John Lennon in Magonia
ONE MORE SCENE from Magonia, complementing those introduced in chapter 2:
The date is August 23, 1974. At the center of the scene is one of the most famous individuals in the world, the former Beatle John Lennon, along with his assistant and then-lover May Pang. The episode has all but vanished from the annals of UFOlogy, despite having been what the UFOlogists would call a “close encounter of the first kind,” multiply witnessed.98 We may well wonder why.
It wasn’t that Lennon was secretive about his and Pang’s experience. “On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O. J.L.,” says a liner note for his Walls and Bridges album, issued a little over a month after the sighting. A sketch Lennon did at about the same time, which he may have been considering for the cover illustration for Walls and Bridges, depicts the UFO soaring over a throng of people, all seemingly oblivious to what’s over their heads. In “Nobody Told Me,” one of the last songs he recorded before he was shot dead in December 1980, he included the line “There’s a UFO over New York and I ain’t too surprised.”
Lennon, separated at the time from his wife Yoko Ono, was living with Pang in a penthouse apartment on East 52nd Street in Manhattan. It had been a hot day, but by 8:00 it had cooled off enough for them to turn off the air conditioning and open the windows. Pang had showered, and as she was drying off (as she told an interviewer fourteen years afterward), “she heard John yell to her from the outside roof, ‘May, come here right now!’ Startled, she ran to John and found him standing on the roof nude and pointing wildly southeastward.”
“I drop the clothes and now I’m nude (laughs) and running out there,” she told another interviewer. Lennon remembered the same thing. “I was standing, naked,” he recalled, “by this window leading on to that roof when an oval-shaped object started flying left to right. It had a red light on top. . . . I shouted after it, ‘Wait for me, wait for me!’”
It didn’t wait, although it easily could have. It was a “classic” disk, luminous and silent, floating through the air less than a hundred feet away from the astonished couple. Lennon was sure he could have hit it with a brick if he’d had one. Then, ignoring Lennon’s entreaties, it was gone. It stayed long enough, though, for Pang to be able to fetch a camera so they could take pictures of it. The photos turned out blank. Naturally. There was nothing there to be photographed. The UFO came from inside.
But the scene isn’t just the flying disk. It’s also the people who saw it. They were naked—both Lennon and Pang harp on this point in their retellings of the incident so frequently that it’s impossible to believe the point was of no significance. Where else do we hear of a nude couple confronted by a numinous presence?
“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew they were naked. . . . And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” says the third chapter of the Book of Genesis. And we note that this is exactly the time of day when Lennon and Pang had their experience. Adam and Eve hide themselves from that Voice—the opposite of Lennon and Pang, who step out onto the roof to greet their visitor—“and the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”
Nudity wasn’t shameful in 1974, as it had been when the Genesis storyteller wrote. The mores of the counterculture called for it to be flaunted and not hidden. But the archetypal scene remains the same: man and woman stand naked before the unknown, unidentified yet radiating power and awe. Not that Lennon and Pang deliberately set themselves to reenact the Bible story; that seems to me inconceivable. It emerged spontaneously from within them, of them yet outside their conscious control.
Three years earlier, in his best-known song of the post-Beatle era, Lennon challenged his audience to “imagine” an ideal world free of nationalities, emptied also of religion. In that world there’d be no heaven above us or hell beneath, “above us only sky.” That sky is completely disenchanted (to use Max Weber’s language), stripped of any transcendent significance. But the repressed has a tendency to return. One warm August night the enchanted sky reasserted itself before the eyes of the man who’d “imagined” it could be banished.
It reasserted itself as a shared vision. It expressed itself through a template hardwired into the unconscious, set down in recognizable form many hundreds of years ago in the Book of Genesis. It took the shape, for those who experienced it, of an Unidentified Flying Object. Early in this book, I told how my eighth-grade friend Bryan and I set out to write an extra-credit paper for a science class and instead discovered flying saucers. I don’t think we ever wrote that paper. That winter I did write a few chapters of a book, nominally coauthored with Bryan, which we planned to call The Flying Saucer Mystery. We would state the facts; we would examine the hypotheses. Then, a pair of junior Sherlocks, we’d find the solution.
