Alien Rock

The Rock 'n' Roll Extraterrestrial Connection

Michael Luckman

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781451604320
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Whether you're a UFO skeptic, believer, or merely a rock music fan, Alien Rock takes you on a fascinating and irreverent journey exploring the extraterrestrial stories of your favorite rock icons. From Elvis to the Beatles and from Michael Jackson to Marilyn Manson, countless rock stars have claimed to have seen, communed with, been inspired by, and sometimes even descended from extraterrestrials. Now you can discover these stories for yourself in this illuminating, all-access pass to rock's unearthly encounters—some friendly, some frightening, and some frankly bizarre.From John Lennon spying a UFO from his penthouse in 1974 to Jimi Hendrix's claim that he was a messenger from "another place, " there is no extraterrestrial tale neglected. With witty prose and in-depth research, Alien Rock provides a fascinating new perspective on the long, strange trip that is rock history, and suggests that, wherever the road takes us, we may not be traveling alone.

1
THE BEATLES AND THE ROLLING STONES

INTERGALACTIC ROCK ’N’ ROLL ROYALTY

A poster depicting the Fab Four as space aliens combines the public’s fascination with the Beatles and extraterrestrial creatures. John Lennon believed that he might have been a UFO abductee.

When the Beatles invaded New York City on February 7, 1964, they might as well have been visitors from another planet. Not only their outrageous new sound but also their peculiar looks made them seem totally alien to most Middle Americans, who were completely blown away by the rock group’s British mop-top haircuts, which were as far away from conventional crew cuts as you could get.

But these same conservative Americans would have been positively shell-shocked to learn that only ten years later a naked John Lennon would shout to an alien flying saucer hovering over his Manhattan apartment building, “Stop, take me with you!” and would apparently send signals to his fans from the other side following his assassination—a superhuman feat that even the great Houdini could never accomplish.

At the dawn of the Space Age during the early 1960s, musical groups commonly adopted names that had a familiar outerspace ring such as Bill Haley and the Comets, the Telstars, the Zodiacs, the Starlets, and so forth. Albums by these and a galaxy of other space groups from the period are highly prized today by savvy collectors for their cool retro cover artwork showing planets, rocket ships, and men in space suits. Consequently, before they were the Beatles, John Lennon and school chums Paul McCartney and George Harrison billed themselves as Johnny and the Moondogs, playing school dances, coffeehouses, and beer halls in and around Liverpool, England. Later they changed their name to the Silver Beatles and ultimately to the Beatles, the group we all came to love.

Asked how they arrived at the name Beatles, John replied it was given to them by a man in the sky who handed them “a flaming pie”—an interesting choice of words given Lennon’s later penchant for flying saucers.

JOHN LENNON’S CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

John’s mind-blowing, up-close-and-personal UFO sighting occurred on August 23, 1974, at 9 P.M. The setting was the small penthouse of the Tower Apartments on East Fifty-second Street overlooking New York City’s East River, a place John shared with his personal secretary and then-girlfriend, May Pang. Among the parade of celebrities who regularly stopped by were Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Paul McCartney and his wife, Linda.

Writing in friend Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, Lennon recalled, “I was lying naked on the bed when I had this urge … so I went to the window, just dreaming in my usual poetic state of mind … as I turned my head, hovering over the next building, no more than a hundred feet away was this thing.” The hair on the back of his neck stood up, a phenomenon long associated with UFO reports.

Lennon said that the object appeared to have “ordinary electric lightbulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one not-blinking red light on top. What the Nixon is that? I says to myself … is it a helicopter? No. It makes no noise … ah, then, it must be a balloon … but no. Balloons don’t look like that, nor do they fly so slow (about thirty miles per hour).”

According to May Pang, she had just stepped out of the shower when she heard John scream for her. He was standing naked on the terrace of the apartment, looking toward the sky, pointing. “My eye caught this large, circular object coming towards us,” said May. “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 seen heading for 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. It was, I estimate, about the size of a Learjet, and it was so close that if we had something to throw at it, we probably would have hit it.”

The UFO, which had a dark metallic color, floated silently less than a hundred feet away from the couple. May jokingly said to John, “Suppose it’s looking at us. Maybe they think that everyone who lives on the East Side wanders around naked on their terraces on Friday evenings. We look like Adam and Eve!” The object went past the United Nations Plaza building, which houses many U.N. delegates, slowly turned left, crossed over the East River, and eventually headed in the direction of Brooklyn, disappearing from view.

