In 1974, on a beautiful summer night in New York City, John Lennon looked outside his apartment window and glimpsed a startling object: a UFO with flashing lights. The object was so evocative that it inspired an Easter egg in the liner notes of his upcoming album and, seemingly, a lyrical reference in one of his songs.
This alleged sighting occurred at a unique time for the former Beatle: during his 18-month relationship with assistant and production coordinator May Pang (He later referred to this time as his “Lost Weekend”). On August 23 of that year, following a productive day’s work on his upcoming fourth solo LP, Walls and Bridges, Lennon came home and started chatting with May about their dinner plans. Then things got weird.
“John said, ‘What do you want to eat? Let’s go for a pizza,’” Pang told New York classic rock station Q104.3 in 2020. “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.’”
Pang said the object was clearly visible, with “bright white lights around the rim, flashing on and off, and then one solid red light.” It moved slowly, silently, and at a shockingly close proximity. “I look at this thing that is so close to us,” she added. “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.”
Though she screamed “like there’s no tomorrow,” no one else in their apartment joined them outside to look. Regardless, she and Lennon were both confident they had witnessed something unusual. “I saw a UFO, and it went down the river, turned right at the United Nations [Laughs], turned left, and the down the river,” the songwriter later told a reporter. “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, Lennon and Pang tried to take photos, with both a Polaroid and regular camera, but captured no evidence. They also reportedly notified the police, who said they’d received other, similar accounts. While nothing came of their efforts, Lennon did document this strange moment in a roundabout way—leaving a reference to the event in the inner sleeve of Walls and Bridges, released just over a month later, on September 26. “On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O.,” reads a message in the lower left-hand corner, tagged with the initials “J.L.”
Milk and Honey, his collaborative 1984 album with wife Yoko Ono—released over three years after his murder—includes the swaggering, percussive hit single “Nobody Told Me.” And there’s a noteworthy lyric in the 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.”
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