A jazz musician claimed to have been teleported to Saturn nearly a decade before Roswell, at a time when the world was focused on the looming Second World War. For Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, this was not science fiction but a defining truth. This episode does not try to debunk the mythology. It asks how a chronically ill, isolated prodigy who transcribed Duke Ellington and Fats Waller arrangements from memory and read esoteric texts at a Black Masonic Lodge library built a cosmic persona as a practical response to the world he was born into.

We cover the Saturn vision that pulled him out of Alabama A&M, his defiant 1942 conscientious objector case and jail time, the move to Chicago and work with Fletcher Henderson, the 1952 legal name change years before Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali, and th ...