ELVIS KING OF THE STRANGE

Who is the most fortean musical icon of all time? Elvis Presley, of course, who was born 90 years ago this month on 8 January 1935. NEIL NIXON argues that while the living Elvis brought religious iconography and supernatural power to rock ‘n’ roll, his post-mortem career since 1977 has encompassed ever wider realms of weirdness, from angels and aliens to reincarnation and conspiracy theories…

When giving talks on UFOs I’m sometimes asked which single event offers the best evidence for intelligent alien life. Until the recent preprint report from the Planetary Habitability Laboratory concluding that the Wow! signal was an explicable, if rare, event in astrophysics (see FT421:6), I tended to trot out that example, and then segue into a question. The Wow! signal was detected at 10.16pm on 15 August 1977: I would ask audiences what Earth-shattering event dominated the following day’s news.1 The answer, of course, is the death of Elvis Presley, which prompted me to point out that Elvis’s death probably occurred around 12 hours from the Wow! signal’s appearance; and in the absence of any definitive answer to what the signal was, the notion that it was the space brothers…

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Fortean Times (Digital) - 1 Issue, 453

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