A Trail of the Saucers Investigation

Did John Lennon Imagine His UFO Sighting?

John Lennon and May Pang claimed they watched a UFO for over ten minutes in August 1974. Were they telling the truth? Here’s our take. (Part 3 of 3)

The story began with Parts 1 and 2…

The story continues now with Part 3 of 3…

Looking for Other Witnesses

Finding a corroborative witness should have happened but didn’t. One gets a mostly consistent feeling from the differing accounts that efforts were made to reach out to authorities and that the consensus was that others had reported the same kind of thing at the same time. This, however, is not hard, established fact and can’t be considered that way. Yet there are accounts that seem to indicate there were others.

Photographer and Lennon friend Bob Gruen figures in this quest prominently, given his arrival at the Lennon penthouse to get the roll of film and see that it was developed ASAP. Although it’s unclear if he got involved in the action Friday night or Saturday morning, most accounts say he’s the one who called up the local police precinct.

Why, if it was so important, wouldn’t Lennon make the call himself? “I’m not going to call up the newspaper and say, ‘This is John Lennon and I saw a flying saucer last night.’”

Gruen questioned an officer about whether anyone had reported a UFO or flying saucer. The police response, supposedly, was, “Where? Up on the East Side? You’re the third call on it.”

Gruen’s second call was to the Daily News to see if they’d heard about anything going down on the East Side. Between five and seven other calls was the answer.

Gruen’s next call was to The New York Times. As the story goes, and it might just be apocryphal, the reporter hung up on him.

Lennon boiled it all down to this: “We even called the police — that’s how excited we were — and they told us to keep calm, that others had seen it too.”

Following his UFO bonding, Gruen’s iconic “New York City” photo would debut in the November 1974 issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. In it, John Lennon gets interviewed by Dr. Winston O’Boogie, one of Lennon’s aliases. Lennon made sure to ask himself about his UFO experience in his self-interview, trying to inoculate himself against people who would feel he must have been stoned out of his mind. “Actually,” he swears, “I was very straight.”

“All the time it was there, I never took my eyes off it. My friend came running and bore witness with me. Nobody else was around. Well, it stayed around for a bit, then sailed off.”

An Unreliable Witness

The term “unreliable witness” is a term of art out here in Hollywood to refer to a character in a film or TV series who can’t be relied on to tell the truth because of a character flaw or a compelling reason to lie. There are four reasons people like to dismiss John Lennon as a credible UFO witness:

• He believed in UFOs before he saw one. John Lennon thought about UFOs as a kid. He talked about them as an adult. Skeptics immediately jump on this kind of thing, wagging fingers that this is proof that he must have made it up because he already knew about UFOs!
• He had a substance abuse problem. John Lennon had abused drugs for most of his life. Alcohol, marijuana, heroin, LSD, cocaine and others. Prior to the sighting, in LA, he’d been a liquored-up party boy, but having just returned to New York he was, by most accounts, clean and sober.
• He loved to be part of a public spectacle. Is it possible that Lennon cared so much about UFOs that he invented a story about seeing one as a kind of performance art, something he had learned from his years living with Yoko Ono, a performance artist? Don’t just have an opinion about UFOs, see one yourself. More dramatic.
• He was nude when it happened. The coverage of the case has been minimal, voyeuristic in its celebrity focus, and limited to recycling the same quotes, rather than pulling together the larger picture of what the witnesses said happened. The click-bait articles have space to say that both Lennon and Pang were nude.

Admittedly, Lennon is not the first person you’d want to believe if he’s telling a story that sounds impossible. A UFO-believing drug-taking show-offing nudist is not the the prime candidate to take before a jury. Yet even hardened criminals with serious drug problems are taken before juries and convictions gained on their testimony. Lennon should have his due.

Lennon was a 34-year-old New York artist who saw something he could not explain. It doesn’t make him more or less credible than Tom DeLonge. In both cases, you need to hear the man out.

