This article first appeared in the February 2006 issue of “FATE Magazine.”

Alien Rock Feature

By Sean Casteel

Among the many stories that Michael Luckman likes to tell about the connection between rock music and the alien occupants of the UFOs deals with the birth of Elvis Presley.

“Elvis to me was totally wild,” Luckman said. “To have one guy, namely the guy who popularized rock and roll, be so closely involved with UFOs—he had contact when he was a kid with cosmic beings of light that communicated with him and showed him what his life would be like in the future, onstage as a performer. Elvis would have a lot of sightings throughout his lifetime. He was told, and actually believed, that he was from a blue star planet in the Orion Constellation.

“To me, this is quite amazing,” Luckman continued. “And, of course, there’s the story about the blue light. The moment Elvis was born, there was apparently a blue light over his family’s small, two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi.”

One immediately thinks of the Star of Bethlehem that preceded the birth of Jesus Christ, and wonders whether Elvis might be more on an even footing with Him than most of us mere mortals. Which begs the question, does Luckman feel rock and roll came from outer space?

“It’s a legitimate question,” Luckman replied, “particularly based on Elvis and the blue light story, but I still don’t think that rock and roll came from outer space, no. But I think that it’s been INFLUENCED (italics) by forces or beings or intelligences from outer space.”

Luckman’s personal interest in the subject of UFOs and the aliens inside them began when he was a child himself, in the 1950s, and first saw the sci-fi classic “The Day The Earth Stood Still,” with Michael Rennie as the benevolent alien sent to scare a little peace into us. By 1971, Luckman was teaching a college level course about rock and roll, the first in the country, at the New School For Social Research in New York. Around that same time, he also published an alternative newspaper called “The New York Daily Planet,” intended to compete with “The Village Voice.” Luckman’s newspaper featured a department about UFOs, which helped him make connections with some of the major UFO organizations at the time.

“There was a lot of very interesting material in evidence,” Luckman said, “and I was especially struck by the existence of so many photos, even back then, that pointed to the reality of subject.”

The parallel tracks his career was taking led him to realize that for a long time many rock musicians had written songs about UFOs and aliens as well as having had sightings and other experiences of their own.

“But I never imagined,” he said, “that the subject cuts as deep as it does and involves so many musicians. I never imagined, for example, that there were a great many rock stars, not just a couple, but at least eight with recognizable names, who have had classic UFO abduction and missing time experiences.”

The many years of research have resulted in a new book called “Alien Rock, The Rock ‘n’ Roll Extraterrestrial Connection” (VH-1 Books/Pocket Books, 2005), which offers many, many anecdotes about rock stars and their fascination with, and even participation in, the UFO phenomenon. Luckman’s research involved everything from combing through CDs and older record albums to voraciously reading books and magazines, as well as many hours spent searching the Internet.

“It couldn’t have been accomplished without the Internet,” Luckman said. “There’s just stuff out there that there would be no other way to know about, and certainly not within the period of time that I was able to do this book. I also had contact with a lot of rock stars, their management people, associates, friends and wives in some cases. Antonio Huneeus [a longtime “FATE” contributor] was my right hand man on this project. He was my research assistant, and I couldn’t have done this without him.”

There are, as Luckman rightly claims, a surprisingly generous number of rock star encounters with the UFO phenomenon in the book.

“I particularly like the one about David Bowie,” Luckman said, “in the earlier part of his career, when he was touring the United States doing concert appearances. He bought a telescope and had it mounted on the rooftop of his limousine, and he would go out looking for aliens between stops on the tour. This was almost like an all-consuming passion on his part. But I would have to say that David Bowie has in recent times played down the reality factor on UFOs. He’ll say on the one hand that he believes in extraterrestrial life, but on the other hand he’ll say that his use of aliens and UFOs in his songs were ‘just imagery,’ and weren’t meant to suggest hardware. But the fact was that in the 70s he was very heavily involved with it. He had a thousand UFO and related books, had a telescope, had his own sightings, and when he was a teenager, he edited a flying saucer magazine in England. He had sightings both when he was younger and also during the filming of ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth.’ So to me, Bowie’s one of the most interesting stories in the book.”

