The Flying Saucer Novelties, 1947–1963
The saucers were in song within four years of Kenneth Arnold. Ella Fitzgerald recorded "Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer" for Decca in 1951, a swing number about a pair of visitors who take one look at the Earth's wars and prices and leave, which was the standard joke of the era: the aliens as tourists unimpressed by us. The first real hit was a record made of other records. In 1956 Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman released "The Flying Saucer," a fake news broadcast of a saucer landing in which the reporter's questions are answered by snippets of that year's hits, Elvis, Little Richard, the Platters, spliced in; it reached the American top five, invented the sampling "break-in" record, and drew lawsuits from the labels whose songs it had cut up, which the pair survived by arguing that the result was a new work. Goodman made saucer break-in records for the next twenty years.
The rockabilly and novelty labels followed. Billy Lee Riley's "Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll," cut for Sun Records in Memphis in 1957, had the visitors landing to dance and became the name of his band, the Little Green Men; Sheb Wooley's "The Purple People Eater" (1958), about a one-eyed, one-horned, flying creature who comes down to join a rock band, spent six weeks at number one and sold three million copies; the Ran-Dells' "Martian Hop" (1963), a doo-wop dance craze from Mars, was the last of the line before the Beatles. These records treat the saucer as a fad, and they are the best record of what the saucer meant in the 1950s to everyone who was not writing to the Air Force: a joke, a dance and a costume.
Space Rock and the Contactee Anthem, 1966–1979
The 1960s made the alien a mystic. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, who read the UFO literature, wrote "Mr. Spaceman" (1966), a country-rock request for a lift from a passing craft, and the band's "5D" album put it beside songs about relativity; Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun" (1967) is narrated by a visitor surveying the Earth and deciding, as Ella Fitzgerald's had, that the humans are not worth it; Jefferson Airplane's "Have You Seen the Saucers?" (1970) was the counterculture's saucer song, with the visitors as allies against the war; Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" (1970) ends its dream with silver ships lifting the chosen from a dying Earth, an image straight from the contactee books. David Bowie wrote the decade's great alien songs from the other side. "Life on Mars?" (1971) asks the question as a girl at a cinema; "Starman" (1972), from the Ziggy Stardust album, is a message from a benevolent being waiting in the sky, relayed by radio to the children, and Ziggy himself, the alien rock star Bowie played on stage for two years, is the Space Brother of the 1950s with a guitar and a haircut.
The decade's strangest hit was an anthem for a real event. In 1976 a Canadian band called Klaatu, whose refusal to reveal their identities started a rumour that they were the Beatles, released "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft," subtitled the recognised anthem of World Contact Day; the Carpenters covered it in 1977 with a full orchestra and took it into the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. World Contact Day had been real: on March 15, 1953, the International Flying Saucer Bureau, a Connecticut club run by Albert Bender, had asked its members to send a telepathic message to any craft listening, and the song's lyric is a paraphrase of that message. Bender closed the Bureau months later after, he said, a visit from three men in black. The same years produced Parliament's "Mothership Connection" (1975), Styx's "Come Sail Away" (1977), whose gathering of angels turns out to be a starship, the B-52's' "Planet Claire" (1979) and Billy Thorpe's "Children of the Sun" (1979), in which the visitors take the willing away.
From Rapture to Roswell, 1981–1999
Blondie's "Rapture" (1981), the first number one to feature rap, has a man from Mars eating cars, bars and guitars, and it set the tone: the 1980s alien was a cartoon. "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Slime Creatures from Outer Space" (1985) was a horror film in three minutes; the decade's serious space songs were about astronauts, not visitors. The Pixies changed that. Trompe le Monde (1991) has "The Happening," about a saucer landing in Las Vegas that the narrator hears about on the car radio, and "Motorway to Roswell," about a visitor who came for a holiday and ended up in a hangar; Black Francis's interest in the subject ran through his solo records too, and the Pixies remain the band most associated with the lore. Dave Grohl named his next band, in 1995, for the foo fighters of the Second World War and his label for Roswell.
