1 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:32,000 You 2 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:12,000 My name is Jan Harzant. I'm the executive director for MUFON. We are a scientific research organization 3 00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:17,000 that basically collects citing reports from the public and then goes and investigates them. 4 00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:23,000 Our mission statement as an organization is the scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity. 5 00:01:23,000 --> 00:01:30,000 And we have three primary goals. We investigate UFO reports, we promote research into the UFO subject, 6 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:33,000 and we educate the public on our findings. 7 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:41,000 MUFON is really more just left of center where we try to take a scientific approach by collecting the data first off 8 00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:48,000 and then reviewing the data, investigating the data, and making sure that what we're seeing is actually something that's truly an unknown. 9 00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:54,000 We have 3,000 members worldwide, many scientists, physicists, PhDs, metallurgists, biologists, 10 00:01:54,000 --> 00:01:58,000 all the way down to just the average citizen who really wants to get involved. 11 00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:04,000 Some of those have chosen to become field investigators and they go through our field investigative training courses. 12 00:02:04,000 --> 00:02:12,000 They become part of the team in their state or country where they reside, and they actually get engaged in going out and meeting this phenomena head on. 13 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:16,000 We receive about 500 to 1,000 reports per month from around the world. 14 00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:22,000 Field investigators will take the case, generally review it, try to come up with a hypothesis, 15 00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:28,000 checking star charts, and we'll go put an investigation in place to determine what exactly happened. 16 00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:36,000 We've recently formed a science review board, and that board is made up of scientists from around the United States and around the world 17 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:41,000 to review some of our more significant cases and try to render an opinion on them. 18 00:02:41,000 --> 00:02:47,000 What we'd like to do is be more outbound, more outspoken in terms of the really true UFO cases. 19 00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:57,000 So MUFON is moving forward with this approach, and we'll be publishing papers in these different areas to allow the general public and even the scientific community 20 00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:00,000 to be able to be challenged by what we're finding. 21 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:07,000 That's the strength of MUFON as an organization is being really the truth seekers of the UFO field. 22 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:39,000 Music 23 00:03:39,000 --> 00:03:48,000 Our next speaker, Linda Zimmerman, is a research chemist, turn award winning author of 30 books on science, history, the paranormal, and fiction. 24 00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:53,000 She's lectured across the country and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. 25 00:03:53,000 --> 00:04:01,000 Linda starred in the documentary In the Night Sky, I Recall a UFO, which was based on her research into sightings in the Hudson Valley of New York. 26 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:07,000 Here to talk about the Hudson Valley UFO sightings, a century of UFO sightings. 27 00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:09,000 Linda Zimmerman. 28 00:04:09,000 --> 00:04:16,000 Applause 29 00:04:16,000 --> 00:04:19,000 Thank you very much. Welcome everyone. 30 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:27,000 I thank MUFON for giving me the opportunity to speak about a topic that I not only have a great intellectual curiosity for, 31 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:42,000 but a great personal interest in as well as I have spent my entire life in the Hudson Valley growing up surrounded by stories of UFOs and actually having a couple of sightings myself. 32 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:49,000 So some of you may be familiar with the Hudson Valley, at least the flap of the 1980s, 33 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:58,000 but what I'm going to present today goes far beyond the 1980s to really an entire century of sightings. 34 00:04:58,000 --> 00:05:01,000 So without further ado, I will jump in. 35 00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:07,000 I had never planned on doing a UFO book. 36 00:05:07,000 --> 00:05:11,000 I hadn't planned on a lot of things in my life actually, but that's life. 37 00:05:11,000 --> 00:05:18,000 I started my career as a research chemist and I enjoyed writing about local history and science. 38 00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:24,000 And when I'd give a lecture somewhere in the Hudson Valley, people would come up to me with their UFO stories. 39 00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:29,000 And I said, well, that's very interesting, but I don't do UFOs. 40 00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:42,000 Well, after about 15 or 20 years of hearing these stories, I said, it's time I do UFOs because this just went so far beyond what even I had known growing up. 41 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:48,000 So the first book was In the Night Sky came out a couple of years ago. 42 00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:55,000 And as I started my research, I decided to contact a production company that was in the Hudson Valley. 