Rock stars and their alien encounters

There is, as David Bowie once noted, a starman waiting in the sky. He’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d — to use Earth vernacular — “blow our minds”. So, what he does, it turns out, is make his presence known only to the most open-minded, space-attuned, alien-friendly creatures on the planet: rock stars.You could certainly be forgiven for thinking so, anyway. First of all, just about every songwriter of note has written at least one song about the final frontier. Space is, after all, the perfect metaphor for . . . well . . . just about anything you’d like it to be.For Elton John in Rocket Man, space provided the perfect metaphor for (in thosedays) closet homosexuality: “I’m not the man they think I am at home.

Oh no, no, no.” For Bowie, it served as the perfect metaphor for alienation, drug addiction and fear of madness, from Space Oddity (the chilling “your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong”) through to Ashes to Ashes (the terrifying “the shrieking of nothing is killing”). The planet Mars has been another all-purpose symbol, either standing for remote desolation (“might as well be on Mars”, sang Alice Cooper); or a place where human beings could start out all over again and maybe make a better job of it this time. The former Byrd Roger McGuinn, modern-day bluesman Ben Harper and the Grateful Dead have all released albums ostensibly “from” Mars — wish fulfilment, presumably — although, admittedly, theDead’s From the Mars Hotel’s chief claim to fame these days is that if you held it up to a mirror, the cover graphic seemed to spell out “Ugly Rumours”, the name of the rock band that Tony Blair used to play in. (Although to be fair to Blair, it should be pointed out that he wasn’t the greatest Grateful Dead fan in the band; that was bandmate Mark Ellen, now editor of The Word magazine.) Yet above and beyond all the singers who reference space in their songs, there are many who also claim to have had alien encounters. Elvis Presley told his inner circle about alien experiences — hardly surprising since his father had noted a strange blue light in the sky when Elvis was born. John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix all saw UFOs, and Lennon had an extremely close encounter with an alien. If the fact that the source for this fact is UriGelle......