Remembering the Spaceman of Ocean Beach – Clint Cary — XiB/2

OB Spaceman at OB Street Fair, 1992. (Marge Grant)

By Eric DuVall / Pt Loma – OB Monthly / Nov. 15, 2023

One thing we learned in this space last month is that “they are most definitely out there.” The UAPs, that is (unidentified aerial phenomena) … the NHI (non-human intelligence).

Nothing new, of course. Clint Cary was saying the same thing 60 years ago — repeatedly and frequently. Clint had firsthand information. He hadn’t just seen a UFO, he’d been to Rillispore twice. In 1965, every kid on the beach in O.B. knew that. Clint loved to tell that story, and many others. These weren’t generic stories about little green men, by the way. No creepy gray space aliens either.

The Rillisporians were tall and beautiful. They came in peace. Theirs was a message of love and unity. Naturally they worried about the foibles and follies of the people of Earth.

Obviously, if you wanted to go with them when they came back, you needed a space number. Everybody knew that, too. And the only guy giving out space numbers was Clint Cary. Even if you didn’t care about going to Rillispore and just wanted to be cool, you still needed a space number.

As a 10-year-old, I certainly wasn’t trying to be cool, and I don’t know if I really believed the story about Rillispore. I guess I figured it could have happened, but either way, I would have been beyond stoked to have had a space number. One summer, my buddy’s cute teenybopper sister did get a space number, and we were both tremendously impressed. “Lucky duck!” we said.

This might have been simply the perception of a fourth-grader, but “Spaceman,” as the kids called him, seemed to prefer older girls in bikinis to sandy little boys. Go figure. It was so unfair.

I never did get a space number, and I can’t say I really knew Spaceman, but I remember him vividly. San Diego Union columnist Frank Rhoades liked to fill a few inches with Spaceman stories occasionally, and in August 1966 he reported “an Ocean Beach housewife” telling him that Spaceman was “like a pied piper. The kids on the beach just adored him. He told them stories about his years in outer space.”

When I read that recently, I thought to myself, “Ah-ha! My memory remains at least partially intact.” That is exactly how I remembered it. The ‘60s were a very different time. This was in the pre-hippie era when there may have been a greater tolerance for eccentric characters. I never heard it suggested that Clint was a creep. An occasional if well-meaning wino perhaps, and he could certainly create trouble for himself.

In a ‘66 instance that Rhoades described, Clint was spending a little downtime in the county lockup on a burglary beef. Probably a misunderstanding, but Clint didn’t have the grand to post bail.

“Thousands of little children will suffer while I’m in here,” he reportedly told Judge Robert O’Connor.

Maybe dozens anyway. You might not be surprised to learn that Spaceman was known to embellish.

I do not remember Spaceman when I was a teenager. He was around, but not on my radar. I was out of college in 1977 when Bob Oaks turned up at our yard sale on Del Mar Avenue one Saturday. I never parted ways with any records on purpose, particularly jazz records, so I don’t know how the topic came up, but Bob told me that if I dug the jazz, I ought to show up at his place down by the pier on Sunday evening.

Bob was a well-known local reedman and famously hosted a recurring Sunday jam session. I did make it down to Bob’s little cottage on the cliff the next day and that’s when I saw Spaceman again. An old-timer was playing trombone and the guys were calling him “Spacey.” I didn’t put it together right away; it had been quite awhile. I hadn’t even known Clint was a musician. Of course, when I was a kid, I didn’t know he was a painter either.

Greg Longway knew. That would be “Commander” Greg to you.

“My friends all thought Clint was just a weird old man,” Greg told me. “But I always knew he was an artist.”

Greg is a couple of years my junior and remembers meeting Spaceman when he was about 10 — he says 1967. They were friends for the next 26 years — the rest of Clint’s life.

Greg refers to himself as Spaceman’s agent and occasionally as “the son of Spaceman.” Clint conferred on Greg the title of commander. Impressive, no? You’d think a guy like that would have a better than average space number, wouldn’t you? How’s XiB/23 grab you? Trust me, that’s a dandy. Clint himself was XiB/2. XiB/1, of course, was reserved for the Creator.

Greg collects Spaceman’s artwork, and if you have a Spacey original, he’d love to chat with you.

Clint was born in Maine and grew up in South Pasadena. He took to tooting the trombone in high school and found he had a knack for it. Following his graduation, Clint played with several traveling dance bands, sometimes known as Chico Cary.

(“Rillispore’s Dragon Plant” by Clint Cary, 1973, is displayed at Kilowatt Taproom in Ocean Beach. Greg Longway collection. Jagged edge in middle of painting is due to need to copy image in 2 parts.)

One morning in 1929 in his hotel room about daybreak following an after-hours jam session at a Mexico City chop suey joint, Clint had a life-changing, metaphysical experience.

