David Bowie, UFOs, Witchcraft, Cocaine and Paranoia
by Timothy Green Beckley
Born David Robert Jones, I first met David Bowie during his
original tour of the United States having adapted the stage
persona of Ziggy Stardust, a sort of lost in space androgynous
alien, complete with cosmic makeup and a painted lightning bolt
zig zaging across his face down to his naked chest.
Before venturing across the pond, Bowie had caused quite a
sensation in the British press not only because of his
outlandish - to some - image of a rock and roller from Mars, but
because of his independent and very liberal sexual lifestyle.
Bowie was introduced to me at the RCA studios in Manhattan by
Walli Elmlark a bedazzling young lady who wrote a regular column
for Circus magazine, a sort of heavy metal version of Rolling
Stone that was printed on glossy paper with color photos of pop
star favorites, emerging on the then burgeoning glam and glitter
rock scenes.
As usual, at the time I was wearing several hats. I was
promoting a number of local rock bands who never quite "made
it," editing the widely distributed UFO Review (the world's only
official flying saucer newspaper), and running the New York
School Of Occult Arts and Science, among the first metaphysical
centers in the country where you could take classes in anything
from astral projection to hypnosis, to witchcraft...which is how
I came to be acquainted with Walli Elmlark.
As I originally wrote in UFOs Among The Stars - Close
Encounters of The Famous (Global Communications), Wallie was
known widely as the White Witch Of New York. Because of her
contacts in the music industry, she had established quite an
eclectic clientele for whom she would offer spiritual guidance,
and occasional good luck or love spells, but always of a
positive nature. She didn't dabble in black magick or even gris
gris (a New Orleans form of "gray magick" that incorporates
poppets and the use of talismans kept in a personal mojo bag).
Walli was lively, imaginative, energetic, well spoken, and quite
attractive in her flowing white garments complete with
fashionable silver moon adornments. Oh did I forget to mention
long black hair, complete with dyed green streak highlights?
Indeed, Walli made a very bold fashion and occult statement
wherever she went.
BOWIE - THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
Early in life, Bowie had established his interest in all
matters extraterrestrial. As a Brit teenager, David had helped
edit a flying saucer newsletter. He admitted to me that he loved
science fiction and was fascinated with life in space and the
possibility that quite a few cosmic visitors had ended up on our
earthly shores.
During a conversation, Bowie had gone out on a limb revealing
that he had once had a close encounter. In the book Laugh
Gnostic, author Peter Koening paraphrases what Bowie said: "A
friend and I were traveling in the English countryside when we
both noticed a strange object hovering above a field. From then
on I have come to take this phenomena seriously. 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."
In the February 1975 issue of the long defunct Cream magazine,
Bowie seems to admit to a reporter that he might have an implant
or metal inside his body. It's hard to define his exact feeling
on this, but this is the quote attributed to him by Bruno Stein
the writer who conducted the interview:
"Well, it turned out David was in luck. If he went to a little
town in Missouri at a certain time, he would be able to see in a
seemingly empty field a fully equipped flying saucer repair shop
at work.
"It was one of those fascinating things you learn at a Bowie
soiree. This evening the gathering was rather intimate. There
was Corinne, David's charming personal secretary, who ducked out
early due to exhaustion (although another participant gossiped
that she had someone interesting waiting for her in her hotel
room)...."I used to work for two guys who put out a UFO magazine
in England," he told the flying saucer man. "About six years
ago. And I made sightings six, seven times a night for about a
year when I was in the observatory. We had regular cruises that
came over. We knew the 6.15 was coming in and would meet up with
another one. And they would be stationary for about half an
hour, and then after verifying what they'd been doing that day,
they'd shoot off.
"But I mean, it's what you do with the information. We never
used to tell anybody. It was beautifully dissipated when it got
to the media. Media control is still based in the main on
cultural manipulation. It's just so easy to do. When you set up
one set of objectives toward the public and you've given them a
certain definition for each code word, you hit them with the
various code words and they're not going to believe anything if
you don't want them to..."
