DAMN! SOMEONE HAD SOMETHING NICE TO SAY ABOUT HIPPES

L to r Michael English, Nigel Weymouth, and Guy Stevens (who would later produce London Calling for The Clash)

The follow item from Fortean Times was sent over by Munz.

“…UFOs were not just in the air, they’d become a religion and the word a common sacrament to everyone who’d tripped.” - Neil Oram

The word hippie conjures visions of brightly clad youth rebelling against society while advocating peace, free love and the right to alter their consciousnesses in whatever way they chose. But behind the fashions and fads, the hippie underground movement in the UK was responsible for the greatest expansion of interest and belief in fortean phenomena in history.Social historians invariably associate the hippie movement with Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, sources of both inspiration and imagery, and the hippies’ interest in these belief systems has been well documented. But there was another alternative to the blinkered Western worldview of the 1960s already deeply embedded in the British cultural psyche, and already present in the lives of those who would form the movement known as the Underground – the flying saucer culture.In the mid-1960s, although flying saucers were being discussed among the influential group of post-beatniks and modern mystics who would form the core of the Underground, the nascent movement lacked a voice. A figurehead was needed, someone who could breathe life into the background hum of belief in flying saucers, articulating it for the burgeoning subculture.That voice came in the form of John Michell, whose influence on the Underground, and forteana in general, cannot be overestimated. (Click for the whole story)

The secret word is Groovy