What happened to musician Jim Sullivan near Santa Rosa nearly 45 years ago?

It sounds like something from an enigmatic novel — a praised but obscure singer-songwriter who sang about UFOs vanishes without a trace near the Route 66 town of Santa Rosa, New Mexico, leading to speculation he was picked up by one of those flying saucers he mentioned.

Decades after his disappearance, a record company reissues his albums, and he becomes a cult favorite.

But the story isn’t fiction. It’s real. It’s about music artist Jim Sullivan, whose car and belongings were found south of Santa Rosa in 1975.

Sullivan and his mysterious disappearance recently were featured in the New York Times. The report begins with these two paragraphs:

Jim Sullivan was the kind of California character who seemed to have stepped straight out of a Pynchon or DeLillo novel — a 6-foot-2 singer and songwriter known as Sully with a magnetic personality and a handlebar mustache. His dramatic psych-folk songs were spacious, cinematic and edged with mystic, lonesome brooding. His social circle included actors and Hollywood hangers-on, and he’d had brushes with fame, including an uncredited part in “Easy Rider” with his friend Dennis Hopper.
On his 1969 debut album, “U.F.O.,” he sang of beckoning highways, of aliens, of an Arizona ghost town, of a man who looked “so natural” in death it was clearly his time to go. Six years later, the 35-year-old Sullivan disappeared in Santa Rosa, N.M. On the front seat of his recovered gray VW bug were his ID, his beloved 12-string Guild guitar, and a box of his two albums, “U.F.O.” and the 1972 LP “Jim Sullivan.”

The “U.F.O.” album can be heard in its entirety on YouTube below. Just based on the music, Sullivan was an interesting cat:

However unique they were, Sullivan’s albums didn’t sell. After a few years in Los Angeles, Sullivan decided he’d try his luck as a songwriter in Nashville. He took off in his VW Bug and told his wife he’d send for her later after he got to Music City.

On March 5, 1975, Barbara Sullivan got a call from Jim, telling her he was all right. She’d had no reason to think otherwise — he’d only left the day before. The conversation continued cryptically. When she pressed for details, he responded, “You wouldn’t believe if I told you,” she wrote. “I said, ‘Jim, what’s the matter, is anything wrong?’ And he said, ‘Forget it. Just forget I said anything. I’ll call you from Nashville.’”
After days went by with no check-in, Sullivan’s family began calling hospitals and the police. An officer told Barbara’s sister that Sullivan wasn’t in jail, “but if you ask me, that’s where he belongs.” They learned that after 15 hours on the road, Sullivan had been pulled over on suspicion of driving under the influence. He passed a sobriety test and checked into the La Mesa Motel in Santa Rosa. Police told Barbara that the bed had never been slept in. On March 8, Sullivan’s car was towed away from rough, mesa-studded country about 24 miles south of town. The 12-string in the front seat was a sign something was very amiss.
“When I heard that, I knew he wasn’t coming back,” Dobbs said. “No matter what, Jim would never have left his guitar.”

No trace of Sullivan ever was found. The remains of a body were found later near Santa Rosa, but they weren’t Sullivan’s. The musician’s wife, who died in 2016, speculated he was abducted by the extraterrestrial aliens he’d written about in his songs.

Light In The Attic Records, which reissued Sullivan’s albums many years later, produced this short documentary about his life:

People who knew Sullivan insist he wasn’t suicidal. Some speculate he was murdered, maybe in some sort of drug deal gone bad. Others think he simply wandered off into the remote New Mexico desert during a fugue state and died there.

The latter scenario isn’t pleasant to think about, but the desert contains enough scavenger animals such as coyotes and buzzards that little trace of his remains would be easily found.

People occasionally ask for Sullivan’s old room at the La Mesa Motel along Route 66 in Santa Rosa, but it’s now used only for storage.

The only things that survive of Sullivan are a son and his music.

(Screen-capture image of musician Jim Sullivan from A Light in the Attic Records video; an image of La Mesa Motel in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, by PunkToad via Flickr)