John shouted to the UFO, “Stop, take me with you!” then they both went inside. “I almost didn’t call you [to go outside],” John confessed to May. “I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me. I thought you would say, ‘What is John on?’ I didn’t think anyone would believe me.” The rest of that night John kept repeating, “I can’t believe it … I can’t believe it … I’ve seen a flying saucer!” John and May were in total shock.

Lennon went to great lengths to assure his friends that he wasn’t high on any substance when he spotted the flying saucer. Among the people he told about the sighting was his trusted friend and adviser Elliot Mintz, who believed the story. Unfortunately photographs John had taken of the saucer came back “like they had been through the radar at customs.” John asked friend Bob Gruen, a well-known photographer of rock stars, to call the newspapers to see if anyone else had sighted the UFO. Sure enough, reports had been received by both the local police station and the news media. The New York Daily News received five telephone calls from people who saw the UFO. Two people gave UFO sighting reports to the New York City Police Department.

John Lennon sighted a flying saucer big enough to hold two passengers from a Manhattan rooftop. The former Beatle yelled to the UFO, “Stop, take me with you!” John opposed the UFO coverup and regularly read UFO publications, such as the Flying Saucer Review.

John speculated that the UFO was part of a fleet stationed in upstate New York, from which they could siphon off energy. “UFOs were probably responsible for the last blackout,” he said. “It’s possible that they drained too much juice from Con Ed all at once.” John’s observations were right on the money. A pilot sighted UFOs operating near a major power station on November 9, 1985. Some eight hundred thousand people were trapped in the blackout, some for hours, in subways or elevators. Strange blue lights were also seen at about the same time on New York’s Lower East Side.

Lennon referred to his UFO sighting on the liner notes of his Walls and Bridges album. He wrote, “On the 23rd of August 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a UFO—J.L.” He further referred to UFOs on “Nobody Told Me,” sadly one of the last songs he wrote: “There’s a UFO over New York and I ain’t too surprised.”

John thought that the governments of the world were covering up the truth about UFOs. “If the masses started to accept UFOs, it would profoundly affect their attitude toward life, politics, everything. It would threaten the status quo,” he said.

Spiritually, Lennon believed that “Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad, were all messengers of the Supreme Being. They were all saying basically the same thing, laying down the laws of the universe in language appropriate to their culture. The trick is to make all this subconscious knowledge conscious.”

John naturally incorporated his cosmic views into his music. For example, in his solo effort “Instant Karma,” the memorable chorus goes, “We’ll all shine on like the moon and the stars and the sun.” In “Across the Universe,” which he recorded with both the Beatles and David Bowie and which was John’s favorite song, Lennon referred to “limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns, it calls me on and on and across the universe.” In “Yer Blues,” John stepped out of his mortal skin entirely, proclaiming, “My mother was of the sky, my father is of the earth but I am of the universe.” And in “Out the Blue,” a song on John’s Mind Games LP that boasts a heavenly choir in the background, Lennon recalled that his soul mate, Yoko Ono, suddenly appeared to him one day “like a UFO” out of the blue.

John actually thought that he might have been abducted by space aliens as a child and certainly shared an affinity with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who believe they have been taken on board flying saucers in the middle of the night by gray humanoids. “It [UFO abductions] can be traced through hypnotic regression,” John said. “That would explain why I’ve always seen things so differently” He wondered aloud if these aliens might be humans from the future who had mastered the art of time travel.

UFOs sparked John’s interest ever since the late 1960s, when he started subscribing to the respected British UFO journal Flying Saucer Review. Elton John introduced Lennon to psychic Uri Geller at a party in the mid-1970s. The two men immediately struck up a friendship. Geller’s New York City apartment was about one block away from the Dakota building, where John and Yoko lived. Uri said that he secretly met John about once a week in a coffee shop at the nearby Sherry Netherland Hotel to discuss UFOs and similar subjects near and dear to their hearts.

John Green (also known as Charlie Swann), John and Yoko’s personal tarot card reader from 1975 to October 1980, indicated that the Lennons were heavily tuned in to the spirit world. Green quoted John as saying, “The wife [Yoko] tells me I’m getting stronger and stronger psychiatric messages. She says the spirits are coming to me all the time now and they say I’m an initiate. Isn’t that amazing? We won’t need all of those psychics anymore because I will get all the messages.”

