The ongoing feud between the former Van Halen vocalists David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar took a bizarre twist this week, with Roth claiming on his podcast that Hagar was “sex probed” by aliens—a clear dig at Hagar’s 2011 claim that he was abducted by aliens as a kid.
Roth made the strange allegation Thursday, in a podcast episode he titled “The Ballad of Popsicle Sam.” In it, Roth offered a rambling explanation for why Hagar acts the way he does—like labeling Roth’s singing as “embarrassing” in an interview last year—and took subtle shots at him.
“According to Sam, he was abducted by aliens,” Roth starts. “So that begins his story arc.”
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Roth went on to concoct an elaborate story of how Hagar, who replaced him in Van Halen in 1985 and for other brief periods, was allegedly sex probed by an extraterrestrial being when he was 15 after being abducted from a park.
Roth, 69, insisted that he needed to tell this unsubstantiated story—or, “solicit this sordid subject,” as he put it—to “explain Sam Hagar’s conduct.”
“For the last 10 summers, I haven’t said a single syllable about (Hagar),” said Roth, trying to prove that he didn’t start this latest beef.
“I think we’ve arrived at both the technical and the medical answer that may explain some of Sammy Hagar’s conduct and his constant spew of diarrhea vitriol in our direction,” he added. “Sammy Hagar was abducted by aliens and he was sex probed. Does it require apparatus? Is it a beam? We don’t know. We may never know.”
Roth finished: “But what I do know with absolute accuracy is that if you take a half of a popsicle and you jam it into a cassette tape player, no matter how carefully you extract it, that tape player will never play the same again, no matter how carefully you try and fix those delicate little parts. And it’ll get worse and it’ll seem like the singer that you used to [be] will stop making sense whatsoever. A lot like Sam.”
The rant was part of a podcast episode that bounced all over the place, with Roth also revealing that he spends almost $100,000 on marijuana, which gets him enough pot to smoke his “body weight.”
Hagar, who like Roth has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has not made a public statement about Roth’s podcast claims. He has been quick to talk down on him, previously, however, with some of their latest beef stemming from an interview he gave on Steve-O’s Wild Ride! podcast last year.
In that interview, Hagar grilled Roth for not having a major career outside of performing with Van Halen and issued a slew of personal insults, which included him calling Roth a “chest-beating motherfucker” who is “not a fun guy” and doesn’t “play well with others.”
The public beef has gone beyond just insults, however. It also included Hagar inviting Roth to travel with Van Halen (minus Eddie Van Halen, who died in 2020) on the band’s upcoming Best of All Worlds tour—an invitation that was reportedly revoked by Hagar after Roth accepted.
Hagar posted to Instagram that Roth could come to some shows and sing “if he can remember the words,” but not join the tour outright, saying, “I know better than to have him on tour again.”
