"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."

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For more information or to order this book, simply click on the title: Bowie: A Biography

For more information or to order this book, simply click on the title: UFOs Among the Stars

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