Visitors from outer space
QUESTION Have any celebrities claimed to have been abducted by aliens?
SAMMY ‘The Red Rocker’ Hagar is a flamboyant heavy metal singer and guitarist from the US known for his virtuoso guitar playing and powerful lungs.
He fronted bands such as Montrose and Van Halen and had a monster solo hit in the Eighties with I Can’t Drive 55.
He is also a believer in UFOs and claims to have been abducted.
Back in the Seventies, before hitting the big time with Montrose, he said that blue aliens took him aboard their ship and downloaded information into his brain. They took knowledge from him in return.
In Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, Hagar wrote: ‘I was lying in bed one night, dreaming. I saw a ship and two creatures inside of this ship. I couldn’t see their faces. They were connected to me, tapped into my mind through some kind of mysterious wireless connection.’
Another alleged abductee was the former actress and ex-Japanese first lady Miyuki Hatoyama.
In a 2008 book titled Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered, Ms Hatoyama wrote: ‘While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus.’ The now 74-yearold said her husband, former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, probably thought it was just a dream, but she believes that she was abducted by aliens.
Lots of celebrities claim to have seen UFOs.
Inevitably, David Bowie, known for his classic songs Life on Mars? and Space Oddity (and his lessthan-classic Loving The Alien and Hallo Spaceboy), and his movie work in The Man Who Fell To Earth, was a believer. He said that as a child he saw so many UFOs that he ‘simply got used to them’.
As an adult Bowie claimed he saw a UFO hovering over a field that he believed was ‘a projection of my own mind trying to make sense of this quantum topological doorway into dimensions beyond our own’.
Elvis Presley claimed he saw UFOs throughout his life. When he was born, his family and the doctor saw an unexplainable light beaming over the family home.
He also recalled that when he was eight years old he was telepathically visited by aliens who showed him a future vision of ‘a man wearing a white suit singing to a crowd’.
Robbie Williams claimed a UFO visited him when he wrote an alien-themed song. He said: ‘I had just finished writing a song called Arizona, which is about alien abduction, when there was this glow. It was magic.’ Andy Graham, Leeds.
...THE lead singer with left-field US rock band Pixies has regularly made reference to a UFO encounter he claims to have experienced as a child in Nebraska.
Known by his stage names Black Francis or Frank Black, he was born Charles Thompson, and says he witnessed a UFO while with his family.
Throughout his career, which began with Pixies in the 1980s and later included an extensive solo career, he has repeatedly made reference in his lyrics to UFOs, aliens and general sci-fi topics.
Indeed, in one live recording of the Pixies song Planet Of Sound, about an interplantary traveller searching for Earth, he prefaces the song with the words: ‘If you’ve ever been exposed to a UFO, like I have...’
In the 1990s, he apparently returned to Nebraska to do some research into the ‘sighting’, but turned up nothing.
In 1997, he told the Daily Nebraskan: ‘I went to the local library and looked through the microfiche and tried to find some scraps of information from that time period that might be informative. I didn’t come up with anything. But I had my own little version of the most boring episode of The X-Files ever.’ Owen Murphy, Dundrum, Dublin 14.
QUESTION Many ancient statues have had their noses damaged or broken off. Was this deliberate or accidental?
THIS question has long troubled archaeologists, who have reached the conclusion that it may both be natural and deliberate.
Scoured by wind and sand, flowing water and millennia of human interaction, it’s inevitable the more delicate parts of some statues have fallen off due to natural erosion.
But during the archaeological ‘gold rush’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many so-called archaeologists lacked the finer instruments and procedures required for proper excavation and were responsible for damaging many of the treasures they unearthed.
Iconoclasm, the destruction of monuments and other images, was also a factor. A black basalt head of the emperor Tiberius’s nephew Germanicus in the British Museum shows a nose that has clearly been chiselled off.
Removal of the nose was a common punishment in ancient times. The Greeks had a term for such nose-docking: rhinokopia.
The Byzantine emperor Justinian II was deposed and punished in this way at the end of the 7th century. He regained power and wore a gold nose to hide his disfigurement.
Hacking the nose from a sculpture might have been a way to humiliate a deposed or disgraced ruler, or diminish their legacy. Martin Goulden, London N12. ...THE most famous example of this is the Sphinx’s nose.
As a child I was told that the proboscis was the victim of one of Napoleon’s cannonballs. However, sketches of the Sphinx sans nez were produced by the Dane Frederic Louis Norden in 1737, well before the era of Napoleon.
The Egyptian-Arab historian alMaqrîzî wrote in the 15th century that the nose had been destroyed by a Sufi Muslim named Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr.
This was in response to Egyptian peasants who were making offerings to the Great Sphinx in 1378 in the hope of controlling the flood cycle, which would result in a successful harvest. Outraged by this blasphemy, Sa’im al-Dahr was said to have destroyed the nose as an act of iconoclasm and was later executed for vandalism. Miriam Walker, Chard, Somerset.
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