Editing Sun Ra (section)

===Trip to Saturn===
Blount left college because, he claimed, he had a visionary experience as a college student that had a major, long-term influence on him. In 1936 or 1937, in the midst of deep religious concentration, Sun Ra claimed that a bright light appeared around him, and, as he later said:
{{cquote|My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up...  I wasn't in human form... I landed on a planet that I identified as [[Saturn]]... they [[Apport (paranormal)|teleported]] me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools... the world was going into complete chaos... I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That's what they told me.<ref>Szwed (1998), pp. 28–29.</ref>}}

Blount claimed that this experience occurred in 1936 or 1937. According to Szwed, the musician's closest associates cannot date the story any earlier than 1952. (Blount also said that the incident happened when he was living in Chicago, where he did not settle until the late 1940s). Sun Ra discussed the vision, with no substantive variation, to the end of his life. His trip to Saturn allegedly occurred a full decade before [[flying saucer]]s entered public consciousness with the 1947 encounter of [[Kenneth Arnold]]. It was earlier than other public accounts: about 15&nbsp;years before [[George Adamski]] wrote about contact with benevolent beings; and almost 20&nbsp;years before the 1961 case of [[Barney and Betty Hill]], who recounted sinister [[UFO abduction]]s. Szwed says that, "even if this story is [[fictional revisionism|revisionist]] autobiography... Sonny was pulling together several strains of his life. He was both prophesizing his future and explaining his past with a single act of personal mythology."<ref>Szwed (1998), pp. 30–31.</ref> [[Gavin Steingo|Steingo]] emphasizes understanding Sun Ra's statements about his life in relation to his music. Steingo writes: "Rather than think of [Sun Ra's] music as a performance and then consider only the content of his spoken words, we might instead understand everything he did as part of the same project to listen otherwise."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Steingo |first=Gavin |title=Interspecies communication: sound and music beyond humanity |date=2024 |publisher=the University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-83133-6 |location=Chicago, IL London}}</ref>