John Winston Lennon, born on 9 October 1940 in Liverpool, was an English singer, songwriter and musician who co-founded the Beatles and became one of the most celebrated figures in popular music. After the band broke up in 1970 he recorded as a solo artist, often with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band, on albums including Imagine (1971). He passed away in 1980. His place in UFO history rests on a single sighting: on the evening of 23 August 1974 he and May Pang reported watching a large, silent, lighted object pass close to their Manhattan apartment.

In 1973 Lennon and Ono separated for about 18 months, the period he later called his "Lost Weekend," which he spent in Los Angeles and New York with May Pang, his and Ono's personal assistant. In June 1974 the couple returned to Manhattan, where Lennon stopped drinking and recorded Walls and Bridges at the Record Plant. They lived in a penthouse at 434 East 52nd Street.

Pang described the sighting in her 1983 memoir, Loving John, as a "saucer-shaped object surrounded by blinking white lights gliding through the sky," with a bright red light on top, seen from the apartment's terrace at about nine o'clock. In a self-interview for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine that November, Lennon described ordinary-looking bulbs flashing on and off around the bottom and one steady red light on top, and placed the object no more than a hundred feet away. Pang has recalled that they called the police, and Lennon said the photographer Bob Gruen also contacted newspapers. The object was never identified.

Lennon recorded the event on the album itself. Walls and Bridges, released by Apple Records on 26 September 1974, carried a line in its notes reading "On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o'clock I saw a U.F.O.," initialled by Lennon. His posthumous 1984 single "Nobody Told Me" also refers to UFOs over New York.

The sighting drew renewed attention in 2026. In October, American Alchemy Magazine reviewed summer 1974 issues of NICAP's newsletter and argued that Lennon's report fell within a wider flap across New York and New England, including police officers in Kingston, New York, on 9 July and state troopers near Albany on 19 and 20 August, when airport radar reportedly tracked objects. Days later, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman's podcast Sound, Light & Frequency premiered an episode asking why rock stars see UFOs, with Lennon among its examples. Lennon's dated note on a number-one album remains one of the best-known first-person UFO reports by a major musician.