A Trail of the Saucers Investigation

Like a UFO You Came to Me

On a hot August night in 1974, John Lennon and May Pang had a close encounter with a UFO in New York City, and he talked about it until his final days. (Part 2 of 3)

The story continues now with Part 2 of 3…

Hot August Night

Lennon’s 52nd Street apartment had a view. Only a few feet off the living room, through a window, you could be on the building’s roof which became a deck, and Lennon felt it was private the way he liked it. Plus, the view was stellar from inside and out.

May Pang decided around 8:30 p.m. that she’d get a shower and order up a pizza delivery for later. John was okay with that because he said he had to review ideas being pitched for his new album’s cover. In the end, he used a painting he’d done as eleven year old.

John Lennon insisted throughout his life that he was “very straight” at the time he saw a UFO. Lennon had experimented with most drugs and abused a few. Not, however, on August 23rd, 1974, according to John. When his biographer Ray Coleman asked him if he’d been smoking or drinking, he replied, “No, God’s honest truth. I only do that at weekends or when I see Harry Nilsson.”

For her part, May Pang was considered the “stable one” among their mutual friends. She didn’t drink or take drugs. Her worst vice was going through countless bottles of Coca Cola every day.

Lennon would describe what happened next numerous times over the years to friends, TV crews, radio DJs. The story beats always laid out the same way.

He was lying naked on his bed when he got the urge to go to the window. Outside, he saw, no more than 100 yards (or feet, in a different telling) away, a craft of some kind with ordinary looking electric light bulbs flashing on and off on the bottom and one non-blinking red light on the top.

He said the UFO was first seen just south of the building. It was brightly lit, hovering silently over an adjacent building so close he would say he could have hit it with a brick. Pang described it as the size of a Lear jet.

As John Lennon would later describe, “I wasn’t surprised to see the UFO really, as it looked just like the spaceships we’ve all seen on the cinema growing up, but then I realized this thing was real and so close, that I could almost touch it.” Again, for context, no one would really see these light-show type UFOs on a theatrical screen for three more years with the release then of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

As May was drying off from her shower, she heard John yell from the outside roof, “May, come here right now!” When she didn’t come immediately, she heard, “Now!” With no time to dress herself, she ran to the observation deck, naked, only to find Lennon, also completely nude. She wasn’t surprised. He had been clothing optional as long as she knew him.

Ordinarily, this might be a funny moment, except that Lennon was pointing wildly at the southeastern sky. They watched together as the object flew below the tops of the higher buildings. He made clear in interviews that if somebody had been on a higher building, they would have looked down on it.

“There’s a whole list of rational things I went through. A helicopter, not a helicopter, balloon, not a balloon, it’s too close to the roof and it’s maneuvering!.. It’s gotta be from lights on billboards, but we don’t have any billboards around here…”

Pang provided other details over the years that are striking, particularly ufologically. She saw it going towards Brooklyn and wanted to call friends who lived there and tell them to look for it. There’s an oddly specific reference to seeing it hover over a building on 23rd Street, a long ways from their penthouse.

“We often had helicopters flying above us, but this was as silent as the night, seventeen stories up above street level.”

At the beginning, they felt that it was “two to three stories above our heads.” It took a long time coming down. Toward the end of the craft’s journey up the East River, she described it as slowly climbing, and then speeding straight up and — poof — gone.

Additionally, Pang has told a detail that gives her overall story more credibility because of its extreme strangeness, and the fact that it is unusual.

“It went sideways at one point. I thought, ‘It’s sideways!’”

This sideways description is a common trait ascribed to UFO behavior. It is not, however, the first thing a trickster imagines saying about a sighting they are making up.

Finally, she thought to herself that Reggie Jackson, the great baseball hitter of the time, “If he can hit a home run, then he could hit this thing.”

When they got a better look, she described the bottom as emitting the blurry kind of heat waves that come off a car engine on a hot day. There was a “shimmer” underneath the thing.

May Pang said that the craft’s lighting package blew them away, as it would change configuration every rotation.

The silence of the craft caught them off guard. The object made no sound. None.

The Lennon/Pang UFO: An Interpretation

For this article, we commissioned graphic design artist Harrington V Skorupka to show us his interpretation as gleaned from the description of the witnesses. Here he shares the steps on the way to a final product.

The Departure Lounge

“It was about the size of a Lear jet and it was so close that if we had something to throw at it, we probably would have hit it quite easily.”

Lennon has described the encounter as going on five or ten minutes. Pang would eventually settle on describing the length of time as ten to fifteen minutes. Settle on ten.

That is an extraordinary amount of quality viewing time. They are watching an unidentified flying object that features white lights around the rim of the circular craft that has a red light at the top. It appears to have been a cone shaped, featuring a flat bottom which rises to a pointed top. It can maneuver and hover. It’s completely silent. And they get to watch it for ten close-up, uninterrupted minutes.

They witnessed this bizarre flying craft quietly make a pass by of the United Nations building. Lennon said it slowly veered left, crossed over the East River, then over Brooklyn.