The decade's end was crowded. The Prodigy's "Out of Space" (1992) built a rave anthem on a reggae sample about taking the listener's brain to another dimension; Babylon Zoo's "Spaceman" (1996) became the fastest-selling debut single in British history on the strength of a jeans commercial; Outkast's ATLiens (1996) made the Atlanta duo extraterrestrials by choice, an idea the Afrofuturism article traces back to Sun Ra; Radiohead's "Subterranean Homesick Alien" (1997), on OK Computer, has a narrator who wants to be abducted so that he can come back and tell everyone what he saw and be disbelieved; the Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic" (1998) came with a video of a robot fighting a squid in Tokyo. And Blink-182's "Aliens Exist" (1999), a two-minute pop-punk confession by a narrator who has seen things his friends will not believe, was written by Tom DeLonge, who would spend the next two decades proving he meant it.
The 2000s to Now: Real Cases, Abductions and E.T.
The best alien song of the century so far is about a police report. Sufjan Stevens's "Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois" (2005), the opening track of his Illinois album, is a two-minute hymn for piano and voice about the night of January 5, 2000, when a truck driver and then police officers in four Illinois towns, Highland, Lebanon, Shiloh and Millstadt, reported a huge, silent, triangular object with bright lights passing low overhead, a case documented in police tapes and investigated by the National Institute for Discovery Science; Stevens treats the object as an annunciation. Tool's "Rosetta Stoned" (2006) is the abduction song, an eleven-minute account of a man taken from near Area 51, shown the answer to everything and unable, afterwards, to remember it; Muse's "Exo-Politics" and "Knights of Cydonia" (2006) came from a band whose singer had read every disclosure book; the Killers' "Spaceman" (2008) is an abduction narrated by a man who is not sure whether to believe himself; Sturgill Simpson's "Turtles All the Way Down" (2014) has reptile beings made of light offering the narrator a cure.
Pop caught up. Lil Wayne declared himself a Martian on "Phone Home" (2008); Katy Perry's "E.T." (2011), with Kanye West, made the alien lover a number-one single and a video of the singer as a visitor over a dead Earth; MGMT's "Alien Days" (2013) and Coldplay's "Aliens" (2017), the latter about refugees, used the visitor as a metaphor; Kesha's "Spaceship" (2017) closes her Rainbow album with the singer waiting to be collected by a craft she has said she has seen. The genre has, in seventy years, moved from the saucer as a joke to the saucer as a confession, and the songs now sound like the reports.
The Songs and the Lore
The songs borrow from the reports directly, and sometimes the borrowing runs the other way. The Carpenters' anthem was written for a real telepathic experiment organised by the man who then invented, or met, the men in black; Sufjan Stevens set a case that is in the NUFORC database; the foo fighters of Dave Grohl's band name are in the case files; and the truck driver at the start of the Highland sighting called the police because, he said, nobody would believe him otherwise, which is the plot of the Radiohead song. The Kenneth Arnold case explains where the word in all the 1950s titles came from.
The largest crossing was Tom DeLonge's. The writer of "Aliens Exist" left Blink-182 in 2015, founded To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science in 2017 with a former Pentagon intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, Christopher Mellon, and was the vehicle through which the three Navy infrared videos reached the public in December 2017 alongside the New York Times story that revealed the Pentagon's UFO program; the Pentagon formally released the same videos in 2020, and the hearings of 2023 followed. The musicians who saw UFOs article covers his story alongside John Lennon's, David Bowie's and Sun Ra's, and the songs about mind control article takes the Pink Floyd question seriously.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most famous song about aliens?
By reach, probably David Bowie's "Starman" (1972), whose alien waits in the sky with a message for the children of Earth, or Katy Perry's "E.T." (2011), which spent five weeks at number one. By age, Sheb Wooley's "The Purple People Eater," a novelty about a one-eyed, one-horned visitor that topped the American chart for six weeks in 1958, and is still the first alien song most people learn.
Did Pink Floyd write a song about aliens?
Not really. Their early space-rock, "Astronomy Domine," "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," is about the cosmos rather than visitors, and "Brain Damage," the song people usually mean, is about madness, not abduction; the songs about mind control article explains what its lunatic and its voice in the head are about. Roger Waters has said the band never wrote about flying saucers.
Which bands are named after UFOs?
Foo Fighters, named by Dave Grohl in 1995 after the "foo fighters," the balls of light Allied pilots reported over Europe in 1944 and 1945, with a label called Roswell Records; UFO, the British hard-rock band formed in 1969 and named after a London club; and Klaatu, the Canadian band named for the alien of The Day the Earth Stood Still, whose 1976 single became the Carpenters' "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft."