A Trail of the Saucers Investigation
There’s UFOs Over New York
On August 23, 1974, John Lennon and May Pang saw a UFO outside his New York City penthouse apartment. He talked about it until his final days. (Part 1 of 3)
Once Upon a Time in New York City
In the last days of August in the summer of 1974 — August 23rd, exactly — John Lennon and his secretary girlfriend May Pang said they saw a UFO outside their rented 52nd Street penthouse apartment.
Editor’s Note: This is part one of a three part Trail of the Saucers investigation.
Lennon put this claim in the liner notes of his upcoming Walls and Bridges album. He released a sketch he’d made immediately after the event. He granted interviews. And shortly before his death in 1980, he recorded a song lyric that said that there were UFOs over New York. He talked directly and publicly about the subject on multiple occasions. Privately, he told an even more personal story that proves to be a Rorschach Test about how you see John Lennon.
There’s been only a smattering of actual reporting about the August 23rd encounter, or even the broader Lennon/UFO connection. People tend to dismiss his sighting because there are so many other great cases and the obvious problem, Hey, it’s a John Lennon UFO story, right?
“I was standing, naked, by this window leading on to that roof… just dreaming around in my usual poetic frame of mind… as I turned my head, hovering over the next building, no more than a hundred feet away was this thing with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top. It was coasting, very quietly, like a tourist! So I just watched. After about twenty minutes it disappeared over the East River and behind the United Nations building.” — John Lennon
“As I walked out onto the terrace, my eye caught this large, circular object coming towards us. It was shaped like a flattened cone, and on top was a large, brilliant red light, not pulsating as on any of the aircraft we’d see heading for a landing at Newark Airport. When it came a little closer, we could make out a row or circle of white lights that ran around the entire rim of the craft — these were also flashing on and off. There were so many of these lights that it was dazzling to the mind.” — May Pang
If it’s a true story, then John Lennon’s sighting provides real data about the extreme strangeness of the craft he described, the duration of encounter, and the debate about physical reality of objects versus a psychic reality. If something really happened to John Lennon and May Pang then, whatever that was, real or other-real, it’s worth our time.
Skeptics diminish it as just a story told by the stoned leader of a popular music group from a time long ago. Maybe Lennon cooked the whole thing up on a lark as a piece of performance art. If that’s true, the story loses its reason for being, and it makes us like Lennon less.
So there are real stakes in making up our minds about this one.
Even in death, Lennon’s public belief in this story challenges us to hear him out, and start to make our final judgment.
The Summer of ‘74
John Lennon’s UFO sighting happened in New York City on Friday night, August 23, 1974 at 9:00 p.m. and was witnessed and confirmed by May Pang.
1974 through 1978 were active years for UFO sightings, but 1974 started the run by turning out to be a showbiz year for the the phenomenon. John Lennon was not the only super celebrity to see an unidentified flying object that summer. Then former actor and current California Governor Ronald Reagan not only saw a UFO in those months, but he and his pilot Bull Paynter chased it in their Cessna Citation. The far-left Lennon and the far-right Reagan had something in common after all — UFOs.
Context is everything, particularly in a UFO sighting of this cultural importance. The actual moment of contact with the potentially paranormal might be brief, and a judgment can come down to assessing the quality of a witness. That means understanding their state of mind, no small matter in the case of John Lennon.
Imagine This
August 23rd was exactly two weeks to the day since Richard Nixon had resigned his presidency in disgrace. Newly sworn in President Gerald Ford was still learning how to make his own toast in the family quarters of the White House, and that was big news.
In this brief window of time, there was reason to hope again in America. The stranglehold that Richard Nixon had on our national psyche had been broken. The system actually did look like it had worked and let us throw the bum out. Lennon had his fingers crossed that this could help him on his now raging immigration case. Even Vietnam was winding down.
Americans were looking for a return to a little bit of innocence after the 1960s, and many had discovered a new show called Happy Days. It even appealed to John’s sense of nostalgia for the days of early rock and roll, and gave him something to do on Tuesday nights.
So when Julian was staying with him for a few weeks during Lennon’s L.A. tenure, John not only took his shy son to Disneyland but got them invited to the Happy Days production set. This gave Julian a chance to do something wonderful — meet a true American celebrity like the Fonz. And his wingmen Richie, Ralph and Potsie.
This is how strange things had gotten in the mid-70s when the revolutionary Beatle would hang out on the least revolutionary TV show on-the-air and it was cool.
On the A.M. radio stations, Paul Anka had the number one song in America with “(You’re) Having My Baby.” Lennon would have his own Billboard number one a few months later with his party-on song, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” recorded with Elton John.
