Close Encounters of the Drugged-Up Celebrity Kind
by Robbie Graham October 2, 2018 (mysteriousuniverse.org)
• Western culture has an inclination to dismiss reports of UFOs from those who might dabble in psychedelics, such as our celebrated rock stars. It is increasingly clear that naturally occurring psychotropic substances do not induce mere “hallucinations,” but they expand the boundaries of human consciousness, enabling us to perceive layers of reality not readily accessible in our everyday lives. It may be that creative brains are better attuned to perceive a broader spectrum of reality than normal brains. Perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss UFO reports from individuals our society might label “colorful” or “eccentric,” or even from those with a known history of drug use.
Here are five rock stars who claimed to have seen UFOs, though while straight and not on psychedelic drugs at the time.
• John Lennon – On August 23, 1974, the Beatles legend observed a UFO from his NYC apartment window while “just dreaming around in my usual poetic frame of mind.” Lennon said the craft was approximately 100 feet away from him and hovering over an adjacent building. He described it as “a thing with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top.” Lennon’s then-girlfriend, May Pang, also saw the UFO. She described it as a “large, circular object coming towards us. It was shaped like a flattened cone, and on top was a large, brilliant red light… 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.”
• Mick Jagger – In 1968, the Rolling Stones front man went camping in Glastonbury with his then girlfriend, Marianne Faithful, and witnessed a huge, cigar-shaped “mothership.” It was around this time that Jagger is said to have had a “UFO detector” installed at his British estate. “The alarm kept going off whenever he left home, indicating the presence of strong electromagnetic activity in the area.”
• David Bowie – Bowie’s longstanding fascination with all things alien fueled him to create some of his best work throughout the 1970’s. But the rock star apparently had multiple UFO sightings when he was a child living in England before going on to publish a UFO newsletter with friends as a teenager, and he was obsessed with UFO cover-ups. In 1967, Bowie had multiple UFO sightings over London, and could anticipate when they would be flying overhead. In one interview, Bowie waxed philosophical: “I have come to take this phenomena seriously. I believe that what I saw (on one occasion) was not the actual (UFO), but a projection of my own mind trying to make sense of this quantum topological doorway into dimensions beyond our own. It’s as if our dimension is but one among an infinite number of others.”
• Lemmy – In 1966, before he became the frontman of Motörhead, Lemmy Kilmister had his own UFO sighting. “This thing came over the horizon and stopped dead in the middle of the sky. 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.”
• Robbie Williams – Robbie Williams of the 1990’s British boy-band, Take That, claimed to have once seen a UFO “150 feet above my head”. Although there were no other witnesses, Williams shared his UFO experience onscreen in the 2018 documentary, Hunt for the Skinwalker.
Celebrity is a curious thing. In our modern world, we’ve been programmed to revere the famous–be they actors, musicians, sports stars, or fashion models. Celebrity status is something that many millions of us aspire to. Rightly or wrongly, the words of the famous carry considerably more weight in all spheres of society than the words of those who are not. For example, it is not unusual for artists in the music and movie industries to make political speeches and to lead political causes. It matters not that they are technically completely unqualified to do so–they’ve already earned a certain measure of our faith simply by virtue of being famous, regardless of what they are actually famous for.
When celebrities speak out on the UFO issue, however, the public are inclined to take their statements with a pinch of salt. Perhaps it’s because the artistic industries are so closely linked with drugs and alcohol, and UFOs are often associated with altered states of consciousness. The logic goes: “It’s no surprise Celeb X sees UFOs… Celeb X has a drug habit.” But perhaps we should not be so quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater, or the UFOs with the LSD. Western culture’s inclination to dismiss reports of UFOs or non-human entities from those who dabble in psychedelic substances speaks to a fundamental misconception of anomalous phenomena. To its detriment, popular UFOlogy is firmly rooted in materialist models of our reality and generally assumes that the UFO phenomenon is external to the human condition: something purely physical from out there that is happening to us, rather than something we play a part in generating, but which is no less “real” as a result.
Alien entities in one form or another have been a core component in the psycho-actively induced vision quests of countless indigenous cultures dating back millennia. As modern science has progressed, we’ve learned more and more about how psychoactive substances interact with our brain and nervous system, and, though many questions remain, it is increasingly clear that naturally occurring substances such as Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) do not induce mere “hallucinations,” rather, they break down our perceptive barriers and literally expand the boundaries of human consciousness, enabling us to perceive layers of reality not readily accessible in our everyday lives. In other words, such substances may enable us to see what is already there, hidden in plain sight.
Some people who take DMT do so precisely for the purpose of seeing and interacting with “alien” entities, and they are often successful in these endeavors. But are their alien experiences any less “real” than those of people who are not under the influence of psychedelics? I say no. There are countless examples in the modern UFO era of credible witnesses claiming to see UFOs and/or aliens in the vicinity of others who report nothing unusual at all. How do we account for this? It would seem that UFO reality is not objective; at least, not always. In fact, a great many reported UFO experiences are clearly subjective. This is not to say they are not real, but that human consciousness is far more mysterious than we know, and that, as many theoretical physicists contend, our consciousness creates our reality.
We know that creative brains are wired differently than most, and it may be that this wiring predisposes an individual to phenomena that most of us will never experience, be it ghosts, fairies, aliens, or whatever label one chooses. When creative brains are affected by psychoactive substances, it is perhaps no surprise that anomalous phenomena may manifest. Even without the drugs, it may be that creative brains are better attuned to perceive a broader spectrum of reality than normal brains, and perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss UFO reports from individuals our society might label “colorful” or “eccentric,” or even from those with a known history of drug use. Perhaps instead we should reexamine popular conceptions of the UFO enigma, placing greater emphasis on the role of the observer in generating UFO experiences and related phenomena.
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