Jim Sullivan

In 1969, a young singer-songwriter from Southern California released an album called U.F.O.

The cover showed him leaning against a wall in a hotel, with a strange expression on his face. The songs were haunting and dreamy, a blend of folk, rock and country, with lyrics about deserts, highways, strange lights and leaving everything behind. One song was about a man who walks into the desert and disappears. Another seemed to be about being taken away by something from the sky.

The album barely sold. Hardly anyone heard it.

Six years later, the singer drove into the New Mexico desert, checked into a motel, and vanished. His car was found abandoned on a ranch, with his guitar, his money and his clothes still inside.

His name was Jim Sullivan. And to this day, no one knows what happened to him.

The Songwriter

Jim Sullivan was born in 1940 and grew up in San Diego. He was a tall, handsome, easygoing man with a deep, warm voice and a talent for songwriting. In the 1960s, he moved to Los Angeles and became a fixture of the music scene in Malibu, playing in bars and clubs, where his performances drew a devoted local following. Some of his friends were actors and musicians who would become famous. He had a small part in the film Easy Rider.

His friends believed in him. A group of them paid to produce his first album, U.F.O., released in 1969 on a tiny label. It got a little radio play, but it didn’t take off. A second album, released a few years later on a bigger label, didn’t sell either.

By the mid-1970s, Jim was in his mid-thirties, married, with a young son, and struggling. He had been drinking heavily. His music career hadn’t taken off. He decided that he needed to go to Nashville, the center of the country music industry, to try to make it there. He planned to stay with his wife’s sister in Nashville while he found work, and his wife and son would join him later.

The Drive

In early March 1975, Jim packed his Volkswagen Beetle with his guitar, his clothes, copies of his records, and a little money, and set off alone, driving east on the old highways across the desert.

On March 4, near the town of Santa Rosa in eastern New Mexico, a state police officer pulled him over for weaving on the road. According to the officer, Jim wasn’t drunk — he told the officer he was tired. The officer let him go, advising him to get some rest.

Jim checked into the La Mesa Motel in Santa Rosa. According to motel staff, he didn’t sleep in the bed. He seemed to have left the room soon after checking in.

The Ranch

The next day, Jim’s Volkswagen was found at a ranch about twenty-six miles outside town, parked in a remote spot.

Inside were his guitar, his clothes, his money, his wallet, and boxes of his own records.

Jim was gone.

According to some accounts, people on the ranch saw Jim near the car and spoke with him, and he was said to have walked off on foot into the desert. Searchers combed the area. They found no sign of him.

He was never seen again.

The Theories

The disappearance of Jim Sullivan has inspired many theories over the years.

Some believe he wandered into the desert, perhaps drunk or confused or despairing, and died of exposure, and that his remains were never found in the vast, empty landscape of eastern New Mexico.

Some believe he met with foul play — that someone, perhaps someone he met along the way, killed him. The land around Santa Rosa in 1975 was isolated and lawless in places. There were rumors that he had been involved in some trouble with local people.

And because of his album, some people have suggested a much stranger explanation. The songs on U.F.O., recorded six years before he disappeared, are full of images that seem eerily prophetic: deserts, highways, disappearing, being taken away by lights in the sky. To some listeners, it’s as if he wrote the story of his own disappearance before it happened. Some have even jokingly suggested that he was abducted by aliens.

His family doesn’t find that funny. They believe something terrible happened to him in New Mexico, and they want to know what.

Rediscovered

For decades, Jim Sullivan was forgotten by almost everyone except his family and friends. His records were rare.

Then, in the 2000s, a copy of U.F.O. found its way to a small record label in Seattle that specializes in reissuing lost albums. The label tracked down Jim’s family, and in 2010 it reissued the album. Critics loved it. A new generation of listeners discovered his music, and with it, the strange story of his disappearance.

There were articles, podcasts and documentaries. People began to call him a lost legend. Like Connie Converse, another songwriter in this book, he found an audience decades too late.

The Highway

I find it impossible to listen to U.F.O. without thinking about that desert in New Mexico. About a man in a Volkswagen, tired, alone, driving east toward a dream that kept slipping away. About the guitar left on the seat of an abandoned car.

His songs are about leaving, about roads that disappear into the horizon, about not coming back. Maybe that’s just what songs are about. Or maybe he knew something the rest of us didn’t.