My teenage quest for that solution, through my mother’s sorrowful final years, has already been described. Of course I failed both to keep my mother alive and to solve the mystery of the saucers. Ray Palmer could have told me that I’d fail, that indeed it was better for me to fail, for if I solved the mystery, it would be gone and I’d be left with nothing. I would have ignored him, the wisdom of his words as far beyond me as some distant galaxy.
What’s the “solution” to the mystery of what John and May encountered that August night? Would it be “solved” if I identified some unusual object in the sky, a Goodyear blimp or the like, that triggered their experience? Martin Kottmeyer, to whom I’m indebted for guiding me to the resources I’ve used in telling their story, has pointed out to me that they’re likely to have had some objective stimulus. What that stimulus was is for me a matter of near-total irrelevance.
Nor is it “solved” by the jeering dismissal “What drug were they on?” Lennon has denied he was on any drug that night, and it wouldn’t matter if he were. The UFO came from within, and whether it was evoked with chemical means or without them is an issue of secondary importance. The central question is the one I’ve pursued throughout this study: what did it mean?
Call it the religious experience of an irreligious man, unbidden and unfettered by any conscious volition. A shared experience, like Adam and Eve’s as expressive of the lovers’ relationship with one another as with the sacral Other that appeared to them from the sky. This doesn’t “solve” the mystery either. It has the virtue, however, of restating it, placing it in a fresh context in which it can be explored.
Does that “Other” even exist? Not in the physical world, certainly as far as the UFOs are concerned. (I leave aside the question of what objective existence can be attributed to the God of Genesis.) But it can’t be limited to John’s perhaps overstimulated brain, or May’s, or the two of theirs together. The parallel in Genesis shows that it was part of them yet also beyond them, a transcendent reality shared with others in distant times and places. Probably with their entire species.
In its essence, the UFO is a religious phenomenon. This assertion must not be confused with the shallow sneer of some debunkers that UFOs are “a religious cult.” What it says is that a UFO sighting, insofar as it goes beyond simple misinterpretation of mundane stimuli, is a religious event, an experience of the numinous that arises—spontaneously, it would seem—from our internal worlds. The totality of UFO lore is a religious myth through which those who’ve not been blessed (or cursed) with the experience can vicariously participate in it. The myth is endorsed by group tradition. Yet fundamentally it’s believed in because of a stubborn awareness, every rational objection to the contrary, that it’s real and true.
This is the “hidden story of the UFO.” It’s a story not of spaceships and interplanetary visitors but of human beings like John Lennon and Barney Hill and Gray Barker and Richard Shaver and you and me, and our interactions with our shared unconscious, which if not “God” in the traditional sense is psychologically indistinguishable from It.
There are some regularities in the story. Not quite the patterns I searched for as a teenage UFOlogist, which I expected to reveal the unseen forces behind them like iron filings sprinkled on a paper over a magnet, but discernable nonetheless.
One is the emergence of a mythic theme from the trauma of an individual, who in violation of the silent, anonymous process of mythic creation, can be pinpointed in time and space. The trauma is normally bound up with alienness: of a black man in a racist society, a gay man in a homophobic society, a crippled hunchback in a society that values good looks and physical vigor. Or a devastating encounter with the ultimate alien, death, particularly a death that’s sudden and meaningless and horrific.
Often this individual is part of a synergistic pair, in which it’s not easy to tell who has contributed what to the developing myth. This is true of Barney and Betty Hill, Gray Barker and Albert Bender, Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver. The last case is particularly rich in subtlety and paradox. Whose trauma did the Shaver Mystery communicate? Palmer’s, with the broken and grotesque body that made him seem a man from Mars, inside which his towering spirit looked death in the eye and twice triumphed? Or Shaver’s, labeled a madman and confined within a hospital for the “criminally insane,” although all who knew him testified to the brawny man’s habitual gentleness?99
The myth originates within historical time, and recent historical time at that. Yet the myth regularly proves to be age-old, manifesting in earlier generations under different guises. The “descenders to the chariot” early in the Common Era fainted under the gaze of eyes like those that stare from the cover of Whitley Strieber’s Communion. Albert Bender was persecuted by three men in black, like Abraham Cardozo nearly three hundred years earlier. This is one of UFOlogy’s paradoxes, very likely bound up with the process by which the trauma of the one spreads to the many. As a primordial myth, universal, it was a property of the many to begin with. Now, in its new iteration, they embrace it as something long-known but forgotten. Or not altogether forgotten, but not quite remembered either.