From his performances, you could tell that nothing was too "non
establishment" for David. He incorporated time machines and
space capsules into his act and wrote a Space Oddity and talked
about how a Starman would like to come and visit us, "but he
knows he'd blow our minds." His appearance in the motion picture
The Man Who Fell To Earth has become a classic. In concert,
Bowie was radiant and his fans were floating on a cloud, but
behind the scenes an ominous specter was forming from which the
master of time and space would quickly need some rightist
assistance in order to escape a wall of paranoia that was
building around him.
AND ALONG COMES MR. SCRATCH
Like many rockers before and after, David had taken a liking to
the good life. You know the old adage sex, drugs and rock and
roll, well on top of this add a heap of consciousness expansion,
an interest in the occult, and you will have the prevalent
influences on what might have seemed like Bowie's immortal being.
But paranoia soon struck in the form of the ole nemesis "nose
candy" commonly known as cocaine.
With the help of Bowie himself and some close associates at the
time, Marc Spitz details in the just published Bowie biography
(Crown) how David was living in LA just a few houses away from
the LaBianca estate where Charlie Manson's gang had terribly
mutilated Sharon Tate and her friends in a ritualistic murder.
Bowie had taken to doing blow regularly and was getting more and
more desperate and paranoid with each passing day.
In a number of shocking revelations, Marc Spitz in the Bowie
biography explains precisely what was transpiring in the pop
singer's troubled life: , "While planning the follow-up to Young
Americans (album), Bowie would sit in the house with a pile of
high-quality cocaine atop the glass coffee table, a sketch pad
and a stack of books. Psychic Self Defense (Dion Fortune) was
his favorite. Its author describes the book as a 'safeguard for
protecting yourself against paranormal malevolence.'
"Using this and more arcane books on witchcraft, white magic
and its malevolent counterpart, black magic, as rough guides to
his own rapidly fragmenting psyche, Bowie began drawing
protective pentagrams on every surface."
Bowie told the author, "I'd stay up for weeks. Even people like
Keith Richards were floored by it. And there were pieces of me
all over the floor. I paid with the worst manic depression of my
life. My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into
pieces. I was hallucinating 24 hours a day."
Spitz adds, "Increasingly Bowie was convinced there were
witches after his semen. They were intent on using it to make a
child to sacrifice to the devil, essentially the plot to Roman
Polanski's 1968 supernatural classic Rosemary's Baby."
Seeing that he was in desperate need, poet and song writer
Cherry Vanilla hooked Bowie up with Walli Elmlark who Spitz
describes as a "Manhattan-based intellectual...who taught
classes at the New York School of Occut Arts and sciences then
located on Fourteenth Street, just north of Greenwich Village,"
and which the author of this article was director of from the
mid 1960s for more than a decade, promoting lectures and classes
by the who's who of paranormal and UFO experts of that era,
including Cleve Backster, Stanley Krippner, Jim Moseley, John
Keel - and, of course, Walli Elmlark the White Witch of New York.
As added confirmation of the madness David was trying to cope
with, ex wife Angie Bowie reveals even more details of his
fascination and dabbling into the occult in her own personal
remembrance, Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side With David
Bowie.
"There was a beautiful Art Deco house on six acres, an
exquisite site property and a terrific value at just $300,000,
but he took one look at a detail I hadn't noticed, a hexagram
painted on the floor of a circular room by the previous owner,
Gypsy Rose Lee.
"A great deal of codling and reassurance got us through that
crisis, and I went and found the Doheny Drive house. Built in
the late fifties or early sixties, it was a white cube
surrounding an indoor swimming pool. David like the place, but I
thought it was too small to meet our needs for very long, and I
wasn't crazy about the pool. In my experience, indoor pools are
always a problem.
"This one was no exception, albeit not in any of the usual
ways. Its drawback was one I hadn't encountered before and
haven't seen or heard of since: Satan lived in it. With his own
eyes, David said, he'd seen HIM rising up out of the water one
night."
Feeling demonic forces moving in, David felt strongly that he
needed an exorcism and asked that his new found friend white
witch Walli Elmlark be called upon to lend her assistance to
remove the evil from his surroundings.