The late John Lennon also had his share of alien encounters.

“There are two accounts about John Lennon,” Luckman said. “The first is one that a few people know about, which is when he saw a UFO from the rooftop of a penthouse he was living in with his then girlfriend May Pang. They were both naked, as it happens, and John saw this thing outside. He went out on the roof naked, and he sees a large flying saucer that he said had lights around its rim and a red light on top. He said it was capable of holding two human-sized passengers. It was just hundreds of feet away. And it really got his juices flowing. He had subscribed to ‘The Flying Saucer Review’ in England for many years, and here he was seeing it face to face, and he was very excited. He said he yelled, ‘Stop! Take me with you!’ Because he was all prepared to go.”

The world-renowned psychic Uri Geller related another Lennon anecdote to Luckman.

“Shortly before his assassination,” Luckman went on, “there was another UFO encounter that involved some beings—now this is according to Uri quoting John—that were presumably grays that came into the Dakota, where John lived at the time. John saw a strange light coming through the door and the small beings came into his apartment. They had some kind of telepathic communication, then they left him with a small egg-shaped, smooth object that John passed along to Uri. And Uri still has it. It’s never been analyzed, and if it’s real, that is, if it’s extraterrestrial in origin, then presumably there would be something in the makeup of the metal that would not be on the periodic chart of elements when they do an analysis on it. But Uri has kept it and hasn’t chosen to have it analyzed, although I’m pressing him to do that because it could really be the ultimate evidence of UFO visitation.”

Writer, editor and publisher Timothy Green Beckley has also written a book on alien contact with celebrities called “UFOs Among The Stars” (Global Communications, 1992) in which he relates similar stories about major show business personalities who have been touched by the Great Unknown. As with Luckman, UFOs and rock music went hand-in-hand from the days of Beckley’s youth.

“I’ve always been interested in UFOs,” Beckley said, “having had personal experiences and publishing literature on the subject even as a teenager. And of course I grew up with rock and roll. When I was a little tyke, about the same time I was having my out-of-body-experiences and things, I was also pestering my mother to buy me rock and roll records. In those days, it was Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, and then Elvis Presley came along. So I grew up with both things.”

As an adult, Beckley promoted numerous rock concerts in the Manhattan area and was a familiar figure backstage in the late 60s and early 70s. He became a close friend of a woman named Wally Elmlark, a columnist for a rock and roll fanzine called “Circus,” and coauthored a book with her called “Rock Raps of the Seventies,” now long out of print. Elmlark also dabbled in the occult, billing herself as the White Witch of New York.

“She introduced me to David Bowie,” Beckley said, “and the Chambers Brothers and Edgar Winter. So I got to meet some of these people socially, and found out a lot of them were interested in UFOs.”

Beckley also met the late, great Jimi Hendrix backstage at a show on New York’s Randall’s Island.

“He was standing there, tuning his guitar,” Beckley said, “and getting ready to go on. I just kind of walked by him and he made some comment about being—I don’t know whether he asked me if I was from Mars or whether he made some comment about him being from Mars himself, but we both kind of chuckled at that. I told him I was interested in UFOs, and he just kind of nodded and went onstage.”

Beckley later made the acquaintance of Curtis Knight, who had played bass in one of Hendrix’s early bands called The Squires.

“We became fairly close friends,” Beckley said, “and Curtis revealed to me quite a few of Jimi’s UFO experiences.”

Knight told Beckley a remarkable story about Hendrix, an event that happened a few years before Hendrix became the legendary and much beloved guitar hero.

“It was during the wintertime,” Beckley said, “and they were playing a small gig in upstate New York, near Woodstock. This was before the Woodstock Festival, so it has nothing to do with that, except as a point of location. It was not very far from Pinebush, where there’s been a lot of UFO activity in the last few decades.

