“The infant race”: David Crosby’s UFO conspiracy theory
The late, great David Crosby was no ordinary folk musician. At the height of his haywire days, he was caught by police backstage in a Dallas nightclub freebasing cocaine with a propane tank in one hand, a brown bottle in the other, and a .45-calibre semiautomatic tucked down his pants. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in jail.
Needless to say, this wild incident didn’t happen in isolation. It equated to a dark patch that we usually associate with stars of the punk rock variety rather than angelic songbirds who purvey the sweetness of an old dog-eared acoustic, but Crosby didn’t like to play into stereotypes.
Thankfully, the Deja Vu singer was able to put these torrid times behind him and lead a more virtuous path in his later years. However, despite settling down and sobering up, he always remained liberated enough to continually share his singular views, no matter how controversial or crackpot they seemed.
One of these outlandish opinions pertained to his steadfast view that we must achieve peace… and then explore space at all costs. “We need to go find out what’s out there,” he once tweeted, “it’s our destiny… if we are smart enough.” In truth, it’s not absurd to think that we should clean up Earth, then turn our scope skywards—the only thing that clouds the clarity of his vision on that front is just how far we seem from his view that peace could be forgone in the near future.
However, he was happy to expand his starry-eyed supposition to include a trademark level of quirkiness when Sonic Breadcrumbs asked him about his UFO views: “Now, I don’t believe in many laws. I don’t obey many laws, but the law of averages I pay very strict attention to it because it works out to be true,” Crosby said.
“The law of averages tells me that you can’t have that many opportunities and have us be the only time intelligent life developed. That’s just not working. Too many opportunities,” he continued. “They’re out there. I guarantee you, there are other intelligences out there now. Right now. It’s just too many chances. It can’t be any other way.” That’s a level of certainty that Crosby usually only prescribed to his character references for Neil Young.
Beyond his view that simple probability proves we’re not alone, he also had a theory that some of that extraterrestrial life may have visited us. “They are real, man,” he said in regard to recently declassified UFO reports. “What I think is that they were here a long time ago. They took a look at us a long time ago and classified us as babies and said, ‘The infant race over here might turn out.’ And quarantined us.”
He likens this extraterrestrial tactic to the same practice human anthropologists deploy when it comes to uncontacted tribes here on Earth. We observe traditional life from afar but steadfastly attempt to avoid contact so as not to interfere with the primitive innocence of their lifestyle (and immunological vulnerability).
Or, as the folk star put it: “There was a bunch of people in, I think, Borneo that were still stone age. They were a tribe that they found that was still stone age. They quarantined them. They said, ‘You can’t take metal in there. They’re too good an anthropological treasure. You can’t fuck it up.’ So, they quarantined them. I think that’s what they did to us,” Crosby wildly theorised—somewhat overlooking the natural occurrence of metal in the Earth’s environment.
Unperturbed by such specifics, the folk singer continued: “They said, ‘This is a baby race. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re still killing each other.’ And they go, ‘I think you have to invent a good enough tribe to get you out into space. And then you have to stop killing each other before we’ll actually have anything to do with you.’ I think they’ve been here many times. I think some of them were probably poachers and probably some of them were park rangers, casing the poachers.”
In short, his view was that we haven’t had concrete contact with an alien race (that certainly exists), because we are simply too primitive to proverbially shake their little green hands. So, they observe us from afar, monitoring our development from a distance. Some get devious and plunder our resources or probe a man with a beard from Galveston, but thankfully, the extraterrestrial authorities are opposed to this and have patrol teams that clampdown on it—perhaps explaining why we sometimes see multiple crafts in pursuit.
He also supposed that end game for the human race should be to reach a level of peaceful development, then enlist Jeff Bezos, I suppose, and see how we go about networking the cosmos. Becasue, as Crosby concluded, “I think they’re definitely out there. I think they probably have been here.”
