John Lennon. His Death, His Wisdom, and UFOs

 

    It is 42 years ago today that the musician John Lennon was shot and killed in front of his home at the Dakota in New York City.

    John Lennon was one of the UFO musicians. There was a lot of them they had a relationship to UFOs, but John Lennon was the biggest. He wrote about his UFO sighting on the cover of his album Walls and Bridges, “Under 23rd of August 1974, at 9:00 o'clock, I saw UFO.”

    In a later song called strange days he sang, “there's UFOs over New York and I ain't too surprised!”

    In the many interviews that he did about the subject he described that he was lying naked in his bed when he suddenly got an urge to go to the balcony of the condo. He saw a large circular object with white lights all around the rim plus a blinking light on top of the craft.

    Lennon claimed that that he and May Pang took photos of the craft in the 10 minutes where the object was clearly visible. None of those photos turned out. Here is how I wrote up the story in my book Tuned In: The Paranormal World of Music.”

    The first UFO event reported by Lennon occurred on August 23rd, 1974, at May Pang's 52nd Street penthouse apartment in New York, after spending a long day at the Record Plant East recording studio.

    John was very open about what had occurred and later described what he saw clearly even though he was very near-sighted and didn't have his glasses on:

 

If you see a little note on Walls and Bridges (album) you will see it says "I saw a UFO." I just finished doing Walls and Bridges.  I had just mastered it or had done the last tape of it, and I was just reading, relaxing, feeling good. It was summer in New York, and I had the window open, and low and behold there was this thing just hovering about a hundred yards away. I saw it so close.  It wasn't in the sky or nothing.  I could have hit it with a brick if I had thrown a stone at it. I couldn't see the colors because it was dusk, but it was a good clear summer night. The sky was very clear, and around the bottom of it were ordinary looking electric light bulbs blinking off and on alternatively like on a billboard.  On top of it was a red light.  The thing that I noticed was that there was no noise. I could hear that freeway down below with all the cars going, so I realized it's not a helicopter - then it must be a balloon.  It was so close to the rooftop it couldn't be a balloon. All the rational things I went through - not a helicopter - not a balloon. It's too close to the roof and it's maneuvering around too much to be a balloon.  So, I just watched it and it was there about 5 or 10 minutes and then it went off down the east river.

    In a later interview John also stated:

 

Some part of you doesn't want to believe it you know…I said I saw it.  I don't care what anyone says.  There it was and no one can explain what it was.  It was below the height of the buildings.  If someone had been in the upper parts of the building, they would have been looking down at it…. I'll stick up for New York.  I think it is pretty real here.  I would never have noticed it if I hadn't happened to look out.  I looked around me an no one was looking out of windows or anything.  The cars were going on.  It was quiet.  It was very low.  It's not that you expect a Martian in the sky.  It was below roof top level.  It was touring around like a tourist.  It was potluck that I saw it - please excuse the expression.  I was as straight as a dive.  I was as straight as a dive."^[1]

He was asked if he had gone to the police, and he said "Lennon sees UFO.  No.  That was enough to get me kicked out.  It's bad enough as it is." The United States government at the time was trying to extradite Lennon.

John incorporated the UFO incident on the artwork on his album Walls and Bridges that he was working on at the time of the sighting. 

On the bottom right (of the back cover) is written:

"On 23 August 1974, I saw a UFO J.L."

Lennon also mentions UFO encounters on two other of his albums - the 'Double Fantasy' album. On that album is a track "Nobody Told Me" where the lyrics say, "There's UFO's over New York, and I ain't too surprised.  Nobody told me there'd be days like these, Strange days indeed."Then in his Mind Games album there is the track "Out of the Blue."  The song was dedicated to Yoko Ono, from whom he was separated at the time. The lyrics state, "Like a U.F.O. you came to me.  And blew away life's misery.  Out the blue life's energy.  Out the blue, you came to me."

May Pang, who was a witness to the August 23 sighting, recalled  what had occurred. According to her version, she had just come out of the shower and did not have time to dress, as Lennon started calling her. That left both Pang and Lennon naked on the patio as they stood watching the UFO fly by "turn right at the United Nations building, then turn left and then down the river."

 

I remember I was just getting dressed when John started shouting for me to come out onto the terrace. I yelled that I would be right there, but he kept screaming for me to join him that instant. As I walked out onto the terrace my eyes caught this large circular object coming towards us.  It was shaped like a flattened cone and on top was a large brilliant red light.  It was not pulsating like any of the big aircraft that we would see landing at Newark Airport. When it came closer. We could make out a row of circular white lights that ran around the entire rim of the craft.  These were also flashing off and on. There were so many of these lights that it was dazzling…it was about the size of a Lear jet, and it was so close if we had something to throw we could have hit it very easily. During the time that it was directly overhead, I could hear no noise. We often had helicopters around, but this was as silent as the night, 17 stories above street level. Finally, the object passed from view. The object returned and the light was so bright coming from the craft that no additional detail could be seen. We took a couple of pictures, but they turned out overexposed. All night long John kept repeating, "I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I've finally seen a flying saucer."^[2]

 

Pang added, "It just tilted - it went over on its side.  I yelled 'it's a UFO!'  It was completely silent.  That's what was amazing.  It hovered over this building for good 5 minutes.  It turned around then moved out there and went straight up into the sky.  It just went straight up."

