Am I imagining things, or does the song “Come Sail Away” by Styx (in their album Grand Illusion) have disturbing parallels to the beliefs of the Heaven’s Gate cult, who commited suicide thinking that a UFO in the tail of comet Hale-Bopp would take them to heaven? Since the song came first, did HG take their inspiration from Styx? It used to be one of my favorite songs, but now every time I hear it I think of eunich hackers wearing designer sneakers.
I can’t see any connection. Ti and Do were expecting the mothership to come (or at least convincing others) long before Styx raecorded Come Sail Away. When they were still Bo and Po? Since about 1970, anyway.
It was already a cliche long before Come Sail Away.
That being said, maybe the reason Eric Cartman developed a compulsion about that song has something to do with whatever it was the aliens put up his butt.
For that matter, Patti Smith’s Birdland (1977?) has a boy joining his dead father in a UFO. I think this is pretty archetypal imagery.
Drift, drift, to the belly of the ship
The ship slides open
And he went inside of it
Where he was not human
In some versions, the father is Wilhelm Reich and the son is named Peter. Now you know.
I understand that if you play Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album to the final hour involving all the Heaven’s Gates suicides, that there are eerie parallels.
Does this mean they went to Oz?
I was thinking of Cartman too.
aka The Two- I remembered when they were originally in the news in the mid-1970s. That was after the 1973 UFO flap & close to the release of Spielberg’s CE3K.