that aforementioned music, alcohol and drugs connection — yes, there’s a theme here — well, Hendrix wasn’t exactly known for his sobriety, so dip back into your salt bowl.
In 1970, when playing a gig in Maui, Hawaii next to a live volcano — yes, Jimi was a god — Hendrix claimed to have spotted not one but a number of flying saucers overhead. Some footage of the show in part featured on the otherwise unrelated Chuck Wein film in 1971, Rainbow Bridge, but there is a UFO shaped-hole in the footage. Despite the film, both Hendrix and the audience kept to the claim.
Interested in all things lysergic, Hendrix is perhaps not the most trustworthy candidate when it comes to UFO sightings. If you travel by ‘Dragonfly’ to anywhere in the world then you’re most likely not a winning the credibility war. What is unsurprising, however, is that Hendrix’s music would transcend worlds!
Hendrix sadly died not long after the gig…. Conspiracy?
Stevie Nicks
Do you remember that music, alcohol and dru — hold your horses! This one comes from a perfectly sober and a perfectly viable source of information in the guise of no other than Stevie Nicks!
In Phoenix, Arizona Nicks would often see, “White floating objects”. If that sounds a lot like aeroplanes that’s because they were. But amongst those aeroplanes Nicks is convinced that she saw UFOs too. Apparently a UFO hotspot, Nicks called her makeshift observatory near the Camelback Mountain a “Space Highway”, due to its number of reputed UFO sightings. Amongst the aeroplanes, Nicks is thoroughly convinced she too has seen little green spacemen out for a leisurely stroll.
As mentioned, Nicks was off the wagon during her sightings so who are we to deny the word of the awesome Stevie Nicks?
Prodigy
Mobb Deep’s late Prodigy was just one of the figureheads for the music industry’s obsession with Illuminati. For the uninitiated, they’re the secret society responsible for everything bad in the world. From wars to reptilians and to your girlfriend leaving you — probably — it’s the Illuminati! Unsurprisingly then, Prodigy also claimed that he once saw a UFO.
Before Prodigy’s unfortunate and untimely death in 2017, in an interview with Viceland he recalled a time when a UFO flew above his home. After seeing flashing lights in his bedroom, he looked out of his window to a completely black street, “Down the block… all the power was out”. After the blackout, “Coloured lights started coming into the room and it was dead quiet”. This strange experience led Prodigy to believe that these lights were indeed of an alien kind. Obviously, there’s no way to confirm what Prodigy actually saw, but he seemed certain it wasn’t of this earth.
Who knows? Maybe it was a local light-show — is that a thing?
Matt Bellamy
Another avid conspiracy theorist, enter Mr Matt Bellamy. From reptilian overlords to the admittedly retracted statement of 9/11 being an inside job, Matt Bellamy ticks every obligatory box for joining the tinfoil hat owner’s club. Of course, Bellamy too claims to have seen a UFO.
In an interview with XFM, Bellamy stated that he was driving through country roads in his formative years when he saw a “Flashing light”, in the woods — the logical conclusion: aliens…obviously. Unless Ramblers were having their annual midnight drug-fuelled rave, what else could it have been but aliens? To be fair this is the same man who has a fear of being impregnated by an alien — yes, he actually said that.
Granted, in the interview Bellamy immediately discredits himself by saying, “I may have smoked something… some kind of tobacco” — funny that! Then again, that would have had to have been some strong stuff…apparently…
Dave Davies
Dave Davies has had a string of purported UFO sightings throughout his life that have left him thoroughly engrossed with Ufology.
In an interview with Vulture, Dave talked all things supernatural including a UFO sighting in Devon. What aliens were doing in Devon is a mystery, but one half of the bickering Davies brothers claimed that he saw, “Lights and zigzags in the skies”. It was this event that led him down the yellow brick road of alien intelligence.
Psychic alien communication, personal connections with the Dog Star and UFOs, Dave is really quite open about his otherworldly beliefs. However, Dave told Vulture that his openness is a relatively new phenomenon because back in ’80s, Dave said, “People thought I’d gone ‘round the bend”. Bless him.
Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar is quickly becoming a legend of hip hop, and rightfully so. Not only for his generation, but for hip hop itself. So maybe this was preordained by our alien overlords after he “probably” got abducted by aliens at the young age of six; or, so he claimed in an interview with Howard Stern.
In the interview, Lamar’s abduction story teeters on being a little tongue in cheek. He suggested that the abduction, “Probably gave [him] the energy” to do music. However, Lamar vehemently stands by at least seeing one alien when he was just six. “Nobody believed me then, and they don’t believe me now”, he stated, “I’m going to stand my ground to this: Yes, I did”. He described the alien encounter as, “surreal”, which is more than an understatement.
Clearly Kendrick is convinced, but it might take more than a memory of when he was six years old to convince the rest of the world.
Morrissey
Before the planets aligned when the Smiths formed, Morrissey was seemingly witness to yet another kind of planetary travel back in 1980.
According to Johnny Rogan’s biography, Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, on an otherwise ordinary night, Morrissey was out visiting friends in London when he and his friends allegedly witnessed a fleet of UFOs flying overhead. For ten whole minutes the fleet flew above them in a hexagonal formation before disappearing. When only one person sees a ‘UFO’ they can be easily discredited, but a whole group of friends, that’s out of this world.
Like a light that never goes out, the ‘sighting’ had a lasting effect on Morrissey and helped cement a belief that the government was and is covering up knowledge of alien life. Morrissey, maybe it was really nothing?
John Lennon
Apparently, it wasn’t just the F.B.I. who were watching John Lennon in the 1970s, but too extraterrestrial life — perhaps there’s a link there?
On one sober night in 1974 while lying naked in bed — something Lennon was famed for — Lennon had an “urge” to walk out onto the terrace of his home in New York. Outside, Lennon saw something that had, “Ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top.” In a panic, Lennon called out to his assistant, May Pang, who corroborated the sighting. Both Pang and Lennon quickly took Polaroids of the ‘UFO’, but nothing showed on the pictures… spooky. Although at this point in his life Lennon was somewhat heavy on the sauce, he claimed that he was sober for this encounter.
In fairness, with the level of fame that the Beatles had, it certainly isn’t surprising that aliens might have picked them up on their alien radio. Perhaps a few mop-topped aliens just wanted a closer look at their favourite pop star?
David Bowie
Why wouldn’t Bowie have seen an alien? Extraterrestrials were certainly a recurring theme in Bowie’s illustrious oeuvre. In fact, some of his lyrics often read like an open letter to UFO fan clubs, though admittedly with no small amount poetic skill.
In the late 1960s alongside the inimitable, Tony Visconti, Bowie would often go out UFO spotting around London — that sounds so sixties it hurts. But always one to excel, when Bowie decided to take his latent Ufology career one step further by regularly visiting an observatory he allegedly “Made sightings six, seven times a night for about a year”, or so he told Creem magazine in 1975. Bowie even documented their movements, “We had regular cruises that came over. We knew that the 6.15 was coming in and would meet up with another one. And they would be stationary for about half an hour, and then after verifying what they’d been doing that day, they’d shoot off”. Again, why wouldn’t Bowie have seen aliens?
Normally this is where I’d make a joke about how it was the 1960s, they were the halcyon days of LSD, so he was probably tripping blah blah blah, but come on, we are talking about Bowie! It has to be true! Colour me biased, but if Bowie — provided he was alive of course — claimed that pigs could fly you better believe that I’d be pushing old Mr Oinkers (my pet pig) right off a tall building.
Disclaimer: I wouldn’t really, nor do I own a pig…