The Lost Weekend Couple
John Lennon and Yoko Ono broke up in the spring of 1973 but never quite cut the chord.
Incredibly, in the beginning, Ono had sent their loyal 22-year-old assistant May Pang to take care of John during their separation. The often insecure Lennon immediately turned Pang into his lover as he also hit a low point of drug and alcohol abuse. May became an eyewitness to a series of embarrassing and spirit-crushing public run-ins about town.
There was no getting around how strange this triangle of relationships was. Lennon lived with Pang in an affair set up by Ono who never stopped wanting to hear what Lennon and Pang were up to. Lennon and Ono often spoke multiple times per day. Pang endured and tried to do the job Ono gave her — keep John Lennon safe.
With May Pang by his side in June 1974, John had just lived through more than a year of his “Lost Weekend” in Los Angeles. It had not been an easy situation so when John suggested going back to New York to help Harry Nilsson finish his Pussy Cats album, Pang agreed, even though she knew that only put John within walking distance of Yoko.
John and May fled his dissolute LA lifestyle for a fresh start and moved into a penthouse apartment on East 52nd Street, just a building away from the East River. It was a great apartment with a view of Brooklyn’s Navy shipyard docks. Lennon told friends that whenever he looked out it reminded him of working-class Liverpool where he grew up with the other Beatles.
A Night to Remember
It was a Friday night and Lennon and Pang were in for the evening.
John wanted to listen to the studio output on Walls and Bridges and get his notes together. He had watched last year as McCartney crushed it with Band on the Run, and Lennon wanted to have some of that, too.
Plus, the day had been muggy and awful, 82 degrees with 85 percent humidity. Pang had said that it was so oppressive and heavy that “you could cut it with a knife.” For John, the idea of kicking off his clothes and chilling on his bed seemed like a good option.
Around 8:00 p.m., the temperature had dropped to just 72 degrees. May turned off the AC and threw open the windows. Maybe there would be a breeze coming off the East River.
As it turns out, more than a breeze was on the way.
Man Under Pressure
John was feeling more paranoid than usual these days and with good reason.
First Lennon and Yoko Ono, and now Lennon and Pang, believed their phones were tapped. They felt that when they went outside on the streets of New York or Los Angeles that they were being followed.
Because of his outspoken radical left talk and actions, when Lennon came to the United States in September 1971, officials high up in the CIA and FBI feared that Lennon really could start a revolution and the thought disgusted them. Lennon and Ono were almost immediately put under surveillance.
Then, on March 23, 1973, John Lennon was issued an order by U.S. immigration authorities to leave the United States, and given 60 days to do so. He armed up with a lawyer and fought to stay in America under a legal cloud that hung heavy in the days of his UFO sighting.
This paranoid reality may have contributed to Lennon and Pang being home on a summer’s Friday night ordering pizza delivery.
On the Record
Walls and Bridges
The first time fans ever heard about Lennon’s sighting was the fall of 1974 when the new John Lennon album, Walls and Bridges, was released. There, in the liner notes (seen above), Lennon first told us about his sighting.
“On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O. J.L.”
Inside the album, Lennon gave his buyers a chance to see a panorama, in Lennonesque doodle format, that was some version of his version of events although it’s unclear why he drew a crowd when what he and Pang got appeared to be a private showing.
Mind Games
John Lennon actually first put UFOs in a 1973 song, “Out the Blue,” recorded a full year before he claimed his own sighting. It comes at the end and seems to imply that John thought being found by a UFO would be a good thing.
“Like a UFO you came to me, and blew away life’s misery…” — “Out the Blue,” Mind Games
Milk and Honey
In late 1980, one of the songs Lennon was working on at the time of his death was “Nobody Told Me” from the album that would be released four years later, in 1984, as Milk and Honey. In the song, Lennon sings:
“There’s UFOs over New York and I ain’t too surprised …” — “Nobody Told Me,” Milk and Honey
“Nobody Told Me” has tremendous new resonance in today’s world of pandemic, protest and partisanship. Consider that he recorded this prescient song shortly before his death. Consider something else:
UFOs were on his mind even at the end.
Editor’s Note: This is the first part of our Trail of the Saucers investigation into the 1974 John Lennon UFO sighting. In part two, Lennon and Pang each talk more about what they saw, and what they did after the sighting. Here is the link to Part 2 —
Trail of the Saucers, published by Bryce Zabel and Stellar Productions, focuses on UFO/UAP news, history, culture, and analysis. Bryce is co-host of the popular new podcast Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel.
Bryce is also a life-long Beatles fan and has written about Lennon and his bandmates many times, including one award-winning novel (Once There Was a Way, winner of the 2018 Sidewise Award for Alternate History) and multiple articles. They include —
