JOHN LENNON’S UFO ENCOUNTER: The Night The Sky Became Magical

When former Beatle John Lennon spotted a silent, flashing UFO hovering outside his New York apartment in 1974, the naked rock star’s close encounter would leave an indelible mark on both his music and legacy.

In the summer of 1974, while gazing from his New York City apartment window, John Lennon witnessed something extraordinary—a UFO with flashing lights hovering near his residence. This remarkable sighting didn’t just disappear into memory; it found its way into the liner notes of his forthcoming album and seemingly inspired lyrics in one of his songs.

The incident occurred during what Lennon later dubbed his “Lost Weekend”—an 18-month period when he was separated from Yoko Ono and involved with his assistant and production coordinator, May Pang. On August 23, after completing work on his fourth solo album “Walls and Bridges,” Lennon returned home and began discussing dinner plans with Pang.

As Pang later recounted to New York’s Q104.3 radio station, “John said, ‘What do you want to eat? Let’s go for a pizza.’ I’m in the other room, getting dressed, so he’s standing out on the balcony. It’s a nice summer’s night, and it’s Friday… John’s out there, standing—naked, mind you—in the dark… We were right by the East River, so you could hear all that. You could hear the helicopters across the river. He told me later, ‘I’m looking downriver, and I see flashing lights.'”

According to Pang, the object was unmistakable—featuring “bright white lights around the rim, flashing on and off, and then one solid red light.” It moved with eerie silence at a disturbingly close range.

“I look at this thing that is so close to us,” she continued. “No sound. I could see the underbelly of this object. You know when it’s hot and you see these heat waves? I could see clear as day, right underneath… It just cleared the buildings next to us, maybe two to three stories over us. I always said that if Reggie Jackson hit a home run, he could hit this thing.”

Despite Pang’s terrified screams, no one else in their apartment ventured outside to witness the phenomenon. Nevertheless, both she and Lennon remained convinced they had experienced something truly unexplainable.

Lennon later described the encounter to a reporter: “I saw a UFO, and it went down the river, turned right at the United Nations, turned left, and then down the river. It wasn’t a helicopter, and it wasn’t a balloon, and it was so near. It was silent, and it looked dark, like black or grey in the middle, and it had white lights—just looked like light bulbs—just going off, on, off, on, off, on, blink, blink, blink, blink, ’round the bottom, and on top was a red light.”

“It was like I could have hit it with a brick if I’d thrown a stone at it,” he recalled in another interview. “The thing I noticed was that there was no noise, and I could hear the freeway down below, all the cars going. So I realized, ‘Oh, it’s not a helicopter, so it must be a balloon.’ But it was so close to the rooftop that it couldn’t be a balloon… And it’s maneuvering too well to be a balloon.’ So I just watched it, and it was there for about five or 10 minutes and went off down the East River.”

According to Ultimate Classic Rock, the couple attempted to photograph the object using both Polaroid and conventional cameras but captured no evidence. They reportedly alerted police, who confirmed receiving similar accounts from others.

While their documentation efforts proved fruitless, Lennon immortalized the strange encounter on the inner sleeve of “Walls and Bridges,” released just over a month later on September 26. A message in the lower left corner reads: “On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O.,” signed with his initials “J.L.”

Years later, on “Milk and Honey”—his collaborative 1984 album with Yoko Ono released more than three years after his murder—the percussive hit single “Nobody Told Me” (see below) featured a telling lyric in its final verse: “Everybody’s flying and never touch the sky / There’s U.F.O.s over New York, and I ain’t too surprised.”

SOURCE