“The lighting on the thing left us awe-struck,” May Pang has said. “As it would change its configuration with every rotation.”

The actual physical structure of the craft was allegedly visible for the entire time they watched it go. She could see the object backlit by the sun’s dying rays.

Its image blended in with the lights of the heavy commercial air traffic found over southern Long Island. Finally, up, and gone.

Where were all the other people of New York City in that time period? In the building that Lennon and Pang resided in, not one apartment she could see was lit up with people home. When asked about it later, Pang said, “We’re talking summer, Friday night. Everybody’s out at the Hampton’s.”

That would be the movie ending way to finish the story, a UFO fading into the sunset while the neighbors have gone to their beach houses. Did we mention this is a story about John Lennon?

Wait for Me

As it started to head away from them, John Lennon called for the UFO to come back and take him away to wherever it was going. Lennon explained to his biographer Ray Coleman,“They all think I’m potty, but it’s true…”

“I shouted after it, ‘Wait for me, wait for me!’”

“He was very serious and I believe he really wanted that thing to take him with it back to wherever it came from,” explains May Pang, “but then that was John Lennon, always looking for the next big adventure.”

It’s one of those gnarly details in the story that won’t get in line, in later interviews Pang tries to distance herself from Lennon shouting at a UFO to take him away: “He didn’t call out to it,” she corrected. “He later said he wished it had taken us with it. However, I doubt we’d have been that enthusiastic to go along had the opportunity actually presented itself.”

In any case, with the disappearance of the UFO, John and May must have climbed back into their apartment through the window. For the rest of the night, into the next morning, Lennon, never a man at a loss for words, was said to have repeated the same words over and over, like a mantra.

“I can’t believe it… I can’t believe it… I’ve seen a flying saucer!”

John’s first call was to rock photographer Bob Gruen. Lennon demanded that his friend drop everything and get over there fast. He wanted to waste no time in getting the film developed that had been taken using Pang’s 35mm camera. As he and May waited, John began drawing from his fresh memories that he must have corroborated with Pang’s input at the time.

Sketchy Details

Lennon was a visual artist as much as a musical one. As such, the first thing he set out to do after seeing the UFO was to draw it. He used the material available to him — in this case, a large manila envelope that May Pang happened to get her hands on.

Whether this is similar to what other alleged witnesses had reported is unknown. None have come forward in the public sphere to discuss it, as best as can be determined.

What is very interesting, however, is that the New York City UFO seen by John and May is quite similar to the craft described in the 1966 Westall sighting that is Australia’s most famous case and involved hundreds of witnesses, many of whom were school children.

The Parable of the Photos

The encounter lasted long enough that they had time to get the presence of mind to take pictures. May ran back into the apartment and grabbed her 35mm camera. She used it to take literally many thousands of photos of first-hand events during the “Lost Weekend.” It was a work horse piece of equipment.

Lennon was in his heavy Polaroid phase still, but talked about that instant camera being busted in Andy Warhol’s Interview, “We tried to take pictures (shit on my Polaroid, it was bust) with a straight camera.”

May returned to the roof and she and John took numerous pictures of the craft. “I could have seen it even without my glasses,” stated John in an interview, “and I’m very short-sighted.” Given how close they describe it as being, this should have yielded some excellent evidence. They had a working camera and a roll of film.

Enter Bob Gruen. He’s he professional photographer who, less than a week later, would take the incredible John Lennon in a New York City ripped tee-shirt photo. Things were moving fast in this world.

On the night of the sighting, however, Gruen arrived and John and May told him what they’d seen, gave him the one roll of film and tasked him with getting the images developed fast.

“I took the film home and put John’s roll between two rolls of film I’d taken earlier that day and developed them,” said Gruen before taking the air out of the balloon. “My two rolls of film came out perfectly but John’s roll was blank.”

“We gave the film to Bob Gruen to develop,” said Lennon. “He brought back a blank film, said it looked like it had been through the radar at customs.”

Why that was the case has never been convincingly described. Was it a bad film roll out of the hundreds that Pang must have shot in her time with Lennon? Was there something in the air, from the craft itself, that destroyed the film through a technological means? What happened to that film roll after Gruen said it was blank? If it still exists, can it be tested with new technology?

All of John’s line drawings are wonderful to have and are a snapshot of his state of mind. Nothing would have bolstered his story more than a single photograph, good or even bad, of something.

After calling Bob Gruen, John’s next call was to Yoko Ono at the Dakota apartment to tell her what he’d seen. As May Pang remembers it, Yoko was unhappy that she hadn’t seen it, too, and felt that he had “left her out of all the excitement.”

Editor’s Note: You’ve just read Part Two of our Trail of the Saucers investigation into Lennon’s 1974 UFO sighting, “Like a UFO You Came to Me.” Here is Part 3 for your continued reading —

Trail of the Saucers, published by Bryce Zabel and Stellar Productions, focuses on UFO/UAP news, history, culture, and analysis. Here are other articles from our archive —