I read this interesting mention of John Lennon’s famous UFO encounter over New York City in 1974. The brief article appeared May 8, 2025, in a publication called Good.

https://www.good.is/john-lennon-ufo-sighting

You know my theory: That, like Jimmy Carter’s similar close encounter in 1969, this was probably not space aliens but the federal government running surveillance.

Here is one of my previous posts on the subject:

https://emilvenere.me/2025/01/05/like-john-lennon-was-jimmy-carter-being-surveilled-by-the-feds-leading-to-their-similar-ufo-encounters/

I would argue that Carter’s experience wasn’t any sort of mistaken identity with known objects. Instead, for whatever reason, perhaps he was being surveilled by the federal government. I would further argue that this object was some sort of classified flying platform.

In the John Lennon example, in 1974, the rockstar insisted that he and his partner saw what can only be described as the classic flying saucer hovering just outside their New York City apartment. He later drew a sketch of what they both saw.

(Here’s a little background article on ultimateclassicrock.com https://ultimateclassicrock.com/john-lennon-ufo/)

In Carter’s case, I think we can dispense with the usual speculations that he saw a planet, star or some other prosaic thing. Considering his education and background, he clearly knew the difference.

And in Lennon’s case, we know he was considered a subversive, maybe even an enemy of the state, by certain federal intelligence types.

So, I propose both of these men were being spied upon by our own government.

The spying platform was a top-secret flying craft equipped with an extraordinary propulsion technology that remains secret to this day.

Here is Lennon’s description of what happened, bold and in brackets, from the article cited above in the culture site ultimateclassicrock.com.

[“I was lying naked on my bed, when I had this urge,” Lennon said in a conversation with Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. “So I went to the window, just dreaming around in my usual poetic frame of mind. … There, as I turned my head, hovering over the next building, no more than 100 feet away was this thing with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top.”

His girlfriend, May Pang, said: “As I walked out onto the terrace,” she said, “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.”]

So, I propose this was likely just Uncle Sam, running electronic surveillance on Lennon, who was deemed a socialist threat, just as we’ve spied on numerous public figures over the years.

This conspiracy theory fits nicely with my overall hypothesis that the UFOs have never been extraterrestrial. They’ve always been Uncle Sam. They were Uncle Sam back in 1947 when Kenneth Arnold spotted a squadron of UFOs near Mount Rainier; during the flying saucer scare of 1952 over Washington, D.C., when, I speculate, President Harry Truman ordered a demonstration of these weapons much as he had arranged a similar demonstration of the new flying wing in 1949, when the aircraft flew low over the capital; during the 1960s when startled pilots were reporting UFOs after unwittingly observing flights of the top secret U-2 and SR-71; also during the 1960s at U.S. nuclear missile facilities, when, I propose, the military was testing a top-secret anti-missile technology capable of temporarily disabling the rocket launch systems; in the 1980s over the Hudson Valley when bystanders including police officers saw a huge triangular thing floating overhead; in Belgium when numerous credible witnesses saw the same sort of craft; a similar thing over Phoenix, Ariz., in 1997; likewise, a giant delta-shaped thing observed by a raft of cops in 2000 over rural Illinois; the “Tic Tac” encountered by U.S. Navy pilots in 2004; the flying disc over Chicago O’Hare International Airport in 2006, when employees saw a stealthy saucer hovering overhead before it abruptly shot straight up at high speed, punching a hole in the cloud cover that lingered afterward; etc., etc.

So, unless we think these were all space aliens, it certainly appears that based on witness testimony the Pentagon evidently has achieved a propulsion breakthrough. Call it antigravity, if you like. I would argue that when you consider the pattern of UFO encounters going all the way back to the immediate postwar period, the U.S. has had some form of field propulsion technology either in development or in operation since that time. If this is true, then these systems have been evolving completely in the dark for more than 70 years.

Let’s call this idea the “terrestrial hypothesis” for UFOs, as opposed to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which has dominated our whole national conversation about the phenomenon going back decades.

While it is admittedly a radical concept, the terrestrial hypothesis makes a lot more sense than space aliens traveling trillions of miles from another solar system, then forgetting how to land and crashing in the desert, or inexplicably hanging out over U.S. military training ranges and the like.

As to why the Pentagon would sometimes be flying these weapons over populated areas, perhaps it’s real-world training, a “living lab” to perfect tactics and to study how well they perform against state-of-the-art, white-world technologies like F-16s. There have been examples of military training exercises taking place over populated areas. This excellent article in The War Zone documents one such exercise over Los Angeles: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/38753/those-mysterious-gray-helicopters-were-landing-on-multiple-downtown-la-rooftops-last-night

Anyway, for what it’s worth, this is my contribution to the various ruminations about John Lennon’s and Jimmy Carter’s curious, and similar, UFO encounters.