Bay Area ravers threw an illegal beach party. Then the UFO arrived.

Jenö Void had his head down when it — whatever IT was — happened. 

It was dark out, save for the moonlight and the soft glow from a Bay Area beach bonfire. He was DJing for a crowd of several hundred, but his eyes were on his turntables. He didn’t see the commotion around him, the sea of dilated pupils looking out over the water as the alien melodies of early 1990s acid house filled the air. 

He finished his set just as the full moon sunk over the horizon and the sun began to rise. 

“I got off the decks,” he said, “… and the first thing that happened was I ran into people, and they were like. ‘Did you see the UFO?’”

‘Our version of the acid test’

In his 1998 history of rave culture titled “Energy Flash,” Simon Reynolds quotes a raver named Wade Hampton, who claims that several hundred people “saw the same spaceship come down to land” at a Bay Area rave in 1992.

“There was this acid floating around called Purple Shield,” Hampton told Reynolds. “That party is legendary in San Francisco. After that party, most people walked away as one.” 

This, as far as I can tell, is the only written record of the UFO incident. But the extraterrestrial event marks a unique convergence of three distinct strands of San Francisco’s identity: its counterculture roots, technological curiosity and a desire to dance all night long.

The early 1990s were a time when the city’s ravers descended onto beaches by the hundreds for illegal parties — sometimes in plain sight of police. 

House and techno music were invented by Black pioneers like Frankie Knuckles and Kevin Saunderson in Chicago and Detroit. But it was the British who paired the sounds with the euphoric club drug ecstasy, turning club nights into sweaty, nightlong lovefests. Acid house — a genre named not for LSD, but for its squelching, acid-like synths — became an obsession in the UK, and illegal raves drew leagues of working-class youths on weekend nights.

It was only a matter of time before the sounds of acid house echoed back across the pond. And when they did, San Francisco was primed to listen. Silicon Valley was in its infancy, and young technologists — a number of whom were ex-hippies — were optimistic about the unimaginable potential of nascent internet technology. The unapologetic mechanicalness of acid house married perfectly with the techno-optimism of the early ’90s. The counterculture movement of the ’60s was only a generation earlier, and the Bay Area was experiencing a second wave of interest in psychedelics, ushered in by a renewed interest in the writings and philosophies of hallucinogenic evangelist Terence McKenna.

This petri dish of influences gave way to a homegrown San Francisco rave culture: a scene that was psychedelic, futuristic and bohemian in a way that echoed the counterculture movement only a few decades earlier. By the early 1990s, the city was fast becoming one of the country’s rave hotspots. 

The UK didn’t just export its mutated forms of American electronic music. It also exported DJs. Among the British expats who landed in San Francisco was a DJ crew called Wicked Sound System, which quickly ingrained itself into the scene after its founding in 1991. 

“They were these British hippie ex-punkers, a group of misfits that came over and brought a whole crew,” San Francisco ex-raver Kelly Cooke, who now helps run Wicked Records, told SFGATE. “They taught us a lot about music.” 

There were two types of Wicked shows. First, there were regular, above-board, paid gigs at San Francisco clubs.

But Wicked were most famous for their all-night Full Moon parties. Once every lunar cycle, the outfit would haul a speaker system to an outdoor location and take turns mixing records from dark to sunrise — sometimes even into the afternoon. There were rarely any flyers for these events. (As was standard with underground raves at the time, the only way to find out where the rave’s location was to call a voicemail.) Depending on the location and date (sometimes the full moon fell on a weeknight), Full Moon raves drew anywhere from a few dozen people to crowds of thousands. 

“They were our version of the acid test,” Wicked DJ Jenö Void said.

Cooke remembers attending the first Full Moon party at San Francisco’s Baker Beach — also the site of the first Burning Man parties in the 1980s — practically by accident. She hopped in the bed of a friend’s pickup and found herself at the rave.

“It just kind of kept going from there,” she said. For a while, she attended practically every show, working as a “flyer girl” promoting the scene.

‘UFOs are real’

The San Francisco scene’s particular clash of sci-fi, futurism and psychedelia evolved into a pet obsession: UFOs. 

“At this time there was a lot of UFO hype in the rave community,” Cosmic Jason, a DJ involved in the early SF scene, wrote in an email shared with SFGATE. A San Francisco streetwear brand called Anarchic Adjustment was pushing out “UFOs are real” T-shirts. A now-defunct nightclub called Osmosis gave out lanyards with UFOs on them. (Cooke still has hers, she said.)

San Francisco’s ravers weren’t alone in their adoration for flying saucers. One of the pioneering techno tracks of the early ’90s was “UFO’s Are Real,” which was produced by a Dallas-based MC and DJ. But of all the country’s scenes, San Francisco may have leaned the hardest into UFO mania. 

“There was always a bit of UFO energy everywhere,” Cooke said. “I don’t know exactly why, but there was.”

According to Jason Drummond, also known as DJ Spun, all-night ravers were, at least ironically, hoping to attract UFOs.

“That was the whole point of what we were trying to do,” Drummond said. “We were trying to send signals into outer space.” 

And in 1992, the dream came true. Sort of.

By then, Full Moon parties had mushroomed — somewhat literally, depending on your substance of choice — into a monthly bacchanalia from midnight to dawn to afternoon, fueled by fire pits, hard kick drums and loads of psychedelics. It didn’t matter what day of the week it was, Void said. If the full moon fell on a Monday night, people would come on a Monday, and some would skip work the next day. Even as parties swelled to hundreds in size, news about Full Moon parties got around entirely by word of mouth. 

