There’s a starman waitin in the sky
He’d like to come & meet us
But he thinks he’d blow our minds
That’s certainly one way to take El Chapo’s capture out of the front pages…
David Bowie, one of the biggest music icons in the last 4 decades, lost his battle to cancer last week, just after having turned 69.
If you’re an audiophile, that’s a shitty enough way to start off 2016. But Bowie earned a special place in the Fortean pantheon due to his long-life interest in both the UFO phenomenon and the occult, which had a great influence in his music as well as his sporadic stunts as an actor. His role in the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth is highly commendable for his attempt to capture the inadaptation felt by an alien being on our planet –then again, alienation from the rest of the boring, one-dimensional humans living on this rock is something he must have been pretty familiar with all of his life…
Bowie’s interest in UFOs began with a sighting he witnessed in his early childhood, which was reported in the English newspapers after he became a celebrity:
“They came over so regularly we could time them. Sometimes they stood still, other times they moved so fast it was hard to keep a steady eye on them.”
This was not to be the only close encounter Bowie would have throughout his life.
Famous rock stars are not an unusual demographic in the annals of UFO reports; in fact, it would seem that artists are more open and predisposed to entertain ideas that would make left-brained people frown upon –and also more open to share their UFO sightings. What was unusual, though, was Bowie’s departure from traditional explanations with regards to the phenomenon. In the book The Laughing Gnostic: David Bowie and the Occult, author Peter R. Koenig reports on another UFO encounter Bowie had –this time, while he was traveling across the English countryside with a friend– and paraphrases his interpretation of the event:
I believe that what I saw was not the actual object, 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.
That right there is a deeper insight into the mind-boggling reality of the phenomenon than the speculative theories of MOST ‘professional’ UFOlogists!
Perhaps is because Bowie was approaching the UFOs more from a perspective closer to Aleister Crowley’s teachings, than from a materialistic ‘nuts and bolts’ worldview. The Golden Dawn philosophy was not only right at the core of his musical output during the 1970s, but also present on one of his last videos: Blackstar (2015)
I think about a world to come
Where the books were found by the Golden Ones
…
Let me make it plain
You gotta make way for the Homo Superior
Look at your children
See their faces in golden rays
Don’t kid yourself they belong to you
They’re the start of a coming race.
Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use
All the strangers came today
And it looks as though they’re here to stay.
~’Oh! You Pretty Things’ (1971)
Androgyny, eccentricity, and the ability to walk back and forth between different worlds. These are all the stapler marks of a true shaman.
Here’s hoping Ziggy returned safely to his home planet, that Major Tom accomplished his cosmic transformation without a hitch, and that deep down in dark caves, the spiders from Mars keep singing Bowie’s songs for many eons to come.