Past History with UFOs

If you are bothered by the fact that a UFO witness can have had awareness of the UFO issue prior to their encounter, well, then this next will bother you.

Pang said that Lennon had seen other UFOs before this night. He even used to subscribe to a British UFO Magazine, Flying Saucer Review back when he was with The Beatles.

Even more problematic was her claim that Lennon felt he might have been “abducted” by extraterrestrials while still a child living in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton. “He felt that experience was responsible for making him feel different from other people for the rest of his life.”

So, yes, there’s all that. And don’t forget the ten minute encounter on the rooftop. And there’s more.

Uri Geller Says Lennon Was Abducted

Uri Geller, the British magician, claims Lennon told him about another encounter with aliens. This one not buried in childhood trauma.

Geller says when he was in Manhattan in the mid-1970s that Lennon brought up the topic of UFOs. John told him this story.

“One night he was lying in his bed in the Dakota building where he lived in New York and suddenly noticed an extremely bright light pouring in from around the edges of the bedroom door. It was so powerful, he thought it was someone aiming a searchlight through his apartment. He got up, crossed to the door and flung it open. The next thing he could remember was four thin-looking (bug-like) figures. He said that the figures came over to him as he just stood there. Two of them held his hands and the other two gently pushed his legs and he was gently guided into this tunnel of light. He was shown all of his life, just like watching a movie, and he told me it was the most outstandingly beautiful thing he’d ever seen.”

Lennon was adamant: “Something happened… Either I’ve forgotten, blocked it out, or they won’t let me remember. But after a while they weren’t there and I was just lying on the bed, next to Yoko, only I was on the covers.”

John also stated that something had been given to him by these four figures — a not quite egg-shaped ball of metal — very smooth and very heavy, about an inch or so wide. Lennon gave it to Geller, stating “It’s too weird for me. If it’s my ticket to another planet, I don’t want to go there.” (A position held in contrast to the description of him calling out to the cherry-on-top UFO to take him with them.)

Okay, that’s a lot. In addition to thinking he was abducted as a child, he was also visited in his home by creatures who told him his life story, then returned him to the bed he shared with Yoko Ono without her knowing he was gone. The ten minute sighting in New York. Oh, and the golden egg.

Geller does not make clear in his published statement whether he understood Lennon’s story to have taken place before or after his UFO sighting.

In His Own Sight

Here is a decent quality copy of the TV interview John Lennon did in the immediate aftermath of the incident. He certainly looks and sounds like a man who has very specific memories of an event that happened to him, and wants to communicate them to you.

Lennon Speaks

John Lennon never thought his sighting could be explained as a “government test plane” and had no doubt that the craft he saw was from another world.

Lennon’s thinking was always expansive so, of course, he did offer his opinion about Disclosure, the time when the world openly acknowledges the reality of unidentified aerial phenomena. He believed it would be a game-changer that would usher in revolution.

Back to the sighting… Pang has always maintained that the experience they shared on the roof changed Lennon. “He became even more fanatical, bringing up the subject all the time. John was always fascinated with the unusual,” explained Pang. “He was always caught up in his fate, his destiny.”

If he’d lived, John Lennon would now be 81-years-old. He would probably see Disclosure as a defining issue and would be a keen observer of everything from the TTSA to the SSCI. He probably would have called Harry Reid up in the middle of the night to give him an earful for pulling back on his New York Times quote.

Regardless of what he saw or didn’t see, it’s a damn shame that John Lennon is not alive to see our world finally change.

Truth or Dare?

However you slice this, John Lennon and May Pang both testified consistently throughout their lives (Pang still actively maintains the story’s truth) about the unusual look of the object with the bulb-like running lights and the red cherry-on-top light. We know that its appearance was bizarre.

They testified that this object was huge and close. They saw a shimmer effect at the bottom of it, like heat waves in the summer.

One more thing.

It was completely silent.

Oh, another thing. It tipped sideways during the encounter.

For the sake of argument, even if you are skeptical, imagine what this would have felt like if it had happened to you. Then to watch such a creation work its way over the East River toward Brooklyn.