Lennon called the Daily Newspaper and learned that 7 other people had reported a similar object. Then he called up Bob Gruen, his longtime friend, and photographer.  He took the film Pang had captured but the pictures did not turn out.  Gruen also phoned the police for Lennon and was told his call was the third one from the east side reporting a UFO. The New York Daily News told Gruen they had five calls related to a UFO.

As a confirmation of his sighting, he drew the event and used it as a part of his Walls and Bridges album.  Lennon would go on to write a song called "No One Told Me" in which he said, "There're UFOs over New York, and I ain't too surprised."  It was not released by Yoko Ono till after his death in 1983.

According to Pang, Lennon had always had an interest in UFOs. She said he even used to subscribe to a British UFO Magazine, the Flying Saucer Review. After the 1974 sighting, however, he became fanatical about the subject, "bringing up the subject all the time."^[3]

Now 42 years after Lennon's death and many more years after his sighting podcaster Keith Olbermann added two new quotes by Lennon that stand out. Both came from the Playboy interview that John Lennon did shortly before his death.

The first has to do with the paranormal and the nature of reality which Lennon seemed to be very interested in. In the book tuned in, for example, I describe the story of the belief that John and Yoko Ono had that they had lived together in a previous life.

Here from the Playboy interview is John Lennon talking about himself as a child,

 

Surrealism had a great effect on me, because then I realized that my imagery and my mind wasn't insanity. That if it was insane, I belong in an exclusive club that sees the world in those terms, Surrealism to me is reality. Psychic vision to me is reality.

Even as a child when I looked at myself in the mirror when I was 12 or 13, I used to literally trance out into alpha. I didn't know what it was called then. I found out years later there's a name for those conditions, but I would find myself seeing hallucinatory images of my face changing and becoming cosmic and complete. It caused me to always be a rebel. This thing gave me a chip on the shoulder but on the other hand I wanted to be loved and accepted. Part of me would like to be accepted by all segments of society, and not be this loudmouth lunatic musician, but I cannot be what I'm not.

The Playboy interview ended by asking about Lennon’s dream for the 1980s.  His reply almost seemed to be the answer to Jim Semivan, the ex-CIA official, who I say was the key person that initiated all the UFO disclosure that we are seeing now in Congress.

Semivan has been very critical of the UFO intelligence, in that it does not announce itself and tell us what it is doing. The implied idea is that there is good and evil in the world and the intelligence behind the phenomenon may not have our best interest at heart.

Lennon, however, stated like most psychologists would state, that we make our own successes and failures based on how we react to what happens to us.

You make your own dream. That's The Beatles story, isn't it? That’s Yoko’s story. That's what I'm saying now.

Produce your own dream. If you wanna save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders, and the parking meters.

Don't expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself. That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way - leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy, and worship for the cover of the book, and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see. They have always been and always will be.

There's nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome, and people cannot provide it for you. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you.

The Playboy interviewer then asked what is that that keeps people from accepting that message and John Lennon said. He answer again related to one of the key elements of the UFO mystery – our fear of the unknown.

It's fear of the unknown. The unknown is what it is, and to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, and hate. All that.  It’s all illusion. Unknown is what it is. Accept that it's unknown, and it's plain sailing. Everything is unknown. Then you're ahead of the game. That's what it is, right?

The final word goes to John Lennon who reported said,
“Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”

That too agrees to three different people that I had on one podcast. The one person had a near death experience after being thrown from a motorcycle face first into the concrete. The second was quietly reading a book in her apartment the third with the financial stock investor who had the experience in a float tank.

each of them received a vision which stated exactly what John Lennon had stated. That vision was that everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be and everything is OK not only in the end but right now. Since I had that interview with these three people who were hesitant to tell their friends what they had seen I have run across UFO experiencers who have had the same vision- there is nothing wrong. Everything is the way it's supposed to be. How we react to that determines whether we enjoy or suffer depends on how we react to the situations that are placed in front of us.

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[1] John Lennon UFO Encounter 1974, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdw4cibPh-U

[2] Timothy Green Beckley, "UFOs Among the Stars.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzGcel0XTus

[3] John Lennon UFO Encounter New York 1974, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdw4cibPh-U