David Bowie and UFOs

It was round about this time of year when we lost David Bowie.

I suppose that's why I've plucked this topic from my overflowing "To Blog" folder in Google. It was a "long read" I found in The Independent many months back about music stars who were also connected with UFOs. It contained this little tidbit I had not previously known (where I've added the emphasis):

"But the king of the UFO pop stars has to be David Bowie. If his oeuvre wasn’t enough – “Loving the Alien”, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, “Starman” – the young David Robert Jones not only put out a UFO newsletter with friends when he was a teenager, but spotted his own mysterious skybound object over London in 1967."

Bowie ran a UFO zine? I shouldn't be surprised, but geez, like I needed any more reason to worship the guy.

Of course I did know about his UFO connection. For further reading on the matter of rock musicians and UFOs, I recommend the book, Alien Rock by Michael C. Luckman. Naturally it has an entire chapter devoted to Bowie. Here's a precis of one of my favorite passages (p. 84-85) from that chapter:

It's 1974, and Bowie is on tour in America, making a stop in Detroit. A 6pm news broadcast on one of the local stations said that a UFO had crashed in the area. The downed craft was described as being "six feet wide and 30 feet long."

Just picture that for a moment.

Anyway, the report continued to say, as Bowie later excitedly related to Mirabella magazine, that "three creatures" in the craft were killed on impact. They were taken to a hospital and examined, and found to be human-like but smaller and with more developed brains. More news on the shocking development would come at the 11pm broadcast.

Unfortunately, the whole thing was revealed to be a hoax at 11pm and that the news crew who initially reported the matter was summarily fired as no UFO or alien craft whatsoever had crashed, landed, been intercepted, or anything of the sort. It was like the Roswell UFO crash and Orson Welles' War of the Worlds all rolled into one.

David Bowie, however, was undeterred. He had one of his personal assistants go buy him a telescope. He aimed this telescope out the moonroof of his limousine as he traveled to Minneapolis, the next stop on the tour, watching for UFOs the whole way.   

Doesn't it just...make sense?

Bowie's connection to science fiction is obvious, particularly with Ziggy Stardust, and his  breathtaking role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, but it's more than that even. He truly seemed otherworldly to me. It wasn't an act, it wasn't a persona, there was just something that made him seem not of this Earth. I will never forget being in the third row at his concert in 1995 when Nine Inch Nails, honestly the real reason I was there at the time, were finishing up their set and Bowie just strode out in the midst of these sweaty guys who had just finished smashing their instruments, and stood regally at the front of stage. His presence, his voice, his visage, I've never seen any musician with that total package and that "I'm really not from around here" quality.

In addition to the book by Luckman, which I believe must be easily ten years old by now, there is a new text on this subject by Jason Heller called Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded. You can't miss its cover. It has a cartoon rendering of Bowie's face and the title is in the same font as the title for Gold Key's Star Trek comic book. The dust cover description says that the book goes into detail about Bowie sneaking into a movie theater to see 2001 and how much that changed his life. Can't wait to read it all, and fortunately I have easy access to it as I first learned of the book by seeing it in my college library.

That's when you know you teach at a joint that's worthwhile. It orders copies of quality reads like Heller's. I'm serious.

More than anything, I think part of Bowie's creative genius came from this sense he had that there was something far greater that lurked outside of ourselves. By "ourselves" I mean the collective consciousness of humanity. UFOs are a psychological, if not physical, manifestation of that sense.
 
 

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