“It’s in the trees, it’s coming”: Kate Bush’s strange UFO encounter
If there’s one artist who seems like they might have encountered a UFO or two in their time, it’s Kate Bush. The music she created always seemed to have a certain supernatural quality, in the otherworldly heights of her vocals, the unearthly synths that swirled around them, and her unusual approach to lyricism. She pushed pop music into new worlds and became an ethereal figure herself along the way.
While many of us would shrug off a supposed UFO sighting as a passing plane or a trick of the light, Bush allowed herself to give into the supernatural outside of the studio as well as in it. She once even divulged the story of an alien encounter with her fans. The scene was as fabled as you might expect: a dark night in Scotland, a stop by the site of a historic battle, and a search for the Loch Ness Monster, all of this culminating in a strange sighting in the sky.
As night fell, Bush and her fellow explorers stopped by the side of the road to read a sign. “It told of a fort from the fifth century, B.C.,” she remembered in the 11th issue of her Kate Bush Club newsletter, “The ruins of which were in the heather-thick field beyond the sign. It also mentioned a phantom battle which had supposedly taken place very near to the site.
From this opening, you might expect Bush to be launching into a ghost story, into an encounter with one of those phantoms who lost their lives in a battle, who now roam the fort waiting for unsuspecting pop stars to pass by. But it was only when Bush allowed her eyes to drift upwards that she encountered something strange and unearthly.
She looked up to find three lights, moving into different positions in the sky. This is the point at which most of us would shrug off the phenomenon, explain it away as something man-made and return on our journey. But Bush and her friends were intrigued by the lights and decided to follow them, setting off in “hot pursuit”.
“We thought maybe they were some kind of stadium lights,” Bush remembered, “But they were too near to the clouds, and we had never seen aircraft with such big lights, nor that colour. As we turned a bend we could no longer see them, but kept our eyes pinned on the sky.” Their commitment to the sky served them well, as the lights eventually returned.
Their second glimpse at the glowing, golden orbs proved Bush’s hypothesis: “This time we could see that they were completely unattached to any form of structure on the ground,” she explained. This would be their final sighting of the strange glimmers, though it didn’t stop them from craning their necks to the sky for the whole ride home.
“We wondered,” Bush concluded, “If instead of finding Nessie on our search, we had found another strange phenomenon.” There’s no way of telling if Bush’s hypothesis was correct — perhaps someone had invented drone art several decades ahead of time, or maybe Bush and her friends had merely got so caught up in the moment that they missed what the lights were attached to.
But maybe, just maybe, Bush had experienced something truly otherworldly. “What do you think?” her entry concluded, passing the decision off to her fans.
