5 global music icons who claimed they saw UFOs

Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) explored the idea of an extraterrestrial being visiting the Earth and living among us. But even prior to the famed director's exploration of the idea, stories of encounters with unidentified flying objects (UFO) had already permeated pop culture, with some of those accounts coming from celebrities themselves. Here's a look at some famous names who claimed to have had encounters with extraterrestrials.

Elvis Presley’s fascination with UFOs reportedly began in his childhood, with his hairstylist and spiritual advisor, Larry Geller, claiming that Elvis experienced telepathic encounters with extraterrestrials at the age of eight, including a vision of himself wearing the iconic white jumpsuit that would later become his trademark. Geller also recounted that he and the King (as Elvis was popularly known) once witnessed mysterious, glowing objects darting across the desert sky during a nighttime drive, noting that these objects moved far too quickly to be conventional aircraft.

Adding further intrigue to the rockstar's apparent connection with alien beings, Elvis’s father, Vernon Presley, is said to have witnessed strange phenomena on the night of January 8, 1935, the night Elvis was born. “His father told us he'd gone out to have a cigarette at 2 am during the delivery,” Geller famously recalled. “When he looked up into the skies above their little shack, he saw the strangest blue light. He knew right then and there that something special was happening," had Geller said.

Back in 2008, the Mirror reported that Robbie Williams had confessed to singer Joss Stone that he was considering leaving pop music to become a full-time ufologist. Williams' decision to ponder this sudden switch of careers arose from several bizarre experiences, including three separate encounters with what he described as "little green men." Out of all his run-ins, Williams described one incident in particular as the weirdest yet, claiming that a UFO appeared while he was playing Arizona, a song he wrote about alien contact.

“I stood on the balcony and there was this big ball of gold light that turned up. We thought it was Venus or Mars or something. Then the song stops playing, and it disappears,” Williams reportedly told Stone. He added, “But then we put Arizona on again and the ball turned back up. It happened four times. After that, a massive electrical storm started, and these two massive balls of light started dancing in the sky. It was like a whole light show for about an hour."

For most people, Tom DeLonge is best known as the co-founder of Blink-182. However, alongside bringing pop-punk into the mainstream during the late 1990s, he is also one of the entertainment world's most outspoken advocates for research into possible extraterrestrial life. DeLonge, for long, has backed the idea that unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) deserve rigorous scientific scrutiny, and he even claims to have personally encountered strange phenomena near the highly secretive Area 51 in Nevada, which is rumored to house aliens.

In 2023, after historic U.S. congressional hearings on UAPs, DeLonge hailed the proceedings as a massive breakthrough. Taking to Instagram, he wrote, "The UFO Hearings today made history. I'm so proud of the three witnesses today that blew the lid off the UFO secrecy that has been intact for decades.” Speaking separately to The Independent, he noted that his company, To The Stars, had also played a vital role in pushing the UAP conversation into the public spotlight.

Fourteen years ago, American rapper Lupe Fiasco shared the story of an "extra-worldly experience" he had when he was just 11 years old. During a 2012 interview on Power 106 FM, the Chicago-born artist described waking up in the middle of the night, completely and inexplicably paralyzed.

"I remember waking up and being shocked by all this electricity," Fiasco explained. "I was trying to call and wake my cousin up, and I couldn't move. And then I saw all this blue light dancing around... really weird, right?!” He then recounted seeing a mysterious black disc hovering just outside his window as he was experiencing the paralysis. Despite there being other possible explanations, Fiasco insisted the incident was not a dream, pointing to an unexplained scar on his ankle as physical proof of the strange encounter. "I've never had surgery; I don't know where it came from," he said of his experience, denying that the scar in question was the result of some other injury.

Decades before declassified Pentagon files on UAPs created a wave, legendary jazz musician Sun Ra was telling extraordinary stories about his supposed encounters with extraterrestrials. Ra built his entire career around Afrofuturism and cosmic themes, famously claiming he had been taken to another dimension by alien beings during a mysterious experience in his youth.

He often spoke of the sensation he experienced while traveling through "time-zones" and being transported to another planet at incredible speeds. The alien entities supposedly told him that he possessed a unique mind capable of helping humanity, warning him about the precarious future of Earth. "I had to go up there like that in order to prevent any part of my body from touching the outside, because I was going through time-zones, and if any part of my body touched the outside I couldn't get it back," Sun Ra explained in an account famously quoted by cultural critic Mark Sinker in a 1992 issue of The Wire. "Anyway, they talked to me about this planet, and the way it was headed... They said they wanted me to talk to them. And I said I wasn't interested.”