Tom Petty thought his parents were aliens
TL;DR:
- Tom Petty grew up in Florida.
- Tom Petty felt so different from his family that he wondered if they were aliens.
- Years later, Tom Petty thought he was going to have an alien encounter.
Tom Petty grew up in Gainesville, Florida. He knew from an early age that music would be important to him and he began pursuing this career as a teenager. His family wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Petty explained that when he spent time with his parents as a child, he felt so different from them that he wondered if they were aliens.
The musician grew up in Florida
Petty grew up in Gainesville. His family had lived in the South for generations, but he began looking elsewhere. Through television, he began to see California as an escape route.
“Los Angeles — TV City,” he told Men’s Journal. “That became my way out.”
He wasn’t an actor, but he loved music since he met Elvis. He realized that this could be his way out.
“The moment I saw the Beatles The Ed Sullivan Show, there was the way out,” he explained. “There was a way to do it. You get your friends and you’re a self-contained entity. And you make the music. And it looked like so much fun. That really appealed to me. I was a big fan of Elvis, but with The Beatles I really saw that…here’s something I could do.”
Tom Petty thought his parents were aliens
Petty explained that his mother and father had very different parenting styles. His mother was a gentle mother who introduced her two young sons to books and music. Although his father was well liked outside of the family, inside the home he was a violent, angry personality.
“I’ve learned to absolutely disappear,” Petty said. “I friggin’ walked away when he was around.”
To Petty, however, neither parent seemed very much like him. From a young age he wondered if they were aliens.
“I remember thinking from a very young age that my parents might have been aliens and I ended up in an alien family like one of them The Twilight Zonehe told Harp in 2006, per The Petty Archives. “I knew from a very young age that I wasn’t like her at all. That was probably because television came into play when I was three or four years old. I loved television so much. It went off at night and sometimes I waited for it to come on. I knew there was a world in there that was very different from the one I was in. I thought that was the right one.”
Tom Petty thought he would have another alien encounter later in life
Years later, Petty wondered if he was seeing aliens again. As he was driving his car near his home in Malibu, he saw silver objects in the sky.
“I was driving to the store and I saw these big silver balls floating in the air,” he said. “And I was like, ‘Oh shit! UFOs land in Malibu!’ I’m not usually the type of person who would think that. But that’s what the hell it looked like.”
He rotated his car to get a better look at the objects.
“Next thing I know, bam! I hit the car next to me, went off the road… and ended up in a nest of about 200 paparazzi.”
As it turns out, the paparazzi were waiting before Adam Sandler’s wedding. The silver objects were weather balloons placed to prevent helicopters from flying over the ceremony.
TIED TOGETHER: Tom Petty shared what he finds “unforgivable” about modern society
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