“If you knew, you knew,” Void said.

Wicked threw Full Moon raves at the Sutro Baths, at Candlestick Park and at the Golden Gate Park Polo Fields. There were also beach parties in Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz.

“I remember walking up over the sand dunes to go down to the beach, or showing up and looking down over the cliffs onto the party, and it would look like a sort of mini festival,” Void said. “People lit bonfires. Some juggled fire; others walked on stilts; others played music from boomboxes.”

It was a Full Moon rave at a beach that was host to the strangest party of them all.

Thirty-two years later, the rave’s exact date and location are hazy. Some say it was at Gray Whale Cove in March, at the one-year Full Moon anniversary. (“This is a private beach, specifically selected to ensure a safe, hassle-free un-interrupted groove,” the flyer for the party read.)

Other ex-ravers swear it took place on Bonny Doon, a beach in Santa Cruz County, in the autumn. Others suggested Panther Beach.

Wherever and whenever it was, all participants agreed on one thing: a group of ravers collectively hallucinated a UFO hovering over the beach.

‘Landing the spaceship’

Thomas Bullock (DJ name: Tom of England) recalls showing up to the rave in the throes of a “terrible flu.” He was sitting on the beach, off to the side, resting, when somebody approached and offered him a “concoction of some sort” to help with his illness. It wasn’t NyQuil.

When the acid kicked in, Bullock and his friend were resting their foreheads against each other. They stayed that way for hours, he said. Then they saw it.

“Out of nowhere we saw this pool of light opening out on the sand in front of us,” he said. “This light spreading out, everything becoming illuminated. We looked up and there seemed to be some sort of activity in the sky.”

There had been rumors of UFO sightings. They matched what they saw with the other stories.

“It felt fun, groovy,” Bullock said. “Why not? Aliens down for the rave. Let’s go!”

When Jenö Void finally rejoined the crowd after his DJ set, he couldn’t escape hearing about a UFO. “Everybody I spoke to — there’s quite a lot [of people] — said yeah, they’ve seen it,” he said. “Either they’ve seen the light on the water or they’ve actually seen the craft above the water, hovering.”

After the event, people started referring to Void’s DJ skills as “landing the spaceship.”

DJ Spun recalled seeing something in the sky, but it wasn’t exactly a UFO: “I remember everybody pointing up and shouting, and not being sure of what I was seeing. I couldn’t say definitely that it was a UFO encounter.”

“Something appeared in the sky,” Sunshine Jones of the Dubtribe Sound System wrote in an email to SFGATE. “Lights. It came down close to the water. Everyone was euphoric.”

But Jones remained skeptical. “It was, from my perspective, a helicopter,” he told SFGATE. “A crop dusting machine. And it was a surprise interaction between us on the beach dancing barefoot on the sand to beautiful acid house music.”

Cosmic Jason agreed. “I was not as high as many who were there and saw the incident unfold,” he wrote in an email shared with SFGATE.

But Cooke, who was completely sober, didn’t recall a helicopter at this particular rave. She said that at a later Full Moon event, a helicopter descended on the beach to evacuate a raver who had fallen off one of the beach cliffs. She suggested that the helicopter theory referenced this other event. 

“I do think people confuse the helicopter and ufo in memory,” she told SFGATE in a follow-up text. “There was a real helicopter at one of the full moons.”

According to Void, it wasn’t until after the party that people started to say that they had seen a crop-dusting helicopter hovering over the water. “Those stories didn’t arrive, to my knowledge, until later on,” he said. 

The UFO myth takes off

In the following weeks, the collective hallucination snowballed into an urban legend. 

“I remember talking to other people that hadn’t been at the Full Moon party and the talk at that time was about the UFO. … Everybody heard about it,” Void said.

For the rest of the year, there was more UFO iconography than usual in the Bay Area scene. One of the organizers of ToonTown, a warehouse rave series, told Void that she had decided to name that year’s party “UFOs are real,” based on her experience at the beach. At a rave at the Richmond Civic Center, a giant prop UFO even came down from the ceiling.

And as the legend grew, the details turned fuzzy. 

DJ Spun remembered people hallucinating a spaceship landing on the rocks, “but I don’t remember 200 people thinking this,” he said. “More like, maybe 12.” Cooke suggested at least 20 hallucinated a UFO. 

Cooke also suggested that the collective hallucination was one of many. “It wasn’t just a random incident,” she said. “People were on loads of psychedelics, so it wasn’t like it just happened once.”

The facts are fuzzy. But everyone agrees that a) people collectively hallucinated a UFO, and b) that they were, to put a point on it, tripping balls. 

But factual details couldn’t slow down a good story, regardless of how many people actually saw something in the sky that night. 

“With acid house memories, it’s better to remember the legend and forget the facts,” Jones told SFGATE.

Lights on the beach

Fifteen years later, Bullock found himself walking down a beach at night. The moon was high in the sky. Unlike before, he was healthy and clear-headed.

As he walked across the sand, something odd caught his eye. It was the same visual effect he had seen in 1992, sitting on another beach with a fever and a head full of acid.

“I was watching a light flood out onto the beach in exactly the same way. And my brain registered that as a light, as if from a helicopter, or arguably a UFO,” he said.

But after a moment, his eyes focused, and he made out what it was: seafoam from a wave riding up the beach, catching the moon’s light. Something that could only happen with a full, bright moon.

“At that moment I had a lovely, joyous recollection of how much fun it had been to be a raver in San Francisco in the ’90s, and to be with a bunch of people dressed like aliens,” he said.

Jan 30, 2024