“I don’t know what it was, man”: the night Jerry Garcia encountered an alien
Have you ever experienced something for which there is no rational explanation? By the law of probability, most people have likely encountered something in their lives that seems inexplicable or even otherworldly. The human brain is a powerful thing, but it is not flawless. Everything from sleep deprivation to mind-altering chemicals can play tricks on your mind, allowing you to see things that aren’t really there. It should probably come as no surprise, then, that the acid-riddled Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia has had his fair share of supernatural occurrences.
Throughout his career, the Grateful Dead songwriter often embodied that person you get stuck talking to at a festival, wearing a Baja hoodie and talking endlessly about aliens and how you need to ‘open your third eye, man’. But alas, you cannot blame a dog for barking. The Grateful Dead formed in the wake of infamous acid tests and the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. Their music and career is indefinitely tied to the mind-bending power of LSD, more so than any of their contemporaries.
Of course, LSD has consistently proven itself as a beacon of artistic inspiration, but it also means that everything Jerry Garcia has ever said should be taken with a pinch of salt and a tab of acid. Nevertheless, in a tale as old as lysergic acid diethylamide, Garcia claims to have experienced an alien encounter back in the 1970s. During a 1984 interview, he detailed a seemingly inexplicable event in which night turned into day in an instant.
“It was in the middle of the night,” Garcia explained, “We came round a corner, and there was this great white brilliant light everywhere. All of a sudden, we came round the corner and the whole area was really brightly lit,” adding, “It looked like somebody punched a hole in the sky and, all of a sudden, light was pouring out of it.” OK, it is hardly a tale of alien abduction or travelling back to a home planet, but Garcia’s tale certainly sounds supernatural if you take it at face value.
Luckily, the songwriter was not alone when this happened, so he was able to provide witnesses. Unfortunately, that witness is David Freiberg, of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship fame. Freiberg, of course, is an incredible musician, but if you are unwilling to accept the acid-influenced account of Garcia, the likelihood of you believing a man who spent much of his career performing ‘White Rabbit’ is equally unreliable.
Even Garcia is unsure whether or not the incident was, indeed, supernatural, saying, “I don’t know what it was, man. The fact that it was something that I don’t know what it was makes me think that it was in that category of UFOs.” By that same logic, quadratic equations and the flavour of Irn-Bru could also be placed in the category of UFOs, given that nobody really knows what either of those things are.
So, was this light-based phenomenon really the result of extraterrestrials, or was it, in fact, two men staring at a streetlamp while having an acid flashback? Seemingly, we will never know the true answer to that question. Either way, the experience hardly makes it into the top ten strangest things Garcia must have seen throughout his life and career. To quote the X-Files, “I want to believe.”
