Five creative geniuses who all believe in aliens: “This ain’t our fucking planet”
You would be surprised just how many great minds from the world of rock, pop, indie, and all kinds of music believe not only that aliens exist, but that they’ve had an encounter with these otherworldly beings.
It makes sense, I suppose, as if aliens from another planet had decided they were going to come to Earth and say hello, they would want to reach out to some of the most creative minds the planet has to offer. Can you imagine how disappointed an alien would be if it travelled lightyears, got off its spaceship, excited to chat to another intelligent lifeform, only to find themselves in the presence of David, an account manager from Google?
These little space freaks want to rub shoulders with the best this spinning blue ball has to offer, and that means having a drink with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Sun Ra. With that in mind, maybe these artists’ visions of aliens were real? Or maybe they were the byproduct of years of extensive drug use and life on the road as a rockstar? We simply can’t know.
Regardless of the rationale, the point remains: there are plenty of brilliant minds scattered around our big ol’ planet who believe there is something else out there.
Five artistic geniuses who believe in aliens:
Shaun Ryder
Shaun Ryder’s declaration was straightforward when it came to all things aliens: “Since I was a fucking little kid, I’ve always thought this ain’t our fucking planet, it’s an experiment in a fucking zoo.” The Happy Mondays’ lead singer has always been pretty open with his commitment to the other-worldly, going so far as to suggest that beings from another planet have spoken to him from time to time.
“There was a point where they was really fucking about with me, you know,” he said, referring to a specific moment when he couldn’t go long without someone from another world reaching out to say hello. Ryder is a realist, though, and he admits that there may have been another factor at play. “Or I was having some sort of hallucinogenic, mad breakdown,” he said in an interview with Mojo. “Anyway, I’ve fucking been there, tuned into Radio Gaga.”
Lemmy
The Motörhead lead singer always seemed grounded in his assessment of music and the world around him. Lemmy was straight to the point, a run-of-the-mill bloke who loved life on the road, Jack Daniels, and rock ‘n’ roll. However, one night when he was out in the mid-1960s, this down-to-earth rockstar saw something that he believes wasn’t from this planet, and he’s believed in aliens ever since.
“This thing came over the horizon and stopped dead in the middle of the sky,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “Then it went from a standstill to top speed, immediately. We don’t even have aircraft that do that now, never mind then. So that was pretty eye-opening for me.”
John Lennon
When John Lennon left the Beatles, he was excited about writing music which was grounded in reality, as he revealed more to his listeners by pouring his aching heart into pop songs. We heard this on tracks like ‘Mother’ and ‘Imagine’; however, the singer’s mind wasn’t always rooted in reality, which was partly inspired by what he thought were encounters with aliens.
In his song ‘Nobody Told Me’, Lennon wrote about seeing aliens flying over New York City one night. In the liner notes for his 1974 record Walls and Bridges, he explained the motivation behind the track, saying, “On August 23rd, 1974, at 9 o’clock I saw a UFO.”
In an interview a few years later, Lennon explained himself. He said, “[I saw] a thing with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top.”
Jimi Hendrix
A lot of people would describe Jimi Hendrix as out of this world, and for a brief moment in his childhood, he nearly was. One night, looking outside of his childhood bedroom window, a young Jimi Hendrix thought that he saw a UFO land outside of his house.
The incident left a lasting impression on the guitarist, as throughout his career, he always believed in aliens, and that trickled into him writing a lot of songs that revolved around the otherworldly. Additionally, Hendrix went on to write his own sci-fi movie, Moondust, which no doubt was inspired by his obsession with space.
Sun Ra
Sun Ra didn’t just believe in aliens; he believed that he had a unique connection with them. Namely, he thought that he had been sent to Earth as a musician by superior beings with the intention of making the world a better place through the power of jazz.
Sun Ra was happy to make music that sounded disjointed from time to time, which he thought was just proof that the music he made belonged on another planet. That disjointed music, in his opinion, was a tangible representation of the connection he had with the aliens that sent him here.
His trumpeter, Ahmed Abdullah, admitted that Sun Ra’s theories were outlandish, but felt they had a certain credibility to them, namely because he believed that if there was a universal language, it had to be music. “It makes sense to me that if the Creator sent anyone here, it would be a person who had mastered music, the planet’s universal language,” he said.
“Sound is the beginning of all creation, the Nomma, the Om, and the Nam that direct our lives, the basis for what Sun Ra called a Sound Government.”
