LOS ANGELES – Sammy Hagar has experienced some pretty wild times, but not all of them are sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
During an interview with MTV Hive, the 63-year-old rocker opens up about his fascination with mysticism, a subject he discusses in his new memoir, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock.
"People say there’s no other life in the universe. But you know how big the universe is? It’s freakin’ huge!" says Hagar. "If we’re really the only ones out there, that’s scarier to me than thinking there are aliens."
He adds, "My whole career I’ve been writing about these kinda things. But they’ve never been the hits. They’ve only been the underground songs. If anything in the book has been played down, it’s my mystical side, because I don’t want to sound like I’m crazy."
Hagar then reveals that he’s been abducted by aliens in the past, including once in the foothills above Fontana.
"[Aliens] were plugged into me," he recalls. "It was a download situation. This was long before computers or any kind of wireless. There weren’t even wireless telephones. Looking back now, it was like, ‘F—, they downloaded something into me!’ Or they uploaded something from my brain, like an experiment. ‘See what this guy knows.’ "
The former Van Halen frontman also remembers an alien encounter when he was about 4 years old.
"I saw what I considered to be, well, at the time I thought it was a car with no wheels," he says. "We lived out in the country and I saw this thing floating across a field, creating this big dust storm. I threw rocks at it and s—. And I don’t know what happened after that … I just have no memory of it. And that wasn’t a dream. It was during daylight."
So why did Hagar keep his alien experiences a secret for decades?
"I couldn’t talk about it because I didn’t know how to explain it," he says. "I didn’t understand the technology. But now I’m pretty sure it was a wireless situation. Either a download or upload. They were tapped into my brain and the knowledge was transferred back and forth. I could see them and everything while it was happening. There was a visual involved, almost like … I don’t know. [Laughs.] Don’t get me going!"
While he was warned to stay away from the alien chatter in his new book, Hager could be writing about his encounters in the future.
"My opinions about the UFO stuff, well, I could write a whole book just devoted to that," he says. "I love it, man. I’m into it deep."
