Credit: Dangerous Minds / UCLA

Look, we’ve all been there. Call it a midlife crisis, call it what John Lennon himself called it, the “lost weekend”, but who among us hasn’t had a period of time where everything falls apart and you just decide to embrace the chaos as much as you can?

Let’s be real here, the whole “embrace the chaos” is such a polite way of putting it that it borders on outright lying. Lennon, as so many people have in their mid-30s, regressed to the worst parts of his id when he split from Yoko Ono in 1973 to have an extended affair with their assistant May Pang.

At the very least, Ono has maintained the same thing that everyone involved with the lost weekend has from the very beginning. That the split was mutual and necessary. Even the relationship with Pang was signed off on by Ono, which is some seriously progressive relationship management for the early 1970s.

Yet from the off, Lennon was a mess. He fell back into drugs and alcohol harder than he’d ever done before, and started hanging around with bad influences like Phil Spector. It’s difficult to take anything he says happened at that time at face value because the man was a complete trainwreck. Yet despite that, arguably the most bizarre thing he experienced at this time is the one thing that can actually be verified by other sources.

For one thing, the testimony doesn’t just come from Lennon himself, it also comes from May Pang, who said that on the night of August 23rd 1974, the Beatles megastar stayed over at her New York City apartment overlooking the East River. In the night, Lennon got out of bed and went out onto the balcony for a cigarette. At which point, Pang heard the starkers Lennon start hollering at her to come onto the balcony as well.

Pang did, and together, both of them saw a dark circle hovering silently in the sky about three stories above them. One with bright white lights circling the rim and a deep red light on top of it… Slowly, it flew over the rooftop of the next building along, then turned sideways and tracked along the river, still at a pace barely faster than a crawl, but after hovering over the Brooklyn Bridge, it suddenly shot into the sky lightning quick and disappeared.

Thank Christ Pang was there too because, with the strongest will in the world to the Beatles legend, his own testimony might not have been the most reliable. He was chasing his already prodigious weed intake with everything under the sun. However, we don’t just have to take Pang’s word for it. When the duo reported their sighting to the police and the newspapers, both sources said that they weren’t the only people reporting a UFO over New York City that night.

The experience also stayed with Lennon for a long time afterwards. He put his experience in the liner notes of his next album, Walls and Bridges, and even put the experience in a song written at the time but released in 1984, four years after his death. In ‘Nobody Told Me’, Lennon sings, “There’s UFOs over New York and I ain’t too surprised.” Which is a good line, but like, he really, really was.

Trust John Lennon to try to play off seeing an alien spacecraft as no big deal.