If you are a hardcore Van Halen fan and you thought David Lee Roth was strange, then think again and go to the nearest book store and pick up Sammy Hagar’s autobiography. Reading this document the reader can get on touch with incredible stories that, among other things, allow him to add the name fo Sammy Hagar to the list of celebrities who have spoken publicly about UFO and alien encounters. Hagar made his remarks about alien abduction in an interview with Sean Casteel as part of a publicity campaign to promote his new autobiography, “Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock,” some of which was excerpted in the March 17, 2011 edition of Rolling Stone. [2] The story was quickly picked up by other news outlets. The autobiography is the typical “tell all” account of excessive subtance abuse and inflated egis clashing with one another. After the obligatory discussion of groupies and some gossiply talk about the infriendly attitude evinced by David Lee Roth toward Hagar, the interviwe asks: “Before reading ‘Red,‘ I didn’t realize you had an interest in mysticism. You’ve apparently consulted with psychics and studied numerology and had crazy dreams about UFOs. Why haven’t we seen more mystical themes in your music?” Hagar then replied:
I didn’t write about it much in Van Halen, but I have done a few songs that have sci-fi themes. There’s ‘Space Station #5’ on the first Montrose album, and then on the second album there’s ‘Space Age Sacrifice.’ My first solo album, there’s ‘Silver Lights’ and ‘HotRocks,’ which are about UFOs coming and taking people away. [2]
Even if very few people are aware of it, obviously Sammy Hagar’s sci-fi inspired mysticism excentric side is “hidden in plain sight” and for those who have ears to hear knows that this was a theme for his writtings from the very begining. His next solo album included songs with “spacey” titles like “Little Star” and “Someone Out There,” which are about how humankind is not alone in the universe. Some of the lyrics goes like this: “I feel scared and lonely to think we’re the only ones, when I know there’e someone out there and someday they’ll come.” Hagar seem to like to talk about those topics quite a bit.
People say there’s no other life in the universe […] But you know how big the universe is. It’s freaking huge! If we,re really the only ones out there, that’s scarier to me than thinking there are aliens. So my whole career I’ve been writting about these kinda things. But they’ve never been the hits. They’ve only been underground songs. If anything in the book has been played down, it’s my mystical side, because I don’t want to sound like I’m am crazy. [2]
The fear of seeming crazy Hagar complains of is one the most frequent emotions felt when one first begins to assimilate the fact that one has experienced contact with aliens. When an abductee finally makes the brave decision to speak about his encounters, he must do so in spite of the possibility of being rejected by family and friends as a new and strange reality begins to take hold.
My opinions about the UFO and stuff […] well I could write a whole book just devoted to that. I love it man. I’m into it deep. [1]
The MTV interviewer finally asks, point blank, “Okay, let’s just cut the chase. I’m just going to come out and ask it. Have you been ever abducted by aliens?” On which hagar replied: “I think I have.” Baffeled the MTV interviewer replied “Really? I was kidding. You seriously believe that?” Hagar laugned and said: “Now you’re making me sound like a crazy person. […] Remeber the story in the book […] where I have a dream about being contacted by aliens in the foothills above Fontana?” The MTV interviewer then said “yeah, yeah, I’ve got the page right here.” [22] This is what the passage of Hagar biography we are refering to:
I saw a ship and two creatures inside of this ship. I couldn’t see their faces. I just knew that there were two intelligent creatures, sitting up in a craft in the Lytle Creek forest area about twelve miles away in the foothills above Fontana. And they were connected to me, tapped into my mind through some kind of mysterious wireless connection. I was kind of waking up. They said, in their communication to each other, no word spoken, “Oh. He’s waking up. We’ve got to go.” They fired off numerical codes, but I was not of our numerical system. There was a split second where I was still seeing everything, and then it was over, like someone pulled the cord or whatever. I opened my eyes real quick, My whole room was white. I couldn’t see anything. No fixtures, no nothing. It was a timeless white. Infinity. I couldn’t move. My eyes were open, bit I was paralyzed in my bed. Betsy was lying next to me. All of the sudden, pow, the connection instantly broke. I jolted. The room went black. Everything returned to normal. It was four o’clock in the morning. I was shacking. My heart was pouding. I was scared out of my brain, beyond anything I ever experienced before. What was that? I didn’t even tell Betsy. [19]
The interviewer then asks, “You’re telling me that wasn’t a dream?” That’s right,” Hagar responds.
It was real. Aliens were plugged into me. It was a download situation. This was long before computers or any kind of wireless. There weren’t even wireless telephones. looking back now, it was like, .F***, they downloaded something into me!’ Or they uploaded something from my brain, like an experiment. [22]
Hagar’s decision to call the experience a dream when he wrote about it in his book is typical of abductees in many ways. The abduction experience, when it is recalled consciously and without resorting to hypnotic regression, is often thought of as being a “dreamlike” experience in spite of the fact that it is happening in physical terms. Another familiar aspect of what Hagar is talking about is the need for the UFO contactee to continue to keep the experience filed away as an “unknown,” to preserve a sense of “unreality” in his memories of the vent. Crossing over a toal belief is a dangerous thing for the mind to attenpt, and it is fraught with more complication than the mind can easily deal with. The abductee must be content to let the memories waver in some netherworld of vaporous unrealities that he can never hope to resolve. The fact that the aliens “downloaded” information into his brain and also “uploaded” information out of it is often seen in abduction accounts. There is nearly always an exchange of information and data between the abductor and te abductee, though this exchange takes several different forms, occuring frequently as telepathic conversation. Anyway, always during the same interview, Hagar moved on to recount another experience, this time from his childhood:
Another thing happened when I was about four […] that I didn’t put in the book. One time I saw what I considered to be, well, at the time I thought it was a car with no wheels. We lived out in the country and I saw this thing floating across a field, creating this big dust storm. I threw rocks at it and shit. And I dont’t know what happened after that.
The interviewer then said: “You blacked out?” On which Hagar replied “I guess, […] I just have no memory of it. And that wasn’t a dream. It was during daylight.” At that point the interviewer sympathetically says that he understand Hagar’s reluctance to talk about his experiences, acknowledging that alien abduction is a “tough sell.”
Especially back a few decades ago […] when this stuff happened to me. I couldn’t talk about it because I didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t understand the technology. But now I’m pretty sure it was a wireless situation. Either a download or an upload. Thet were tapped into my brain and the knowledge was tranfered back and forth. I could see them and everything while it was happening. There was a visual involved, almost like… I don’t know. (laughs) Don’t get me going!
It’s pretty obvious that Hagar has a lot more to talk about, to the right audience and at the right time. If an interviewer more steeped in the litterature and everyday manifestation of UFO and the alien presence were given the opportunity to interview Hagar in more detail, one can only wonder what other revelation would be brought forth. A funny comment about this whole rock-n-roll/UFo connection is the one formulated by Timothy Green Beckley who made the following observation: “one can even ask if rock n roll is an alien invention altogether, the electrified siren’s song from the great unknown leading us to new levels of evolutionary development.” [18]
