In 1974, former Beatle John Lennon claimed to have seen a UFO in New York City. He was living in an apartment in Manhattan with girlfriend May Pang when he saw the flying saucer.
It wasn’t just a light in the sky and there were other witnesses. This sighting was up-close, of a huge craft, and it happened right outside Lennon’s 52nd Street apartment. He wasn’t afraid to talk about it and, in fact, he famously wrote about it in a song. This was Nobody Told Me and, as Lennon sang it, “There’s UFOs over New York and I ain’t too surprised… Nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days indeed.”
The sighting occurred when he was living with May Pang, his so-called “personal secretary” who’d turned into a lover during Lennon’s separation from Yoko Ono. It was a hot August night, August 23, 1974, when John Lennon walked out on his balcony facing the East River to catch a cool breeze. He was completely naked. He started yelling at Pang to come out to the terrace.
When she did, she saw what he saw. According to her description later, it was a “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.
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| May Pang's book 'Loving John' describes her account of the UFO sighting |
It was, I estimate, 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.” The sighting lasted from five to ten minutes, and the UFO drifted away and came back before sprinting off into the sky. Apparently, Lennon and Pang weren’t the only ones to see the UFO, multiple other witnesses (at least seven) had called city newspapers. You can read more details in this article by Larry Warren, link at bottom. And you can hear Lennon himself describe it in this radio interview,video at (below).
What is particularly notable about this account is that May then refers to John describing the UFO as a “spaceship”… so there’s little doubt that neither May nor John thought they might have mistaken an aircraft, weather balloon or whatever as a UFO. John incorporated the UFO incident on the artwork of ‘Walls and Bridges’.
