UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (26 page)

An artist’s copy of drawings made by independent witnesses in different parts of New York and Connecticut in 1983 and 1984, which have been reduced and sized to fit the same scale
. Collection of Phil Imbrogno

Although the Hudson Valley residents reported mainly delta- or V-shaped objects and the Belgians saw mostly triangular ones, in reading the many witness accounts of both events, the similar behaviors of the crafts are striking. The bizarre and highly unusual “red light ball” phenomenon reported by the four Belgian policemen made an appearance in upstate New York as well. During the first, dramatic night of the Belgian wave in 1989, two pairs of policemen in different locations watched the red light ball shoot out on a beam from a hovering craft, which was then drawn back into the UFO—a rare detail observed at very close range. Heinrich Nicoll, one of the policemen who witnessed this spectacle, interpreted it to be a probe of some sort. In an interview, he said, “The ball kept leaving and coming back, as if the ball were trying to measure something.”
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During the Hudson Valley wave, David Athens, chief of the New Fairfield Fire Department in Connecticut, was standing outside talking with a police officer in July 1984 when both saw a row of lights in a circular pattern. “I would say it was something man-made except that two of the red lights dropped down from the group and went in a different direction behind the mountains. One came back and the other didn’t,” Athens reported.
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Jim Cooke, a biomedical engineer, was shocked to see a triangular object hovering no more than fifteen feet above the water of the Croton Falls Reservoir late one October night in 1983 while driving home. He got out of his car and watched from the edge of the water. “Something came from the underside of the object, a red beam of light or something solid that was glowing red—I really don’t know what. But it seemed to be probing the water,”
⁴
he said. According to Cooke, the object moved slowly over the reservoir, and at each stop the “red probe” interacted with the water, and was then retracted. Like the Belgian craft displaying essentially the same thing, this one was triangular. Heinrich Nicoll’s description was remarkably similar to Cooke’s. He also witnessed the phenomenon over a body of water, which he, too, interpreted to be a probe of some sort. We may never know the purpose of this strange red offshoot of the UFO, but this suggests that very similar objects may have visited both locations in the 1980s.

Despite the intriguing similarities, there was a major difference between these events in upstate New York and those in Belgium—not in the details of what actually happened, but in the way these extraordinary close encounters, repeated year after year, were handled by the authorities—those in charge of protecting citizens and monitoring unregistered air incursions over populated areas.

We must remember that the 1989–90 UFO wave in Belgium was handled rationally, openly, and responsibly by the government. The Belgian Air Force was called into action immediately, and other agencies, such as the Gendarmerie Nationale (a combination of police and army) and the Belgian equivalent of our FAA, also cooperated in the mobilization to identify the objects. The Air Force was not only responsive, but was even proactive in its investigation, looking for craft on multiple radar systems, scrambling F-16s to intercept one on three occasions, and then holding a press conference to explain all this to the public. In addition, state-of-the-art analysis was provided by a number of laboratories on the superior photograph of a craft, one of the best UFO pictures on record. And to take it one step further, the Belgian Air Force made all its data and every resource, including radar stations and even aircraft, available to a highly competent group of civilian scientists who organized data, interviewed witnesses, and kept extensive records. All of these important developments were covered in the European media, with some reporting in the United States, as well. Through it all, the Belgian government did not hide information, issue false explanations, or ridicule witnesses. In fact, we know that Colonel Wilfried De Brouwer, head of the Air Force investigation, told the people the truth. Much was learned, except for the most important thing of all: the origin and purpose of the crafts themselves.

However, in the United States, our UFO wave wasn’t handled at all. Not a thing was done by any branch of our government. There was no national or statewide mobilization. No Air Force F-16s were launched (at least not as a matter of public record). No attempts were made to capture the objects on radar. Nor was there any established partnership with a leading U.S. research organization to collect reports, though such qualified scientific groups were ready and waiting. No government labs analyzed the photographs. No government body convened a press conference to provide Air Force data for a public eager for information. The local media gave plenty of coverage in places where the events were actually happening and were a fact of life, but because no officials were engaged other than local policemen, national coverage was minimal.

When pressed by concerned callers, the FAA told witnesses that they had seen something other than what they saw—recognizable things that made a lot of noise, such as airplanes in formation, or helicopters. Numerous factors rendered this explanation untenable, the most obvious being that sometimes the craft hovered or moved more slowly than planes could fly, often at very low altitudes, and it was usually silent. Hovering helicopters or a group of planes flying in formation are notoriously loud. Also, the UFO was seen on many occasions when there were no planes or blimps aloft, as confirmed by the nearby airport. Sometimes, witnesses saw a massive, solid structure around the lights blocking out the sky behind it, easily distinguishable from conventional aircraft. In 1984, for example, six security guards at the Indian Point nuclear power plant witnessed the UFO hovering about 300 feet over the reactor in restricted airspace. Two guards told investigators it was a solid object bigger than a football field.
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Yet U.S. government indifference never changed, despite the fact that what many called the “Westchester County boomerangs” hovered or cruised off and on for years over the Hudson Valley and parts of Connecticut, arrayed with colored lights that sometimes blinked on and off when approaching people. Witnesses were left to handle these events on their own, encounters that were disturbing to some, frightening to others, and awe-inspiring to almost everyone; but no official guidance was offered as to what to do. Police departments in New York and Connecticut were flooded with calls, but how were the small units to respond? They were simply not prepared or equipped to handle something like this, beyond making records of these witness accounts, some from their own officers. Traffic jams occurred on Route 84, a major thoroughfare, as drivers stared at the sky. And the local airports simply told callers that they had nothing on radar and could not confirm the sightings. Communities were left unassisted in trying to make sense of these absolutely staggering events, and most of the U.S. public never heard anything about them.

