by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
Rock musicians, like people from all walks of life, have reported encounters with UFOs. Famous examples include Jimi Hendrix, his former roadie and Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, John Lennon, and Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays. However, unlike people with more average day jobs, rock musicians tend to be treated less seriously in the press, often due to their sometimes publicly acknowledged drug use. A good example is Dave Davies of The Kinks, who reported an experience stranger than most, but students of this subject should recognize that some of what he reported has been reported by others.
Dave Davies and his brother, Ray, were the founding members of The Kinks, one of the bands that became popular in the midst of what became known as “The British Invasion” in the United States in the early 1960s. In 1996, Dave Davies gave an interview for Encounters magazine that was published in the July issue of that year, a snippet of which can viewed here.
During the interview, Davies claimed that he was first contacted by intelligences from another planet during a U.S. tour in 1982. He said he felt a pressure on his head and that the lower part of his body went numb. He then started hearing 5 different voices. According to him, two were from another planet, two were his spirit guides, and one was living on Earth.
He said they showed him, by means of “thought projection,” some of the things they had on their spacecraft. These included computers that looked “a lot like polished granite–sort of transparent to look at.” According to him, they were used to monitor every human on Earth. He said he believed the millennium would be the time of first contact between Earthlings and those from elsewhere.
Davies stuck to his story well into the new millennium and provided more details about his experiences during an interview with David Marchese for Vulture that was posted on March 27, 2017, under the headline “The Kinks Dave Davies on the Band’s Best Riff and Communicating with Aliens.”
Marchese describes Davies as “a prolific New Age writer and teacher.” In the course of the interview, Davies described a project he worked on with his son that “was a mix of science fiction and strange spiritual ideas.” Marchese asked Davies if it was based on any experiences he’d had and added, “You’ve claimed to have seen UFOs, right?”
Davies replied that he’d had “several experiences seeing UFOs” in North Devon, England. He described them as lights and zig-zags in the skies. He said that when he dug deeper into his experiences he realized he was “getting communications–psychic impressions–from aliens.”
Marchese asked, “How did you know it was aliens and not just you having a brain blip or something?” Davies replied that there are many others who could explain it better than he could. He said that a person keeps the feelings they’ve had during a UFO experience and that those feelings get into the sub-conscious and super-conscious. He said that when he looked into what those feeling could be, he “got really into UFOlogy” and “could’ve sworn I was having connections with the Dog Star, with Sirius.
Davies went on to compare “the extraterrestrial intelligence” to the imaginary rabbit Jimmy Stewart interacted with in the 1950 movie Harvey. He explained that he was Irish and that there are “elementals” in Irish folklore called “pookas” and that there are all sorts of phenomena about consciousness that we can’t quite explain that give us wisdom and guidance
According to Davies, “people get irritated” when he talks about his pooka/Harvey/inner light, but people “nowadays” are more open-minded than they were in the 1980s. It was then that he first started talking about such things, and according to him, people thought he’d “gone ‘round the bend.”
Marchese asked Davies to share a specific revelation, and Davies brought up his 1982 experience. He added the detail at this point that he got a lot of the information “through sense of smell,” which he describes as a language.
Davies was content to set his experiences down for posterity in his 2022 biography, Living on a Thin Line. He describes the smells he said he experienced as being “of fresh flowers like jasmine and magnolia” with a “fragrance so full, I felt like I could have scooped them up with a spoon.”
The above quote and others from the book are included in a Toronto Sun article posted July 11, 2022, headlined “Kink’s Dave Davies: Aliens Banned Me From Having Sex.” The headline comes from an additional element Davies reported about his 1982 experience. According to him, “they” told him he “must not have sex” and his groin and pelvis went numb, although he was able to walk normally. He wrote “The reason being, they told me, was they wanted to transmute my sexual energy to a higher vibrational level.”
While the Sun focused on the more sensationalistic (and seldom reported as far as this writer is aware) aspect of Davies’s claims, other aspects he reported have shown up in paranormal literature. Joshua Cutchin wrote a 2016 book, The Brimstone Deceit, entirely devoted to smells reported by those claiming to have had paranormal experiences, and Whitley Strieber has written and spoken extensively about the spiritual aspects of contact with “the other.” As for Davies’s comparison of the intelligences he said he’d interacted with to the pookas of Irish folklore, Jacques Vallée, in his 1969 book, Passport to Magonia, explored the idea that some reported alien encounters have a similarity to the creature encounters of myths and legends.
In case this reader was wondering, Marchese ended his interview with the question, “What’s the best Kinks riff?” Davies answered that while “You Really Got Me” was “an immense turning point for us and a lot of people,” one of his favorites is “Powerman.”