John Lennon asked Green, in his first job interview, if he believed in UFOs, saying that he’d seen one: “I was on the roof … when I saw this thing, this ship. It wasn’t much of a ship, maybe big enough to hold two people.” Lennon told Green that he didn’t report the UFO sighting, fearing newspaper headlines like “‘Ex-Beatle Sees Saucer” and articles asking “What was he on?” Green considered Lennon’s question about UFOs a “test.” Green passed the test with flying colors, blurting out that everything we see is affected by “selective perception,” created by our own beliefs and conditioning, and the conversation promptly moved on to other topics.

Around 1969 John and Yoko became briefly involved with a mysterious character from the San Francisco area named Dr. Don Hamrick, who claimed to have made direct contact with extraterrestrials in Norway and wanted the Beatles to promote communication between humans and space beings. According to biographer Albert Goldman, author of The lives of John Lennon, the Lennons visited John’s old friend Tony Cox, who lived with his new wife, Melinda Kendall, in a remote Norwegian farmhouse near the town of Alborg. Melinda was the daughter of a rich Texas family and one of Hamrick’s devoted followers. During their three-week stay, John and Yoko were introduced to Hamrick, who sometimes used the alias Z. Charneau, and two hippie concert producers from Canada, John Brower and Ritchie Yorke, who were organizing a huge Toronto peace festival, which Hamrick envisioned being headlined by the Beatles. Hamrick also wanted to have Elvis Presley perform at the mega-event.

Brower said that when he later met Hamrick in a hotel room in Norway, the leader of the Frontiers of Science group claimed that John had already been taken up in a spaceship. “The next thing Hamrick does is to take us over to this table, and here’s this scale model of a little Buck Rogers city,” said Brower. “It’s floating mysteriously about a foot above the table. He runs his hand under it and says, ‘I have been given by the space people the antigravity secret. We’re building a city above Brazil in the clouds. This is the model and it illustrates the power.’” Hamrick, a former seminarian, was on a mission to unite the physical and metaphysical aspects of science.

Brower noticed that a tremendous change had come over John the second time he visited him at the Coxes’ farmhouse. He claimed that Lennon’s primary focus had gone from world peace to space and cosmic consciousness. Furthermore Lennon insisted that the rock festival in Toronto had to be free. Hamrick’s flamboyant chief disciple, Leonard Hollaban—a man with long red curls who dressed in purple velvet—unveiled plans at a key strategy session at the Jefferson Airplanes house in Haight-Ashbury in January 1970 for John and Yoko to arrive at the festival in a “kosmic kraft”—a bubble-bodied helicopter that supposedly had no engine and operated entirely on psychic energy. The psychic helicopter proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Rock musicians, including Paul Kantner of the Airplane, weren’t buying it. The whole project quickly dissolved.

In an article published in Rolling Stone magazine on April 16, 1970, John wrote, “Yoko and I still think we need it [a festival] not just to show that we can gather peacefully and groove to the music, but to change the balance of energy power on earth and, therefore, in the universe.” John alluded to staying in a “far out farmhouse” in Norway with no telephone and referred to his friend “Dr. Don Hamrick or Zee to his Martian friends.” As Lennon biographer Albert Goldman noted, “Lennon’s interest in UFOs and space people didn’t disappear. It just became a private interest rather than a public statement.”

Just a few weeks before his assassination, John reportedly handed Uri Geller an object that he claimed he got “from an extraterrestrial entity.” According to Uri, the object, which he cherishes, is an “odd-looking, not-quite-egg-shaped piece of metal,” resembling brass, “very smooth and very heavy, about an inch or so wide. I was astounded. I said it sounded like an alien encounter and he seemed to agree and said that he couldn’t think of another explanation himself”

John told Uri, “About six months ago I was asleep in my bed, with Yoko, at home, in the Dakota Building. And suddenly I wasn’t asleep. Because there was this blazing light round the door. It was shining through the cracks and the keyhole, like someone was out there with searchlights, or the apartment was on fire … There were these four people out there”

Uri asked John if they were fans. “Well, they didn’t want my f—in’ autograph,” said John. “They were like, little. Bug-like. Big bug eyes and little bug mouths … I’ve told this to two other people, right? One was Yoko and she believes me. She says she doesn’t understand it, but she knows I wouldn’t lie to her … I was straight that night. I wasn’t dreaming and I wasn’t tripping. There were these creatures, like people but not like people … They did something, But I don’t know what it was. I tried to throw them out, but, when I took a step towards them, they kind of pushed me back. I mean, they didn’t touch me. It was like they just willed me. Pushed me with willpower and telepathy.”

