Jim Sullivan was a Nebraska-born guitarist raised in San Diego who spent the late 1960s on the fringes of the Hollywood music scene. He played the Malibu club circuit, counted actors among his friends and turned up as an extra in the commune scene of Easy Rider. In 1969 a friend, the actor Al Dobbs, started a small label called Monnie specifically to release his debut album, U.F.O., recorded with Wrecking Crew session players including the drummer Earl Palmer and the keyboard player Don Randi. It sold almost nothing. A second album on Playboy Records in 1972 fared no better, and by 1975 his career and his marriage to Barbara Sullivan were both under strain.
What happened
The plan was for Sullivan to try his luck as a songwriter and session man in Nashville and send for his wife and children once he was settled. On March 4, 1975 he set out from Los Angeles alone in his Volkswagen Beetle, by one account with about $120 in his pocket. Some fifteen hours later, in the early morning of March 5, officers pulled him over outside Santa Rosa, a Route 66 town in eastern New Mexico, because the car was weaving. He was taken in for a sobriety test, passed it, and was apparently judged to be exhausted rather than drunk. He checked into the La Mesa Motel.
He did not stay there. The bed was later found unslept in, with the room key left inside. Sullivan is said to have bought a bottle of vodka in town and driven off. His Beetle was next seen on remote ranch land south of Santa Rosa, toward the village of Puerto de Luna, where the family who owned the property reportedly found him and asked what he was doing there. The following day the car was found abandoned roughly 26 miles from the motel, locked, with a dead engine. Inside were his wallet, his Guild twelve-string guitar, an appointment book, clothes, tapes and a box of copies of his Playboy album. Sullivan himself was gone.
The investigation
According to research gathered later by Light in the Attic Records, search parties were organized repeatedly for more than two years by the New Mexico State Police, the Santa Rosa police and volunteer groups. A few weeks after the disappearance a body was discovered in the desert, and the local paper wondered whether it was the missing singer; it was identified as someone else. In a note dated March 28, 1975, Barbara Sullivan listed what the family had learned: he was in no nearby hospital, the car had broken down, there were no signs of a struggle, and people in Santa Rosa believed he had hitched a ride and simply vanished. No later evidence has improved on that summary.
The explanations
The ordinary possibilities are bleak and unprovable. A tired man with a stalled car and a bottle of vodka could have walked into empty country and died of exposure, his remains never found. He could have caught a ride and chosen to start again under another name, although leaving behind the guitar he relied on for money makes that hard to believe, as one of his friends pointed out. Rumor has also accused the ranch family of having mob connections and the officers who stopped him of doing him harm. None of these claims has been supported with evidence, and no one has ever been charged.
The unearthly version owes everything to timing. The album was obscure in 1975; it found an audience only decades later, when a record collector spotted its cover online and Light in the Attic reissued it in 2010. Its title, its desert imagery and its themes of leaving the world behind made the story irresistible to listeners, and on late-night radio his old friend Al Dobbs admitted that he and the family liked to imagine Jim meeting visitors from another world. Nobody has reported any unusual lights or sightings in Guadalupe County at the time, and no investigator has treated the idea as anything but a fond fancy.
Where it stands
The case remains open in the only sense that matters: no body, no witness and no record has ever accounted for Sullivan after that day in March 1975. Barbara Sullivan died in 2016. His reputation, meanwhile, has grown far beyond anything he enjoyed in life, helped by a further release of unheard demos in 2019. The disappearance is documented; everything that happened after the car stopped is unknown.