Such an event would be an astonishing, life-changing moment in the lives of anyone who experienced it. Many of us would want to tell people about it, but would keep it to ourselves for fear of ridicule. John Lennon was beyond that. He was about bearing witness.

Witness about what exactly? “It just reaffirmed our beliefs that there were other beings out there,” said Pang in an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America.

It is terribly difficult not to consider his life-long interest about UFOs and hold it against the veracity of his story. Abduction as a child, abduction from the bed he slept in with Yoko Ono, other sightings, the 52nd Street event. Either John Lennon had a continuing thing about claiming alien contact that didn’t happen, or, if it was happening that much, then his words on the subject might be important.

It does feel astonishing that there weren’t thousands of New Yorkers snapping photos and calling local police during this ten-minutes long in-your-face event. The omission is another uncomfortable fact.

So we are left to consider that something of this magnitude happened in New York City and extremely few people saw it or talked about it. Yet the number of people who could corroborate Lennon and Pang’s account is not zero. There appear to be stories told at the time about how other people who saw something similar had called it in to the police or the newspapers. Sadly, probably based on the journalistic taboos of the time, no newspaper felt it was important enough to cover, so those witnesses were never put on the record.

Where are these witnesses today? Most of them, of course, are deceased. Yet, like World War II veterans, some are likely still with us. Even now, those who saw this, should come forward. If police departments took calls from freaked out citizens, those logs appear to have never been checked. Local New York media with good access should get as many people on the record as is possible.

Otherwise, we are left with a difficult and unsolvable question.

How is it possible that a massive, slow-moving object, lit up like a child’s toy could linger on its journey over the East River and be largely unseen in a city of millions of people?

My heart wants to take John Lennon at his word. My gut tells me that it’s hard to rule out that what happened to him was more mind games than alien encounters.

If the phenomenon is truly paranormal more than extraterrestrial, the case presented by John Lennon and May Pang may be an important one to study. That would mean that they were telling the truth as they saw it, but that something besides physical reality is in play. Maybe religious visions are shared hallucinations. Maybe our universe really is stranger than we can imagine. Or, could it be that the phenomenon does not reveal itself to all because it is cloaking itself or because it is not a physical object, but something else?

That, by itself, would also be a mind-bending reality, if true.

On the issue of whether Lennon and Pang conspired to make up a story as a piece of performance art, we have to rule strongly in favor of their truthfulness. To listen to Lennon and Pang in their interviews is to feel strongly they believe what they are saying and are trying to get the details right for the record. This was no bed-in over at the Amsterdam Hilton.

This means, at the end of the day, we have to believe that they saw something that they interpreted as extraordinary. Was it a nuts-and-bolts flying saucer from outer space? It could possibly be related to an Intelligence-sponsored psychological test connected to Lennon’s immigration case. Or a manifestation of a spirit or a technology from an even more exotic source?

Within years, Disclosure will be underway in a significant and real way with the declassification of vast numbers of previously “lost” documents about the UFO phenomenon. When that process is engaged, we may find a few very enlightening memos about this event in New York City in 1974.

At the time, few really believed John Lennon when he complained he was being harassed by the Nixon Administration and the FBI. He was that angry political Beatle, after all. Later, as the Freedom of Information Act pried documents loose from the archives, it turns out that Lennon was telling the truth from the start.

It could happen again, this time with UFOs. Lennon made claims about his connections to the phenomenon. The Nixon Administration had him under surveillance. Did they see or learn anything and write a memo about it?

Gimme Some Truth.

Trail of the Saucers, published by Bryce Zabel and Stellar Productions, focuses on UFO/UAP news, history, culture, and analysis. This is the third and final installment of our Trail of the Saucers investigation into the 1974 John Lennon UFO sighting. You can read the other parts here —

Bryce is also a life-long Beatles fan and has written about Lennon and his bandmates many times, including one 2018 award-winning novel (Once There Was a Way, winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History) and multiple articles. They include —