What Planet Am I On? Read Online Free PDF Page B

sure your cynics will say was down to the amount of acid that was being taken at the time. I think it was mostly just a case of musicians being fascinated by space and the possibilities of other life out there in the cosmos at the time. In the early sixties there were loads of bands who gave themselves cosmic names like Bill Haley and the Comets, the Telstars, the Zodiacs and others. Everyone knows that the Beatles were first called the Quarrymen, but they also changed their name to Johnny and the Moondogs for a short while. When the Beatles started becoming famous, John Lennon was asked in an interview where the name came from and he said, ‘It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto us “From this day on you are Beatles with an ‘A’.”’ Most people assumed that ‘flaming pie in the sky’ referred to a UFO. Paul McCartney also did a solo album in the nineties called Flaming Pie .
    John Lennon’s main UFO incident came much later when he was living in New York. On 23 August 1974, Lennon and May Pang (his assistant who he got together with for a bit when he split from Yoko) saw a UFO from his apartment balcony at the Dakota Building in New York. May later described what happened, saying that John was screaming for her to come out on to the terrace and she saw ‘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.’ May said they stood there mesmerized, unable to believe what they were seeing.
    Lennon and May were naked as apparently it was a hot night.
    ‘Suppose it’s looking at us,’ May said. ‘Maybe they think that everyone who lives on the East Side wanders around naked on their terraces on Friday evening. We look like Adam and Eve.’
    The UFO then did one and headed off towards Brooklyn, and Lennon shouted, ‘Stop, take me with you!’
    May said that all that night, Lennon kept repeating, ‘I can’t believe it . . . I’ve seen a flying saucer.’
    Lennon had just finished his Walls and Bridges album, which came out the next month, and on the liner notes he wrote, ‘On the 23rd August 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a UFO – JL.’
    He later referenced the episode in two songs, ‘Out of the Blue’ from the album Mind Games and ‘Nobody Told Me’ from Milk and Honey .
    Lennon also had another weird incident that he told Uri Geller about: ‘You ain’t fuckin’ gonna believe this’. Lennon said he was asleep with Yoko at home in the Dakota Building when he woke up because ‘there was this blazing light round the door. It was shining through the cracks and the keyhole, like someone was out there with searchlights, or the apartment was on fire.’
    Lennon jumped out of bed and opened the door.‘There were these four people out there. They were, like, little. Bug-like. Big bug eyes and little bug mouths and they were scuttling at me like roaches.’
    He insisted that he wasn’t on drugs when it happened. ‘I never saw anything on acid that was as weird as those fuckin’ bugs, man.’ He said he tried to throw the little people out of his apartment, but they pushed him back just using willpower and telepathy.
    Lennon then woke up back in bed and he had a metal, egg-like object in his hand. He gave it to Uri Geller, saying he didn’t want to keep it because it was too weird for him: ‘If it’s my ticket to another planet, I don’t want to go there.’
    Lennon had an open mind on most things, not just UFOs, which is where I’m coming from too. I remember reading him summing up his attitude: ‘I believe in everything until it’s disproved. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now? Reality leaves quite a lot to the imagination.’
    I’m with him on that.

    The Rolling Stones also have strong UFO connections. Mick Jagger, Marianne