‘It’s like they were smoking something potent’: the ‘bizarre’ Paul McCartney alien musical that never was

Wings at Osterley Park, London in 1971. From left: Denny Laine, Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Seiwell. Photograph: Barry Lategan/PA

It is the film that never was – an unlikely sci-fi musical about aliens dreamed up by Paul McCartney half a century ago. The aliens would have landed in a flying saucer, but the project never got off the ground.

Now the former Beatle’s treatment for the film – and an expanded version by the American sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov that McCartney turned down – have been unearthed in a US archive by the authors Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, while researching a forthcoming book.