They
came in the darkness and had bug-like faces. Stranger still, they left
a weird egg-shaped object behind. Uri Geller recalls his friend John
Lennon’s encounter with the unknown.
There is
an egg-like object in my pocket. It was given to me by John Lennon. And
it was given to him by . . . well, I’ll come to that. We
were eating in a restaurant in New York City. Yoko was with us, so this
was after their big break-up and reconciliation. Yoko was expecting
their child, Sean, and John was excited — he was going to love this
baby day and night: feed him, change him, teach him to talk, teach him
to love music. He did all of that. And he was
going to watch him grow into adolescence, through the tumbles from
bicycles and terrors of schooldays, from reading to dating to college.
He never got to do that. John started talking about UFOs. He
said he believed life existed on other planets, that it had visited us,
that maybe it was observing us right now. He took me to a quieter,
darker table, lit a cigarette and pointed its glowing tip at my face. “You believe in this stuff, right?” he asked me. “Well, you ain’t f---in’ gonna believe this.
“About six months ago, I was asleep in my bed, with Yoko, at home, in
the Dakota Building. And suddenly, I wasn’t asleep. 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. “That was what I thought
— intruders, or fire. I leapt out of bed, and Yoko wasn’t awake at all,
she was lying there like a stone, and I pulled open the door. There
were these four people out there.” “Fans?” I asked him. “Well
they didn’t want my f---in’ autograph. They were, like, little.
Bug-like. Big bug eyes and little bug mouths and they were scuttling at
me like roaches.” He broke off and stared at me. “I’ve
told this to two other people, right? One was Yoko, and she believes
me. She says she doesn’t understand it, but she knows I wouldn’t lie to
her. I told one other person, and she didn’t believe me. “She
laughed it off, and then she said I must have been high. Well, I’ve
been high, I mean right out of it, a lot of times, and I never saw
anything on acid that was as weird as those f---in’ bugs, man.guest.html“I
was straight that night. I wasn’t dreaming and I wasn’t tripping. There
were these creatures, like people but not like people, in my
apartment.” “What did they do to you?” Lennon
swore again. “How do you know they did anything to me, man?” “Because
they must have come for a reason.” “You’re
right. They did something. But I don’t know what it was. I tried to
throw them out, but, when I took a step towards them, they kind of
pushed me back. I mean, they didn’t touch me. It was like they just
willed me. Pushed me with willpower and telepathy.” “And then what?” “I
don’t know. Something happened. Don’t ask me what. Either I’ve
forgotten, blocked it out, or they won’t let me remember. But after a
while they weren’t there and I was just lying on the bed, next to Yoko,
only I was on the covers. "And she woke up and
looked at me and asked what was wrong. I couldn’t tell her at first.
But I had this thing in my hands. They gave it to me.” “What
was it?” Lennon dug into his jeans pocket. “I’ve been carrying it round
ever since, wanting to ask somebody the same question. You have it.
Maybe you’ll know.” I took the metal, egg-like
object and turned it over in the dim light. It seemed solid and smooth,
and I could make out no markings. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” “Keep it.” John
told me. “It’s too weird for me. If it’s my ticket to
another planet, I don’t want to go there.” When
we first met on November 28, 1974, almost exactly 30 years ago, he was
suffering terribly from his separation from Yoko. His drug abuse and
drinking, linked to the sorrow of Yoko’s recent miscarriage, had driven
them apart, and John desperately wanted to mend the relationship. He
just didn’t know how to make the first move. The night Lennon and I
were introduced, Elton John was playing at Madison Square Gardens.
Elton was trying to persuade the ex-Beatle to get up on stage with him,
and John was torn — he wanted to perform but he was scared. Finally,
he turned to me and offered a deal, as though I were a negotiator sent
by God: “I’ll sing,” he said, “but you have to make Yoko call me.” Like
all of John’s jokes, this one was a plea from the heart, wrapped in a
sardonic quip. Yoko phoned John out of the blue, 36 hours later. I
think John always believed I had beamed a mind-control ray at her. For
my part, I think that of all the synchronicities that have shaped my
life, that was one of the strangest. John Lennon
was a compulsive doodler. The last autograph he ever signed, 15 minutes
before Mark Chapman gunned him down outside his home at the Dakota
Building, on December 9, 1980, features a double portrait of himself
and his wife, Yoko Ono. The drawings are done in a couple of lines —
the style is unmistakable and so are the faces. I
always marvelled at John’s skill as an artist. There is no doubt that,
if he’d been tone deaf and tuneless, the boy who created The Beatles
could have become a successful painter or illustrator. During the last
year of his life, we met most weeks to chat over a coffee in one of the
hotels near our New York homes. Sometimes John
would bring Sean, who was about four years old then. The rocker had put
his music career on hold while the child was small. John once told me
how bitterly he regretted that while his first son, Julian, was a
toddler, he himself was devoting his energies to the stage or the
studio, or would be out partying with friends. “You don’t get
those years back,” he said. “I’m not going to miss a
minute while Sean is growing up.” That
is the greatest tragedy of my friend’s death. He had finally learned
what made him happy, and then he was robbed of it. What really
interested me about John was not his incredible life, his fame or his
talent, but his deep spirituality. I too was
working out what made me happy — I’d realised at last that buying
watches and eating six helpings of dessert before making myself throw
up was not the path to nirvana. The shock of
Lennon’s murder was one of the powerful forces that drove me to quit
New York and spend a year in Japan, undergoing a spiritual detox. John
spoke with passion about Japanese views of life, and I am certain that
Yoko’s philosophies were at the core of his last years. I was woken on the day John was shot by a call from a friend, Roland, a publisher who lived opposite the Dakota. “He’s
dead,” Roland sobbed. “They killed John.” I dressed in a few seconds
and ran across town: somehow I had to see the house to believe the
news. The radio reports weren’t enough. If John
really were dead, if this wasn’t some sick media hoax, then there would
be people outside his home with candles and prayer bells. They were
there, in their hundreds already. I didn’t have
to push my way through the crowd; I simply stood and stared across the
road, and then walked away through Central Park with the tears running
down my face. Now, 24 years on, when I hold the
cold, metal egg in my fist, I have a strong sensation that John knew
more about this object than he told me. Maybe it didn’t come with an
instruction manual, but I think John knew what it was for. And
whatever that purpose was - communication? healing? a first-class
intergalactic ticket? - it scared him. I wish I could have warned
him . . . that however scary aliens seem, it’s the humans you have to
fear.
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