He recalled that “all these beautiful, fantastic, etheric colors came into the room in every direction. They came in through the keyhole, through the cracks in the door and wall, through the pipes where the heat came in, coming in the window, going out the window and swirling around. These were colors that were out of this world, that I had never seen before. Colors that were not in our color spectrum!”

That wasn’t all. Clint had the overwhelming feeling that, more than the colors, something, or somebody — what he referred to as a “profound presence” — had come to visit him in that hotel room. The colors seemed to be talking to him, but not audibly. Thought forms and ideas were being transmitted directly into his head and he was suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling of falling in love for the first time. Clint couldn’t see or hear anybody, but he had been engulfed by a euphoric spiritual high.

What do you think? Craziest thing you ever heard? Just sit tight then, because it gets wilder. And no, I am not making this stuff up. This part of the story can be found in a slender volume titled “Spaceman (Vol. 1): The Life Story of One of the World’s Great Painters,” as told to Linda Wilson, 1988.

This is the short version. Clint was in the middle of what might now be referred to as a Type 2 encounter. The profound presence seemed to coalesce into a group of beings — at least that was his impression — and their communication, still via telepathic thoughts, became more specific, more like words he could understand.

Clint was informed that his visitors were from a fifth-dimensional world known as Rillispore and they had some plans for the young musician.

Clint Cary tacks up a flier for a “giant rally” in 1979 in Ocean Beach. (Stevie Wonder never showed up.) (Photo by Steve Rowell; flier provided by Greg Longway)

“They hadn’t forced me to do anything,” he said, “but they had caused things to happen that made me come to Mexico City. It was a certain place they wanted me to be, at the time they wanted me to be there, and they had certain things they wanted me to do.”

They wanted Clint to sell his trombone, take a train out to the coastal town of Colima near Manzanillo and start painting — just a slight career course correction. Clint was enjoying his fledgling career as a professional musician and was initially reluctant to consider selling his horn. However, he recalled that he felt “such an overwhelming love” for his new friends that his overriding intention became to do as they wished.

The Rillisporians told Clint that he wouldn’t need his trombone anymore anyway. “We’re going to make a great painter out of you,” he remembers being told. “You have a natural ability to become one. You’ll probably have to teach yourself how to paint, but that’s all right, because some of the greatest painters in the world were self-taught.”

All this happened in just a few minutes. Clint did as he had been directed. Over the next 18 months, benefiting from the patronage of the mysterious Señor Alvarez in Colima — possibly another contactee — Clint became a painter.

Here we will advance the narrative a cool quarter of a century. Living in Hollywood in 1955, Clint considered himself a primitive abstractionist. His work was well-regarded. His art was displayed in quite a few galleries, and he had several exhibitions under his belt.

Had he been the first president of the Hollywood Association of Artists? Maybe. He had made his living as a restaurateur for a number of years, and he was known to paint portraits on commission. Do any of those portraits remain? None has turned up.

Upon moving to a studio in South Pasadena in 1957, Clint began picking up some good vibrations. He recalled having a series of “very strange experiences, mostly in the form of vibrations that seemingly penetrated to the depths of my body, and a strange awareness of some intangible something that I couldn’t quite put my fingers on.”

Clint began to paint in a completely different style. Through a phenomenon he later termed meta telepathy, he seemed to be acting as the physical conduit for someone else. One evening, Clint hopped in his car with the notion of dropping in on a friend who had a cabin in the desert outside Joshua Tree. She wasn’t home.

What transpired next was the first of Clint’s physical encounters with highly evolved representatives of the planet Rillispore. A cup of coffee, a blinding flash of light and Clint found that he was not alone in the desert. He was asked if he’d like to take a ride, so he went.

It was an enormous craft — a mile long, 10 levels and beautiful to behold. Clint wasn’t knocked out, per se, but his consciousness was suspended while his metaphysical vibration was altered and he was acclimated to the speedy Rillisporian mode of travel.

How quickly did they travel? Millions of miles per second. His hosts treated Clint with love and kindness and communicated with him telepathically. He brought up the speed of light thing and was astounded to learn that to the Rillisporians, light doesn’t travel at all — it only seems to travel to those of us stuck here in the third dimension. To them, light is evolved by the principal of reflection and is the symbol of understanding.

So where is Rillispore, you might be wondering. Clint was told it is in the neighborhood of the Rigel star system — a four-star cluster that appears to us as the brightest star in the constellation Orion. Rigel is Orion’s left foot or left knee, depending on how you draw the great hunter, or giant, as he is referred to in some cultures. By our reckoning, Rigel is some 860 light-years from our sun, and Rillispore is right around there, but in the fifth dimension.

