From Goldie Hawn to Demi Lovato: celebrities who swear they’ve seen UFOs and aliens
Turns out the Nixon–Jackie Gleason alien legend is far from the only Hollywood close encounter. A surprising number of famous faces say they’ve personally seen UFOs, or even met aliens. Here are the wildest celebrity encounters, in their own words.
We recently dug into the wild legend of President Nixon supposedly showing Jackie Gleason some dead aliens. But it turns out Gleason is in very crowded company.
A shocking number of celebrities say they’ve had their own close encounters, from distant lights in the sky to full-on face-to-face meetings. Here’s a rundown of the most famous, and most bizarre, celebrity UFO stories, straight from the stars themselves. (A fair note up front: these are personal accounts, not proof of anything. But they sure are fun.)
Goldie Hawn: “It felt like the finger of God”
Let’s start with one of the most detailed, and strangest.
Actress Goldie Hawn says she had a powerful alien encounter in the California desert when she was around 20. She recalls a high-pitched sound, then seeing silver, triangular-headed beings, “silver in color, slash for a mouth, tiny little nose, no ears.”
She says they touched her face, and rather than being terrified, she felt overwhelmed with love. “It felt like the finger of God,” she said on Apple Fitness+’s Time to Walk. “It was the most benevolent, loving feeling… It was filled with light.” She admits she’ll never really know what happened, and says she kind of likes it that way.
Kurt Russell: the accidental Phoenix Lights witness
Here’s one that connects to Goldie in a genuinely great way.
Goldie’s longtime partner Kurt Russell has an unbelievable claim: he says he was the pilot who first reported the famous 1997 “Phoenix Lights,” one of the most witnessed UFO events in history. Russell says he was flying his private plane into Phoenix, saw a triangle formation of lights, and radioed it in.
The kicker? He says he forgot all about it for years, until he was home watching a UFO documentary with Goldie, saw the Phoenix Lights segment, and realized: “Wait a minute, that’s the night I was landing in Phoenix.”
Demi Lovato: on a first-name basis with the “E.T.s”
Now for one of the most committed believers in Hollywood.
Singer Demi Lovato is such a devoted believer that she made an entire Peacock docuseries about it, Unidentified with Demi Lovato. She’s described seeing a glowing blue orb in Joshua Tree, and has told an even wilder story of three beings appearing in her room who offered to show her their planet.
Lovato also famously pushed back on the word “alien,” calling it a “derogatory” term and preferring “E.T.” Whatever you call them, she’s convinced they’re friendly: “I haven’t seen any zapping happen… Maybe they’re just trying to get along!”
Miley Cyrus: chased by a “flying snowplow”
This one comes with a very honest disclaimer.
Miley Cyrus told Interview magazine she was driving through San Bernardino when she got “chased down by some sort of UFO,” which she memorably described as looking like “a flying snowplow” glowing yellow. She says she even made eye contact with something inside, and that other cars stopped to look too.
Her refreshingly candid caveat: she admitted she’d bought some questionable substances earlier, “so it could have been the weed wax.” Still, she says the experience shook her for days: “I couldn’t really look at the sky the same.”
Aaron Rodgers: a scene straight out of “Independence Day”
The NFL has a believer too.
Quarterback Aaron Rodgers says that back in 2005, he and some friends saw an otherworldly object after a siren went off near a nuclear plant. “It was like a scene out of Independence Day,” he recalled, adding that they even saw fighter jets seeming to chase it. “Nobody said a word. We all kind of looked at each other like, did we just see what we think we just saw?”
Kacey Musgraves: two sightings and a real fear
Country star Kacey Musgraves is a lifelong sky-watcher, and says it’s paid off with two UFO sightings.
She described seeing a strange object in Mexico that looked like “the underbelly of a bird” before it started glowing and shifted into an X-pattern. Days later, near her Nashville home, she says she saw “two great balls of fire” overhead. The experiences left a mark, she now says one of her biggest fears is being abducted.
Woody Harrelson: lights over Ohio
Actor Woody Harrelson told Stephen Colbert about a 1974 sighting from his Ohio teen years. He says the whole street came outside to watch blinking lights zip impossibly fast across the night sky, darting around before finally shooting off. “Then finally just, whoosh, went somewhere else,” he recalled. “Some other world.”
Muhammad Ali: the boxing legend who watched the skies
One of the older, and coolest, entries.
Boxing icon Muhammad Ali was a genuine UFO enthusiast who claimed multiple sightings, including one over New York’s Central Park during an early-morning run. He described “a brilliant light hanging as if by an invisible thread,” and said he saw similar objects on several occasions.
The honorable mentions
Plenty more stars belong on this list:
Nick Jonas says he saw three flying saucers while playing basketball as a kid, and remains “obsessed with UFO stuff.”
Steven Spielberg, who’s now made four alien films including this year’s Disclosure Day, has long said he believes people have genuinely seen UFOs.
Tom DeLonge of Blink-182 famously stepped back from music to seriously research UFOs, co-founding an organization dedicated to studying them.
The bottom line
Here’s the takeaway.
Whether you think these stars saw genuine extraterrestrials, misidentified planes and drones, or (in Miley’s honest case) something in their system, the sheer number of celebrities with UFO stories is genuinely striking. Some, like Goldie Hawn and Demi Lovato, describe life-changing encounters. Others, like Kurt Russell, stumbled into famous sightings without even realizing it at first.
None of it counts as proof of anything, of course, celebrities are just as capable of misremembering or misidentifying as the rest of us. But it’s a fun reminder that stargazing and wondering “are we alone?” is a universal human thing, one that doesn’t care how famous you are. And with UFOs having a genuine cultural moment right now, don’t be surprised if the celebrity-encounter list keeps growing. The truth, as they say, is out there, and apparently a lot of famous people think they’ve seen it.
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Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
Hat Tips:
People and Today (2023-2025), verified for Goldie Hawn’s desert encounter (the “finger of God” and silver-being descriptions, via Apple Fitness+’s Time to Walk) and the details of her account
Interview Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Variety (2021-2025), verified for Miley Cyrus’s “flying snowplow” account and weed-wax caveat, and Demi Lovato’s Unidentified docuseries, Joshua Tree orb, and “aliens is derogatory” comments
IndieWire and Jimmy Kimmel Live! (via reporting) (2018), verified for Kurt Russell’s claim to have reported the 1997 Phoenix Lights and realizing it years later while watching a documentary with Goldie Hawn
Additional celebrity accounts verified via reporting from AOL, Toofab, and Us Weekly, including Aaron Rodgers’s 2005 sighting, Kacey Musgraves’s two sightings, Woody Harrelson’s 1974 Ohio account (via The Late Show), Muhammad Ali’s Central Park sightings, Nick Jonas, Steven Spielberg, and Tom DeLonge