John Lennon and May Pang's UFO Sighting, Manhattan, 1974

Summer 1974. John Lennon was 33 and living apart from Yoko Ono, in the stretch later called his "Lost Weekend." He was finishing Walls and Bridges. In early July he and May Pang, his partner and former production assistant, had moved into a penthouse at 434 East 52nd Street, beside the East River.

Friday, August 23. About 9 pm. Lennon later wrote that he was lying naked on his bed. Then he had "this urge." He went to the window. "There, as I turned my head, hovering over the next building, no more than 100 feet away was this thing with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top."

Pang saw it too. A large, circular object, dark in colour, with "a large, brilliant red light" on top. As it came closer, they made out "a row or circle of white lights that ran around the entire rim of the craft." Above all, she remembered the silence. "I could hear the street noise below me, but the thing that was directly above my head had no noise."

It moved slowly. At times it simply hovered. "It was like I could have hit it with a brick if I'd thrown a stone at it," Lennon said. Then it slipped away. "It went down the river, turned right at the United Nations, turned left, and the[n] down the river." He shouted after it. "Wait for me, wait for me!"

Lennon's Polaroid was bust. Pang shot a roll on another camera. Photographer Bob Gruen developed it with his own film. The frames came out blank or overexposed. The next day Gruen made calls for Lennon. The police: "Where? Up on the East Side? You're the third call on it." The Daily News: "On the East Side? Five people reported it." The New York Times reporter hung up.

In September Walls and Bridges came out. The lyric booklet carried a handwritten note: "On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o'clock I saw a U.F.O." He signed it J.L. Lennon also drew the object. One saucer sketch labelled "UFOer," given to guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, sold at CooperOwen Auctions in London in March 2014 for about $16,600. Years later the night surfaced in "Nobody Told Me," released in 1984 on Milk and Honey. "There's UFOs over New York and I ain't too surprised."

No police, military or civilian UFO group ever investigated. Lennon argued with himself in print: "is it a helicopter? No! It makes no noise… ah then, it must be a ballon!" But "Balloons don't look like that, nor do they fly so low." He insisted he had been "very straight" that night.

The tellings shift. 100 feet or 100 yards. 8:30 or 9:00. The count of other witnesses grew too, to "about 400 reported sightings" in Pang's 2011 recollection. In 2015 a second sketch surfaced, owned by UFO investigator Russ Kellett. Pang called it a fake. "This is not anything close to his drawing style." Religious studies scholar David J. Halperin offers no physical answer. He finds meaning in the witnesses' nakedness. To him, the UFO "not only was seen by them, but also saw them."

May Pang has never wavered. "I know what I saw. And the rational explanation is… it was a UFO." The 2022 documentary The Lost Weekend: A Love Story shows the drawing and tells her account once more. The object over East 52nd Street has never been identified.