“Anyway, as I understand it from Curtis,” Beckley continued, “there was a very snowy blizzard and the boys in the band were trying to get back to Manhattan. They got snowed in. It was so cold outside that they couldn’t even open a window. The windows had frozen. They had the engine still running, and the carbon monoxide filled the car. A couple of the other guys passed out in the backseat, but Jimi was still able to breathe apparently, and he claimed that a cone-shaped object landed on the road not far from their vehicle. A door opened on the side of the craft and a being came out. He described it as kind of like a cross between a feathered creature, maybe like Mothman, and an angel.

“This thing drew its wings out and walked around the vehicle, and where it walked, the snow melted. So they were able to get out of the blizzard and get back to New York. Jimi always told Curtis that if it wasn’t for this being coming from the ship, he was sure that they would have all died in that car that night.”

Before Curtis Knight’s death in Holland a few years ago, he wrote a book dealing with Hendrix’s many otherworldly experiences called “Jimi Hendrix, Starchild,” which Beckley published in 1992.

We’re all very likely fascinated at this point, but what’s in it for the aliens? Luckman offered some interesting speculation.

“I think that extraterrestrials,” Luckman said, “are looking to influence popular culture through the rock stars. Exactly toward what end is very, very hard to figure out. This is something that is still to play out in the near future.”

Luckman would like to be a part of just how that alien contact plays out. He is working behind-the-scenes to organize concerts to be held around the world, in New York, Tokyo, Berlin and even West Africa.

“The rock concerts are based on the concept of beaming live music into space,” he said, “to make contact with extraterrestrials. While researching my book, I found that UFOs have been seen at various rock concerts. Not frequently, but they have shown up at some key rock concerts, including the Isle of Wight concert in England, and the filming for the Jimi Hendrix Rainbow Bridge Concert. Also at Woodstock, Altamont and a number of others.”

Luckman said that top-flight artist management firms as well as major corporate sponsors are already showing an interest in his idea.

“These concerts, each one of them, is supposed to be large enough for let’s say three to five hundred thousand people,” Luckman explained. “We’re currently having discussions in West Africa about the possibility of doing a free concert for a million to two and a half million people. These are very expensive undertakings, in the very high millions of dollars. So we’ll see what actually is feasible, but we’ve gotten a very strong response to trying to raise the kind of money that’s needed.”

Suppose that Luckman succeeds in making alien contact through the music—what kind of response is he seeking from the UFOs?

First, Luckman shares the widely held belief that the end is near.

“I didn’t need New Orleans,” he said, “or the tsunami to prove this to me. I’ve felt for a very long time that we’re living in the ‘end times,’ or whatever you want to call it. We have relatively limited time left, and perhaps musicians are going to play some kind of a vital role. It’s hard to say just how and what and where, but I would think that if ever there was an opportunity to gather momentum and involve musicians in a movement, this is the time.

“Therefore, I think that with the remaining time that we may have left, that we should try to do what we can to make contact. Because, to me, it’s the ultimate quest. The aliens could tell us so much about the universe and perhaps help us in some ways to overcome some of our problems, although frankly I feel some of the damage is irreversible. But perhaps, if we are successful in making contact, we can get some emergency help from extraterrestrials. We’re heading toward increasing manmade catastrophes, as well as natural catastrophes, and we have a lot of knowledge to gain from contact.”

Luckman has founded an organization called The Cosmic Majority, which seeks “to advance the views of the majority of people living on planet Earth who believe in UFOs, life on Mars and other planets throughout the universe, the paranormal, the New Age and the sanctity of the environment.”

Can Luckman bring this off? Can he use his book “Alien Rock” as the starting point for an entirely new kind of social and cultural movement?

Rock music has nearly always had a social vigor that goes well beyond its role as a simple musical form, and has in fact been the catalyst for a great deal of cultural change for well over fifty years. Whether it can actually be harnessed to bring the UFOs down from the skies to deliver us from our seemingly insoluble problems remains an open question however. One can only hope, should Luckman ever bring to fruition the UFO/rock music alliance he envisions, that ET does more than think it’s got a good beat and is easy to dance to.

THE END

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