The Hudson Valley UFO
The Hudson Valley U̳F̳O̳. In a place you would hardly expect, just an hour north of New York City, is the site of one of the most widely observed and yet most inexplicable set of U̳F̳O̳ sightings ever seen. The place is the Hudson Valley, and the story of its strange U̳F̳O̳ began on New Year\’s Eve 1982.
A few minutes before midnight, a retired police officer was in his backyard in Kent, New York, when he observed a cluster of strange lights to the south. They were red, green and white. At first, the former officer thought they belonged to a jet plane in trouble, but when the object passed over his house at a height he estimated to be about 500 feet, he realized that it was moving too slowly for a jet plane and was making very little noise. . Just a distant buzz. As he watched, he decided that the lights, which appeared in a “V” shape, were connected by a dark triangular fuselage.
What the former officer had seen would be seen many times in the Hudson Valley area over the next few years by hundreds of different witnesses: a V-shaped array of multi-colored lights moving slowly and silently across the sky. On March 26, 1983, a front-page article in the Westchester-Rockland daily article proclaimed:
HUNDREDS CLAIM TO HAVE SEEN U̳F̳O̳
The article, which spoke of sightings of a triangular U̳F̳O̳ on March 24, caught the attention of a group of U̳F̳O̳ researchers in the Valley associated with Dr. J Allen Hynek, founder of the Center for U̳F̳O̳ Studies. The group began an investigation of the phenomena that was later documented in a book, Night Siege: The Hudson Valley U̳F̳O̳ Sightings, written by Dr. Hynek and Philip J. Imbrogno, with the help of Bob Pratt.
The group opened a U̳F̳O̳ hotline and received more than 300 calls from people who had seen the U̳F̳O̳ on the night of March 24 alone. A witness cited in the book reported that it had moved down the Taconic Parkway in “sort of a Z pattern.” He described the object as being triangular in shape with thirty to forty colored lights along the trailing edge. The object, he claimed, was huge: “If there is a flying city, this was a flying city.”
The object also apparently crossed over the Yorktown community that night, where the police switchboard became so full of reports that officials worried they might not be able to take emergency calls.
On Taconic Avenue, people stopped to watch the object as it moved slowly across their path. One observer estimated that it was “as big as an aircraft carrier.”
U̳F̳O̳ researchers estimated that more than 5,000 people had seen the object during a five-year period from 1982 to 1986. Often the U̳F̳O̳ seemed to glide over large areas causing dozens of sightings in one night. He was never seen during the day.
Most of the reports came from people who appeared to be reliable witnesses. As the authors say, “ordinary people who have seen something extraordinary.” The U̳F̳O̳ was seen not only over the Hudson Valley, but also as far east as New Haven, Connecticut, and as far north as Brookfield, Connecticut.
While most reports described the U̳F̳O̳ moving at a very slow speed, hovering or spinning slowly like a wheel, some reports described the object suddenly moving away at fantastic speeds or simply disappearing. In some accounts, the shape varied so that the lights looked more like a circle than a “V.” Often the color and arrangement of the lights changed as viewers watched. In a few cases reports came in that placed the object in two distant locations at the same time, suggesting that there could be more than one of them.
One of the most striking reports the group gathered was from guards at the Indian Point nuclear plant. The U̳F̳O̳ hovered over an active nuclear reactor for a few minutes, approaching the reactor dome as close as ten meters. The security supervisor even considered ordering the guards to take him down. One guard described it as being the length of three football fields.
The object also seemed to be interested in bodies of water. An observer observed the U̳F̳O̳ over the Croton Falls reservoir, where it appeared to use a red beam to probe the surface.
Researchers knew that when they investigated, most U̳F̳O̳ reports turned into IFO reports: identified flying objects. They often turn out to be airplanes, balloons, satellites, or even the planet Venus. They found evidence that some of the reports of the “V” shape may have been a group of small planes flying out of the Stormville airport. The pilots appeared to have been flying their planes in formation in a deliberate attempt at a U̳F̳O̳ hoax.
However, the plane hoax only cleared up a small number of reports. Most observers reported that the lights moved together like solid objects. Others could see the body of the U̳F̳O̳ among the lights. None of the observers who had seen the planes and the object thought they were the same phenomenon.
There are few good explanations for most Hudson Valley sightings. The only object that moves slowly through the air and floats almost silently is a blimp. Investigators contacted all blimp operators in the area and were unable to find a match between blimp schedules and U̳F̳O̳ reports. It was widely speculated at the time that the object was a formation of ultralight aircraft. This seems unlikely since the U̳F̳O̳ was almost silent, could hover, and carried tremendously bright lights, all things ultralight aircraft are incapable of doing.
The Hudson Valley UFO remains a mystery even today. If you decide to take a trip to the Hudson Valley to try to see the strange UFO for yourself, you may want to stay in one of the excellent local bed and breakfast inns. One, the Burlingham Inn, has decided to take advantage of the strange nighttime phenomena by presenting a UFO Bed & Breakfast. They welcome UFO watchers and list UFO sightings as one of the activities for which the Inn is especially well located.
