Bill Hicks: UFO Contactee
Kevin Booth Talks On The Record

By Greg Bishop (editor of The Excluded Middle)


"Boy, is my finger not on the pulse of America" was one of late comedian Bill Hicks' favorite lines to throw at an audience, whether they were with him or heckling his ass. The fact that Hicks didn't accept the twisted illusion under which most of us are forced to live was due in great part (by his own admission) to his use of psychedelic drugs, specifically stropharia cubensis-the "magic mushroom." At one point in his career, Hicks decided he was going to take mushrooms before every live performance. The drug also opened Hicks' doors of perception to a subject dear to the hearts of many of us, namely UFOs.

Give a listen to any one of his CDs. Every one contains some commentary on UFOs, either as a metaphor for looking at this planet from an extra-human perspective or, more rarely, when Hicks talks about his own alien vistiation experiences. He'd make fun of his fellow Alcoholics Anonymous inmates' pitiful "sharing" speeches with a dry "Fuck you, I've been on a UFO! I met an alien race who wanted to take me to the planet Arcturus!" Did he actually meet space brothers from another galaxy?
He might have never had the chance had he not left Texas in 1980 with his fellow comedian and mentor Sam Kinison to conquer Los Angeles, comedy capital of the country, and evil central. Kinison succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, and Hicks even managed to make a name for himself. He was just 20 years old at the time.

Because of his straightlaced upbringing, Hicks and his friends actually used to make fun of other kids who took drugs when they were in high school. Although a straightedge-type youth in Texas, Bill was introduced to recreational drugs while in L.A. and he never looked back.

Kevin Booth, Hicks' friend, producer, and partner in crime says that one night Hicks called and told him that he'd just taken mushrooms and that he was coming back to Houston to turn Booth on. With the fury of the newly-converted, he returned a few weeks later, all ready to introduce his teetotalling friend to the wonders of psychedelia, even though Hicks still hadn't tasted alcohol yet.

Sometime in the mad rush of the first few weeks of psilocybin intoxications, Hicks had a date to play the Laugh Stop comedy club, so he and Booth dropped 'shrooms a couple of hours before showtime. "He just went up there and killed" says Booth. "he was reading the minds of the audience, and I was reading his mind, just a complete connection." Hicks thought he had discovered the divine inner secret of the comedy Illuminati. "I'm gonna trip every time I go on stage" he pontificated.

As those who have been initiated into the wonders of psychedelics know, the experience can change radically from one trip to the next, and this is what Hicks found out the next time he tried the stunt. The blank stares were frightening. Perhaps this is why in later years he jokingly suggested that the audience all trip along with him. This would have had him arrested quicker than Lenny Bruce, but the idea is workable, if you could corner a private audience that would mentally and physically stay in one place long enough to listen.  The ticket price would be sort of steep though.

Booth, Hicks and another friend retreated to the safety and privacy of the Booth family ranch near Austin over and over again to sanctify their new ritual. None of them were prepared for what was going to happen on one particular night. Bill would never stop talking about it publicly, but Booth was closed-mouthed about it until a few years ago.
Some critics and fans have asked whether Bill was just kidding about his flying saucer encounters. "Bill and I had a shared UFO expereince that was pretty much the one that he went on to talk about in his act" says Booth, but he wanted to set the stage first. "I try to tell people about it and I get tongue-tied, like I'm telling about my first sexual experience. It sounds awkward and embarassing. Bill never thought so, but he was one of those 'all or nothing' friends. At the time, I was in college, studying electrical engineering and reading all these books about Einstein."
Booth and Hicks had dropped about three hours before sunset so that that they could time the "peak" right around the time when the sky began to fire up. They were walking around a pond and Hicks asked him, "So, explain that Einstein thing to me again." As he asked the question, the bottom dropped out of their everyday reality.

"It seemed like about an hour-long event of being able to completely read each other's minds." Booth says. "We were telling jokes back and forth without moving our mouths, and we would occasionally say things to reference ourselves that this was really happening."

They walked onto what appeared to be a spaceship. "It was all white light inside, like a conch shell, and it seemed like there were thousands of other people on the same channel, communicating at this high speed." He goes on, "There was nothing scary or evil about it. It was just really positive and happy, a really good vibration all around." After being shown the interconnectedness of all things with the benign regard of an alien race they "woke up on the ground all of a sudden."

Hicks immediately started talking about the experience in his act. Booth didn't think it was an appropriate thing to admit in public. "Bill would go out there on stage and say 'Me and my friend were up  on a spaceship,' and I wouldn't like him talking about it. I thought it kind of demeaned the trip, like we were trying to brag about it." After his friend's death, Booth reconsidered: "It wasn't until Bill died that I realized that it was dumb and insecure of me not to want to tell people about that moment we had shared. I should have talked to him about it more."

In an unreleased recording, Hicks said "Shirley Maclaine's out on a limb, and I'm hanging onto a twig, and the UFOs are honking. Shirley, let's GO!"

Another, unconfirmed quote from an indeterminate interview archived at http://www.billhicks.com/main/darktimes/other/darktimes20/faq/faq.html recounts another incident, probably out at the Booth family ranch as well.


Me and two friends, we had this shared vision of being visited by a ship. And these seven balls of light, which inside you could see these little skeleton figures inside, moving in these lights, and they led us onto their ship. And we were asking them, all telepathically, "Why are you doing this?" And they said, "Because you wanted to know." And we said, "Why us?" And they said, "Because you'll see it for what we are." And we said, "How do you do what you do?" And they said, "We'll show you." And they opened up their ship, and we all saw this bright light.

This was a vision, we were not together when this happened. We got together later, and we'd forgotten about it. And my friend said, "Do you get the impression we're meeting lots of new friends tonight?" And all three of us, that memory dawned. Kind of a neat experience.


When Hicks talked about the "Seven balls of light took me onto their ship" on the Relentless CD, he was most certainly referring to this.

The old joke used to be that UFO witnesses were drinking at the time of their sightings. While this seemingly ignores the fact that no one hallucinates balls of light flying around at high speeds while under the influence of alcohol, the updated version of this old wives' tale would seem to make more sense. Why do you think they call them "hallucinogens?" Anyone familiar with psychedelics and their study knows that thousands of indigenous world cultures have used and respected psychoactive plants for divination and sometimes just everyday problem-solving. You could probably remember where you put those keys or that cute guy's phone number with a quick dose of psilocybin. The idea is that psychedelics open the mind to a wider experience of reality and quite literally open doors to other ones.
The point is that Hicks and thousands of others were and are seeing UFOs and aliens (or at least something that looked like them) by using the mushroom-shaped key. Cultural imperialism shouldn't blind one to something that's just as "real" as reading these words or listening to Bill Hicks' work.
Legendary ethnopharmacologist researcher R. Gordon Wasson and others like Jonathan Ott coined a word in 1978 which they thought described the experience more accurately and did away with the cultural baggage of the older terms. The new word they came up with was "entheogen," which means literally "becoming divine within": En = Within, Inner/ Theo = Divine, God/ Gen = Becoming, Creating. This was what Hicks and his comic compatriots said that were trying to achieve when they stumbled into the UFO experience. They weren't looking for it, but as Kevin Booth said, "It's a different story every time."



More information is available at Kevin Booth's website, sacredcow.com, including archives, merchandise, and current cultural critics who carry on in Bill Hicks' tradition.

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