And spread it does. As a rule, not immediately; that’s another of the regularities we’ve encountered, not quite invariant.100 First comes a latency period. Twenty to twenty-five years passed between Barney Hill’s “abduction” memories and the flowering of abductions into a recognizable feature of American culture. It took thirty years for Roswell to return to the spotlight, forty years for the myth immortalized in They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers to morph into the Men in Black movies.
In this process of forgetting-then-remembering, multiple factors are surely at play. It would be unwise to reduce them to a single cause, whether of individual or mass psychology. Yet at the end the myth has become a shared cultural property, recognizable to nearly everyone, evoking an emotional response of some sort even if it’s only a contemptuous sneer. (This also is a form of vicarious participation.)
The UFOs remain unidentified, not in terms of the mundane stimuli that trigger their appearance but in terms of what they mean within us, from which regions of our “inner space” they come and what conditions govern their emergence. There’s much that we can feel fairly sure we understand, more that we can fumblingly guess at. Yet there’s even more that will continue to baffle us, that we have no choice—once we’ve refused the stale alternatives of believing or debunking—but to contemplate in wonder.
This is the mystery that two thirteen-year-old boys set out to “solve,” that remains unsolved to this day although I think I have a grasp of its contours that I couldn’t have had when I began my quest. The more I ponder it, the more it seems to me an aspect of the ancient and insoluble mystery of who we are.
We: a two-legged, two-gendered animal evolved from microbial existence through unthinking, unfeeling biological processes, capable nonetheless of thought and feeling. We: rational and sentient yet mortal, living and knowing we must die. Religion, in the famous definition of Unitarian minister Forrest Church, is “our human response to the dual realities of being alive and having to die.” This is the religious issue at the heart of the UFO.
Long ago, the Psalmist asked, “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour”101—and if there’s no “Thou” to have accomplished this, as current scientific opinion has it, but only inconceivable eons of the blindness, cruelty, and terror that we call “nature,” the end result is the same. In our wisdom, in our power, we’re all but angelic. Yet dust we are and to dust shall we return.
Near-angel and dust, with dust always winning. So Adam is told (Genesis 3:19) in his climactic encounter with the divine Alien that reappeared, in mandala rather than human form, over John Lennon and May Pang’s Manhattan apartment.
At age thirteen I didn’t yet face my own death, as I may this year, or possibly next year or the year after that. I did face my mother’s, and like Perseus’s mirror in the ancient and impeccably true myth, the UFOs gave me a way to look into that Gorgon face and live. In a very real sense, they saved my life. How could I forget them? How could I leave them alone?
Bryan and I never wrote The Flying Saucer Mystery. Nearly sixty years later I’ve at last written it, with some alteration of its title. You are holding it in your hands.
“There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream,” Freud once wrote, which must be left obscure, its “tangle of dream-thoughts” unresolved. The dream’s “navel,” he called it—“the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.”
This was Freud in his mystic mode, not the rigid rationalist of the stereotype. The thoughts from which the dream is born, he went on, can have no definite endings. Rather, “they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought.” Put mythic themes in place of dream-thoughts, understand “our world of thought” to be not just yours or mine but the total psychic life of our culture and species, and his words will apply to the collective dream we call the UFO.
And that dream does have a spot where it connects and draws nourishment from the unknown. We can’t follow it or know what it is. We can only gaze on it, and marvel.
Notes
98. Jerome Clark’s monumental UFO Encyclopedia, that vast resource for knowledge of all things UFOlogical—now out in its third edition (2018)—has not a single word about it.
99. Both experienced hospitals as their places of trial, from which Shaver emerged shattered and Palmer victorious—the reverse of what you’d imagine from looking at their outsides. But in dealing with the UFO, it’s the hidden and not the visible that counts—or rather, the hidden and its interaction with the visible.
100. The Shaver Mystery seems an exception.
101. Psalm 8:4–5.