"A Greek Orthodox Church, in LA would have done it for us
(there was a priest available for such a service, the people had
told me) but David wouldn't have it. No strangers allowed, he
said. So there we stood, with just Walli's instructions and a
few hundred dollars' worth of books, talismans, and assorted
items from Hollywood's comprehensive selection of fine occult
emporia.
"There he (David Bowie) was, then, primed and ready. The proper
books and doodads were arranged on a big old-fashioned lectern.
The incantation began, and although I had no idea what was being
said or what language it was being said in, I couldn't stop a
weird cold feeling rising up in me as David droned on and on.
"There's no easy or elegant way to say this, so I'll just say
it straight. At a certain point in the ritual, the pool began to
bubble. It bubbled vigorously (perhaps "thrashed" is a better
term) in a manner inconsistent with any explanation involving
air filters or the like."
The rock and roll couple watched in amazement. Angie says she
tried to be flippant - "'Well, dear, aren't you clever? It seems
to be working. Something's making a move, don't you think?' -
but I couldn't keep it up. It was very, very strange; even after
my recent experiences I was having trouble accepting what my
eyes were seeing."
Angie insists that she would peak through the glass doors which
lead to the pool every so often and was dumb founded by what she
saw.
"On the bottom of the pool was a large shadow, or stain, which
had not been there before the ritual began. It was in the shape
of a beast of the underworld; it reminded me of those twisted,
tormented gargoyles screaming silently from the spires of
medieval cathedrals. It was ugly, shocking, malevolent; it
frightened me.
"I backed away from it feeling very strange, went through the
doorway, and told David what I'd seen, trying to be nonchalant
but not doing very well. He turned white but eventually became
revived enough to spend the rest of the night doing coke. He
wouldn't go near the pool, though.
"I still don't know what to think about that night. It runs
directly counter to my pragmatism and my everyday faith in the
integrity of the "normal" world, and it confuses me greatly.
What troubles me the most is that if you were to call that stain
the mark of Satan, I don't see how I could argue with you."
"David, of course, insisted that we move from the house as
quickly as possible, and we did that, but I've heard from
reliable sources (Michael Lipman for one, the property's real
estate agent) that subsequent tenants haven't been able to
remove the shadow. Even though the pool has been painted over a
number of times, the shadow has always come back."
Several years went by and Walli met an untimely passing as she
could not remove the demons in her own life, even though she had
a dramatic impact on almost everyone she came in contact with.
Besides teaching at the School Of Occult Arts And Sciences,
Walli teamed up with the likes of T Rex's Marc Bolan (whom she
nicked named the Wizzard) and King Crimson's guitarist Robert
Fripp. The trio went off to merry old England to record a spoken
word album Though The Cosmic Children has never been released
the soundtrack was years ahead of its time, centering around
those special souls who Walli believed had reincarnated on earth
from "elsewhere" at a very important time in the human
evolutionary process to pass on the light to others who were
destined to change the world through music, literature and an
emerging New Age philosophy. The recording is out there
somewhere - perhaps safely in the vault of Robert Fripp - who
hopefully if he reads this will contact me and allow us to do a
limited pressing for those who would truly find this effort
transformational.
Walli and I worked mutually for a number of years on several
projects and even co-authored a book together. Out of print for
decades, once in a while I have seen a copy of Rock Raps Of The
Seventies offered on ebay or elsewhere at an exorbitant price.
Somehow I can't exclude the fact that Walli looks down from
time to time and perhaps sings along with David Bowie as he
performs all over the world in concert. Long recovered from
drugs and the dark aspects of occultism, he is now raising a
family and going on with his chosen task. And perhaps before you
know it his Starman song may take on a reality all it's own if
the predicted disclosure about UFOs and extraterrestrials ever
comes about in our lifetime.
# # #
Timothy Green Beckley is a long time investigator of UFOs and
the paranormal. He is the president of Inner Light/Global
Communications, a publishing firm specializing in this field.
His own works currently available on Amazon.com include:
The UFO Silencers: Mystery of the Men In Black
Secret Prophecy Of Fatima Revealed
MJ12 And The Riddle Of Hangar 18
The Big Book Of Werewolves
UFOs Among The Stars
Subterranean Worlds Inside Earth
Strange Saga
Our Alien Planet: This Eerie Earth
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