When John woke up with “this (egg-shaped) thing in my hands. They gave it to me.” John presented it to Uri, saying, “Keep it, it’s too weird for me. If it’s my ticket to another planet, I don’t want to go there.” Uri said that “when I hold the cold, metal egg in my fist, I have a strong sensation that John knew more about this object than he told me. Maybe it didn’t come with an instruction manual, but I think John knew what it was for. And whatever that purpose was—communication? Healing? A first-class intergalactic ticket?—it scared him. I wish I could have warned him … that however scary aliens seem, it’s the humans you have to fear.”

Geller said that he still has the physical evidence from John’s alleged alien encounter, but is reluctant to have it tested by a laboratory. “I want to keep the mysticism around it,” Uri explained. (For further information go to www.urigeller.com.)

John’s wife, Yoko Ono, who has brilliantly reinvented her career recently by invading the dance-club circuit and the rave-music scene, scoring a smash hit with her song “Walking on Thin Ice,” was well aware that someone else was out there in space listening. On her 1985 Starpeace album, Yoko sang about “blue star people” who inhabit outer space, while the title track of the album contained a long-distance phone conversation with aliens. Yoko’s description of aliens coming from a “blue star” is nothing short of astounding when you factor in that the two beings of light who communicated to Elvis Presley when he was a young boy growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, told him that his home was a “blue star planet” located somewhere in the Orion constellation. How could Yoko have possibly known about the existence of the blue star? It seems that she may have tuned in to the same cosmic wavelength as Elvis, who was John’s musical idol.

Yoko Ono holds a clear, round cosmic ball on the cover of her album Starpeace, which expresses her hope for peace not only on Earth, but throughout the universe.

Yoko also was inextricably drawn to Egyptology and collected museum-quality Egyptian artifacts that held valuable clues to the cosmos. Michael Jackson and David Bowie shared the same fascination with Egyptian art. “I make sure to get all the Egyptian things, not for their value but for their magic power,” Yoko said. “Each piece has a certain magic power.” The Sphinx and Great Pyramid at Giza, which Yoko featured on on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• INTRODUCTION ELVIS: MUSICAL AMBASSADOR FROM THE STARS
• 1 THE BEATLES AND THE ROLLING STONES: INTERGALACTIC ROCK ’N’ ROLL ROYALTY
• 2 EMF: EXTRATERRESTRIAL MUSICAL FORCES
• 3 DAVID BOWIE AND JIMI HENDRIX: MEN WHO FELL TO EARTH
• 4 MICHAEL JACKSON: SINGING AND DANCING ON THE MOON
• 5 OTHER COSMIC PERSONALITIES: ELTON JOHN, MADONNA, STING, BOB DYLAN, MOBY, TINA TURNER, DAVE GROHL, DAN AYKROYD, REG PRESLEY, MARC BOLAN, SUN RA, GEORGE CLINTON, MERLE HAGGARD, WILLIE NELSON, DEBORAH HARRY, LANCE BASS, PATTI LABELLE, JUDY COLLINS, LAURIE ANDERSON, AND JAMIROQUAI
• 6 ROCK ’N’ ROLL’S SECRET X-FILES: JERRY GARCIA, DAVE DAVIES, SAMMY HAGAR, RICK WAKEMAN, NINA HAGEN, OLIVIA NEWTON JOHN, ACE FREHLEY, CAT STEVENS, PHOEBE SNOW, JOHNNY ROTTEN, MARILYN MANSON, AND OTHERS
• 7 EXTRATERRESTRIAL RAVERS ’N’ ROCKERS
• 8 THE MARTIAN MYSTERY TOUR AND THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
• 9 UFOS OVER WOODSTOCK, ALTAMONT, AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT
• EPILOGUE THE SIGNAL TO SPACE CONCERTS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• WEBSITES
• PHOTO CREDITS
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR