John Lennon’s Experience With Aliens

John Lennon was never one to keep things boring. Sure, he ruffled feathers with controversial statements like saying The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” but behind the sharp tongue was also a curious mind that leaned into the weird and wonderful. One of his more fascinating obsessions? The number 9.

Let’s take a ride through Lennon’s unusual love for the number—and his wild UFO sighting that even his girlfriend witnessed.

The Magical Number 9

Lennon was convinced that the number 9 held a deeper meaning in his life. From his earliest days, the number kept showing up. “I lived at 9 Newcastle Road,” he told David Sheff in a 1980 Playboy interview.

“I was born on the ninth of October—the ninth month [in the Chinese calendar]. It’s just a number that follows me around, but numerologically, apparently, I’m a number six or a three or something, but it’s all part of nine.”

He even wrote a song titled “One After 909” back when he was about 17, inspired by his Liverpool address. And let’s not forget “Revolution 9” from The Beatles’ White Album, a track inspired by an engineer’s repeated test line: “This is EMI test series number nine.”

Coincidence or cosmic sign? Lennon leaned toward the latter.

A UFO Sighting at 9 O’Clock

During Lennon’s so-called “Lost Weekend” in 1974—a period of separation from Yoko Ono and a romantic fling with production assistant May Pang—things got even stranger.

In the liner notes of his 1974 solo album Walls and Bridges, Lennon wrote, “On the 23rd August 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O.” Yep—again with the number 9.

In a November 1974 interview with Interview magazine, Lennon recalled the moment: “I was just dreaming around in my usual poetic frame of mind,” when he spotted “a thing with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top,” hovering above a nearby building just 100 feet away.

May Pang Saw It Too

Before you write it off as Lennon daydreaming, here’s the kicker—his girlfriend May Pang also saw it. She said:

“As I walked out onto the terrace, my eye caught this 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.”

She added:

“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.”

Imagination or Something More?

Lennon never backed down from sharing his strange beliefs. Whether it was his mystical attachment to numbers or spotting something from another world, he owned those experiences—and left the rest of us wondering just how much more there was to his famously curious mind.