How could something as momentous as these Hudson Valley sightings, repeated year after year, be ignored by our government and swept under the rug? This indifference is so stunning that one could justify questioning whether these events actually took place at all. Many would ask, how could this
really
have happened if I never heard anything about it? And why didn’t I hear about the wave in Belgium for that matter, or other very credible UFO sightings, if, in fact, thousands of witnesses were involved? This puzzling situation, prompting legitimate questions about whether UFOs actually exist, represents one of the primary reasons intelligent, well-informed Americans don’t “believe in” UFOs. And for good reason. A rational conclusion would be that if this were really happening, we would all know about it.

If the Air Force Project Blue Book were still in effect at the time of these sightings in New York State, they
would
have been officially investigated, even if not at the level many of us would have liked. It would have been harder for the Air Force to offer quick, dubious explanations for these events, which happened repeatedly and at very close range. Fortunately, the key scientist with Blue Book throughout its twenty years was still actively investigating UFO cases in the mid-1980s, and was paying attention to the sightings in upstate New York. Although no longer formally associated with the U.S. government, Dr. J. Allen Hynek began investigating the Hudson Valley wave in 1984. By that time he was widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on UFOs as well as an eloquent spokesman on the subject to the American public. These sightings were the final focus of Dr. Hynek’s life—he died in 1986—and he poured a great deal of energy into confronting the shocking indifference of U.S. government officials in the face of the repeated, well-documented visits by some kind of phenomenon.
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Government apathy, he realized, is what had kept the story from exploding into the national media.

Despite the fact that he had been at the forefront of many UFO investigations for more than three decades, the unrelenting Hudson Valley wave seemed to both awe and baffle Hynek beyond anything else. Nothing quite like this had happened before in America. In a 1985 essay,
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he described “hundreds of largely professional, affluent people in suburban areas,” whose statements he and others recorded on cassette tapes, as “astonished, awestruck and often frightened” by the bizarre sightings. When flying over the Taconic Parkway, or cruising low over streets and houses, an “utterly strange and possibly menacing object” constituted a serious hazard that should have concerned the FAA, he wrote. For scientists, these events should have been of breathtaking scientific concern, and the police and the media were completely derelict in their apathy and indifference, keeping the whole thing out of public awareness.

To understand how such things could occur without our knowing about them, we need to examine the total inaction by those in positions of responsibility. “It was as if a malady plunged all who encountered it, except the witnesses, into a deadly stupor,” Hynek mused. “In the story of the Boomerang sightings, the FAA, the media, the scientists, the politicians and the military all may momentarily have touched the mystery, but it appears that then apathy intervened, sapping all incentive, and left in its place a powerful desire to do nothing.”

Like so many today, Hynek wanted to know how and why this shocking inaction occurred. He had been a committed skeptic about UFOs when hired by the Air Force, and with his colleagues in the scientific world had often made fun of people who reported seeing them. Although he initially set out to show there was nothing to any of this “nonsense,” he underwent a gradual transformation during his long tenure working for the government. While investigating hundreds of UFO cases and interviewing countless credible witnesses, he came to recognize that there
was
a real, physical phenomenon involved, and a very mysterious one. He described it this way in 1977:

I had started out as an outright “debunker,” taking great joy in cracking what seemed at first to be puzzling cases. I was the arch enemy of those “flying saucer groups and enthusiasts” who very dearly wanted UFOs to be interplanetary. My own knowledge of those groups came almost entirely from what I heard from Blue Book personnel: they were all “crackpots and visionaries.”

My transformation was gradual but by the late sixties it was complete. Today I would not spend one further moment on the subject of UFOs if I didn’t seriously feel that the UFO phenomenon is real and that efforts to investigate and understand it, and eventually to solve it, could have a profound effect—perhaps even be the springboard to mankind’s outlook on the universe.
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In 1985, the dedicated investigator was confronting an extreme manifestation of a peculiarly American phenomenon known as the UFO taboo—the automatic, deeply ingrained refusal to acknowledge that something so contradictory to what we consider “normal,” and therefore unacceptable to our worldview, could possibly exist no matter what the evidence shows. In this case, Hynek observed that the taboo is so powerful that it can thwart the duties of groups of otherwise highly responsible people in positions of authority. He struggled to find some kind of core answer to this dilemma.

Hynek noted that seeing the otherworldly Westchester County boomerangs caused stress, trauma, and fear among the witnesses. They were given no answers and felt unprotected by their government, and many did not want to “go public” about these events for fear of being ridiculed. Rooted in the minds of most people, such as the policemen who received reports from witnesses and had not seen anything themselves, was the collective belief that this type of event cannot possibly happen. The only way out was to label the witnesses “crackpots.” And yet thousands of people actually saw the objects. They were faced with the conundrum that they
knew
that these events
did
happen, as did others from the area personally acquainted with witnesses or informed about sightings from trusted sources, such as local newspapers. Could all of these people be lying or confused? Or could it be that there was something larger, more deeply rooted, that kept government officials from truly listening to these accounts, accepting them as true, and investigating accordingly?

Hynek postulated that, in its inability to accept something as revolutionary as the existence of these inconceivable crafts, our psyche simply shuts the whole thing out. The impossible reality “overheats the human mental circuits and blows the fuses in a protective mechanism for the mind.… When a collective breaking point is reached, the mind must openly disregard the patent evidence of the senses. It can no longer encompass such evidence within its normal borders.” He concluded that, due to the totally bizarre, shocking, and even traumatic nature of such an event, there is no energy for action, as if everyone was operating on a dead battery. This dynamic can affect groups of people as a whole, and those in charge were not exempt from its numbing effects. “With apathy goes the ability to accept even the most inane explanations—anything whatever—to stave off the necessity to think about the unthinkable,” Hynek wrote.