Musicians Who Saw UFOs: John Lennon, David Bowie, Sammy Hagar, Tom DeLonge, Sun Ra and More

The first musician to claim an abduction did so before the word existed. Herman Poole Blount, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, told interviewers for the rest of his life that in the mid-1930s, while a student at Alabama A&M, he had been taken by beings with small antennae to Saturn, where they told him to leave school and speak to the world through music; he left school, and by 1952 had changed his name to Le Sony'r Ra, then Sun Ra, and had begun to insist that he was from Saturn and had never been born. His Arkestra, a big band in sequinned robes and Egyptian headdresses, played what he called myth-science and cosmic jazz for four decades, recorded hundreds of albums on his own label, and made Space Is the Place (1974), a film in which Ra lands in Oakland in a spaceship to recruit Black Americans for a colony on another planet. He died in Birmingham in 1993, having never withdrawn the story.

Whether he believed it is the wrong question; he built a life and an art on it, and the Saturn story predates the Hill abduction by a quarter of a century and the contactees by fifteen years. The Afrofuturism article follows what his myth became in the hands of George Clinton, Outkast and Janelle Monáe; for this article he is the case that shows the encounter story as a vocation.

Lennon's sighting is the best documented of any musician's because he documented it. On August 23, 1974, at about nine in the evening, he was on the terrace of the apartment he shared with May Pang on East 52nd Street, looking toward the East River, when a round, flat object with a row of white lights and a red light on top came into view over the buildings and moved slowly north; Pang, who came out at his shout, has described it as close enough to see detail and silent, and the two watched it until it passed out of sight. Lennon called the police, who told him others had reported it, and a newspaper, which did not; he had a camera but no film. The liner notes of Walls and Bridges, released on September 26, 1974, carry a note in his hand giving the date and time and stating that he saw a UFO.

The sighting turns up twice more in his work. "Nobody Told Me," recorded in 1980 and released after his death in 1984, has a line about UFOs over New York that he sings as if it were the least surprising thing in the song, and Pang's memoir gives the event a chapter. The stranger story belongs to Uri Geller, who has said that Lennon told him, in the 1970s, of being handed an egg-shaped object by beings in his apartment and that Lennon gave him the object, which Geller still keeps; it rests on Geller's word alone. The terrace sighting rests on two witnesses and a printed record, which is more than most cases in the timeline can claim, and the how to report a sighting article would have told him to load the camera first.

Bowie built his career on an alien and said the interest came from experience. In a 1975 interview with Cameron Crowe he claimed to have seen UFOs repeatedly as a young man, six or seven times a night for a period, he said, while watching the sky from an observatory in the Beckenham area, and other accounts from friends of the 1960s have him helping with a UFO newsletter as a teenager; how much of this was Bowie in character is unknowable, since he was in character for most of the decade. The songs are on the record. "Space Oddity" (1969) is an astronaut lost; "Life on Mars?" (1971) is the question; "Starman" (1972) is a visitor who wants to meet us but fears he would blow our minds, delivered by radio to the children; and Ziggy Stardust, the alien rock messiah he played on stage from 1972 to July 1973, is the contactee's Space Brother as a pop star, come to save a dying Earth and destroyed by his fans.

He then played an alien for real. In Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) he is Thomas Jerome Newton, a visitor from a drought-stricken planet who builds a corporation to fund a rescue ship and is ruined by the humans he came to use; the performance, thin, cocaine-pale and remote, is the one most people picture when they picture Bowie as an extraterrestrial. "Loving the Alien" (1984) and "Hallo Spaceboy" (1995) kept the theme, and his last album, Blackstar (2016), released two days before his death, opens with a video of a dead astronaut. Bowie never reported a sighting in the way Lennon did; he reported a life.

Sammy Hagar's account is the abduction story told by a rock singer who does not care whether it costs him. In Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock (2011) the Van Halen and Montrose frontman describes, at around nineteen, waking in his bedroom in Fontana, California, to the awareness of a ship parked in the foothills and two beings who were connected to him, as he puts it, wirelessly, uploading and downloading his mind; he has said since, on television and in interviews, that it was not a dream, that it happened more than once, and that a childhood sighting of a craft in the same hills preceded it. His music had been in space since Montrose's "Space Station #5" (1973), and he has treated the experiences as the reason.

Tom DeLonge took the belief into policy. The Blink-182 guitarist who wrote "Aliens Exist" (1999) spent the 2000s reading the literature and the 2010s acting on it: he left the band in 2015, published a series of novels and nonfiction books, Sekret Machines, with the historian A.J. Hartley, corresponded with John Podesta about the subject in emails that WikiLeaks released in 2016, and in October 2017 founded To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon's AATIP programme, Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, and the physicist Hal Puthoff. The company released the three Navy videos, FLIR1, Gimbal and GoFast, in December 2017 and March 2018, timed with the New York Times story that revealed the Pentagon's UFO program, and the Pentagon's own release of the same footage in April 2020 and the hearings of 2023 followed the trail he had opened. He rejoined Blink-182 in 2022. No other musician has changed the subject's public standing as much.

The list is long and the evidence is testimony. Ace Frehley, the Space Ace of Kiss, has said for decades that he has seen craft and believes he was taken as a young man, and made a solo album called Space Invader (2014). Robbie Williams went to Nevada in 2008 to attend a UFO conference with the journalist Jon Ronson for a BBC radio documentary, described three sightings of his own, one over his Los Angeles house as he finished a song about the subject, and has since retreated from the topic. Kesha has said she saw a group of lights over Joshua Tree, wrote "Spaceship" about waiting to be collected, and hosted a paranormal podcast. Post Malone told Joe Rogan in August 2020 that he had seen objects several times, as a teenager in upstate New York and later in Utah. Nick Jonas told a radio interviewer in 2015 that he had watched three objects over his backyard at fourteen.

Demi Lovato went furthest. After a 2020 session in Joshua Tree with Steven Greer, the founder of the CE5 contact protocols, in which they reported a craft appearing on request, Lovato made a Peacock series, Unidentified with Demi Lovato (2021), toured sighting hotspots and argued, for a season, that the word alien was offensive; the CE5 article covers what the protocols claim and what a meditation group in the desert is likely to see. The older stories are shakier: Elvis Presley's sightings come from his hairdresser and confidant Larry Geller, and the account of a craft rescuing Jimi Hendrix's band from a snowstorm comes from his former bandleader Curtis Knight's 1974 book, not from Hendrix. The pattern across all of them is the pattern of the reports generally, a sincere witness, a bright object and no camera, and the songs are what the musicians made of it.