On the ride to Rillispore, Clint found out that his impromptu jaunt out to Joshua Tree in the middle of the night had been no mere whim. He also learned that his recent unusual series of paintings had been the work of Rillisporian artist Azora, for whom Clint had been a channel.

While I’d like to tell you that a few of what is known as the Azora series have been preserved somewhere, such is sadly not the case.

Clint claimed to have been on Rillispore for maybe five days total over two visits. It was a gigantic, fantastically beautiful world many times larger than our sun. The color spectrum there is twice what we can perceive in our dimension. Everything is huge on Rillispore — massive plants and flowers, gigantic and intelligent animals and birds, some of whom also communicated with Clint telepathically.

He experienced no foul odors or harsh noises, no crime or malfeasance, no strife, no government, no war, no dog poop on the lawn. It was thoroughly lovely.

Clint’s guide was a big guy, maybe 9 feet tall, known as Baldisore. Though Baldisore wasn’t strictly a guy as we think of it, because Rillisporians are a homogeneous race into which male and female do not factor. They were rather darkly complected, with shimmering silvery hair.

But it was the fantastic array of colors that really moved the needle for Clint.

“Viejas 1967,” on a wall at Kilowatt Taproom in Ocean Beach, is one of many paintings Clint Cary created while incarcerated at the Viejas Detention Center. (Greg Longway collection)

Returning to Earth, Clint began to paint what he had experienced on Rillispore. He tried to paint that which he could not describe verbally.

“Many paintings that I have executed since my physical contacts were also done by color telepathy,” Clint recounted. “The instructions being transmitted from Rillispore enabled me to execute these paintings almost automatically.”

Clint began to add fluorescent paint to his detailed and beautiful fantasies. The visual impact and depth that fluorescent colors add to an image are really only visible and appreciated under black light. Clint never painted using a black light.

Clint arrived in Ocean Beach in 1963. He was befriended by Bob Oaks and continued to paint. He began telling people about his experiences. He found a ready audience and became a minor local celebrity. Clint appeared on the Bob Dale and Regis Philbin shows and was interviewed several times by Larry Himmel.

Clint’s behavior became more erratic as he grew older, and though he sustained long productive periods of sobriety, the bottle was not his friend. He would wear out his welcome and find himself on the street.

“If you saw what I saw on Rillispore and then came back to this dreary world, you would take a drink, too,” he was known to remark.

Blind in his later years due to misadventure, Clint passed away just 30 years ago, in October 1993. He led quite a life.

An excellent example of one of Spacy’s blacklight paintings.

An excellent selection of Clint’s original artwork remains on display in the black-light lounge of the Kilowatt Taproom on Cable Street in Ocean Beach. It is a rotating exhibit on loan from the collection of Greg Longway.

If you drop in, be sure to pick up a pair of 3D shades from a little basket there. Those corny shades add six to 12 inches in depth to some of those fantastic paintings. I can’t imagine Clint would have anticipated that, would he?

If you have an original Clint Cary, you are encouraged to contact Greg at clintcarycosmicart@gmail.com.

Did Clint really paint a portrait of Errol Flynn that the actor hated? Possibly. Had he taken the better part of a year to paint an elaborate mural in a dining room at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas? Probably not. Did Clint gig and carouse with clarinet great Pee Wee Russell? He could have. Had the pair played with Red Nichols? Pee Wee certainly had. Had Clint learned a few riffs firsthand from bandleader and trombone monster Jack Teagarden? I’d sure like to think so.

While many of Clint’s tales bordered on the outlandish, some of his conclusions were inarguably profound.

“We here on Earth will never travel beyond the limits of our own solar system,” Clint opined in his manuscript “The Glorious Perception,” which is included in Greg’s book “The Cosmic Art of Clint Cary.”

“The only possible way that we can be aware of a life experience in dimensions higher than our own will be through the metaphysical process of spiritual evolution and reincarnation,” Clint wrote. “It is my opinion that the absolute in His infinite wisdom planned it this way. We here on Earth must first of all improve our moral standards before we can hope to experience and enjoy the most wonderful experiences planned for us by our maker.”

The above is reposted with the author’s permission.

Eric DuVall is president of the Ocean Beach Historical Society. Board members Pat James and Kitty McDaniel contributed to this article. Membership in OBHS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is $25 annually. Visit obhistory.org.

More on OB Spaceman

Ten years ago, the OB Playhouse performed a play based on his life.

The Rag posted 3 other rememberances of Spacy’s life:

• One by Thomas Arnold at the San Diego Reader back in December 23, 1993.
• Another by local Warren Patch in 2010.
• Citizen Cane’s memories of him from 2011.
• Also a bar opened up a year ago, 2022, in Oceanside inspired by Spacy.