43 00:05:55,000 --> 00:06:06,000 And I thought maybe we could have a 10-minute companion video that we can just put on YouTube, something to drum up interest and maybe get more people to come forward. 44 00:06:06,000 --> 00:06:16,000 Well, you know, great oaks grow from little acorns and that 10-minute companion video became a 2DVD full-length set. 45 00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:26,000 And we actually were fortunate enough to win the People's Choice Award at the EBE Film Festival, the UFO Congress, in 2013. 46 00:06:26,000 --> 00:06:32,000 And of course, with that success came more people out of the woodwork wanting to tell their stories, 47 00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:36,000 which is why the second book, Hudson Valley UFOs, came out. 48 00:06:36,000 --> 00:06:42,000 And people tell me I have to write a third because they want their story told as well. 49 00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:46,000 So I am working on a third. Who knows how many more. 50 00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:56,000 But it just goes to speak to this incredible scope of the generations of sighting by so many tens of thousands of people over the years. 51 00:06:57,000 --> 00:07:10,000 I will leave this up to you, but in my personal opinion, I think the Hudson Valley over the last century has been the number one hot spot in the United States. 52 00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:16,000 So it's open into interpretation. I will let you draw your own conclusions. 53 00:07:16,000 --> 00:07:20,000 But that is the premise that I have been working on. 54 00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:31,000 One thing I made a great mistake when I first started doing this research was I assumed everybody knew where the Hudson Valley was. 55 00:07:31,000 --> 00:07:38,000 My first presentation several years ago, people were saying, oh yeah, I know the Hudson Valley. That's Wyoming, isn't it? 56 00:07:38,000 --> 00:07:42,000 Isn't that somewhere in Florida? You name it. 57 00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:54,000 I said, okay, I'm going to start with a very simple map, New York, basically from New York City up to Albany, the counties that are on either side of the Hudson River. 58 00:07:54,000 --> 00:08:11,000 But I do want to clarify that a lot of these sightings, particularly some of the largest sightings on any given night, would also spill over into northern New Jersey and western Connecticut and sometimes western Massachusetts as well. 59 00:08:11,000 --> 00:08:22,000 Obviously, these were not isolated incidents. If UFO was traveling a thousand miles that night, it was going to be seen over a wide range. 60 00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:33,000 But for the most part, what I'll be speaking about tonight and what I focus on are the ones that are actually in the Hudson Valley. 61 00:08:33,000 --> 00:08:41,000 When I was a child, I was of course fascinated by UFOs. I think everybody was, science fiction movies, you name it. 62 00:08:41,000 --> 00:08:47,000 But UFOs to me were always things that happened in somebody else's backyard. 63 00:08:47,000 --> 00:08:54,000 And then I picked up a Frank Edwards book. I think it was Flying Saucers Serious Business. 64 00:08:54,000 --> 00:09:00,000 And there was this photograph taken at Lake Tirati in 1966. 65 00:09:00,000 --> 00:09:06,000 Now Lake Tirati was where my family went just about every Saturday or Sunday in the summer. 66 00:09:06,000 --> 00:09:09,000 We would picnic, we would fish, we would rent a boat. 67 00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:14,000 And all of a sudden, you can imagine a little kid seeing this image of this. 68 00:09:14,000 --> 00:09:20,000 It was described as a coppery shaped disc, maybe 18, 20 feet in diameter. 69 00:09:20,000 --> 00:09:29,000 And I was amazed. I was blown away. This was my backyard now, not some distant land. 70 00:09:29,000 --> 00:09:35,000 And the story that came out was this man was fishing by the name of Vincent Perna. 71 00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:38,000 He and his brother, he had a little brownie camera. 72 00:09:38,000 --> 00:09:41,000 Remember the little brownie film cameras in his tackle box. 73 00:09:41,000 --> 00:09:44,000 He took a series of four photographs. 74 00:09:44,000 --> 00:09:52,000 When he brought it to the local newspaper and police, they suggested, these were such remarkable images, 75 00:09:52,000 --> 00:09:55,000 that he go to bring it to the Air Force Base. 76 00:09:55,000 --> 00:10:02,000 At the time, we have Stuart International Airport now, which also has an Air National Guard Unit. 77 00:10:02,000 --> 00:10:06,000 But back then, it was an actual Air Force Base. 78 00:10:06,000 --> 00:10:12,000 Now this man is voluntarily going there with his photos and negatives. 79 00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:20,000 They proceed to inject the man with sodium pentothal and try to discredit him in every way possible. 80 00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:23,000 And they're not able to do it because he's telling the truth. 81 00:10:23,000 --> 00:10:27,000 I saw this object. I'm not telling you what it is. I just took these photos. 82 00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:36,000 So since they weren't able to personally discredit him, they concluded that these objects on this series of four photos 83 00:10:36,000 --> 00:10:39,000 was nothing more than a blob of developing fluid. 84 00:10:39,000 --> 00:10:48,000 That happened to show up as a coppery shaped disc on four consecutive negatives. 85 00:10:48,000 --> 00:10:53,000 So this was a great influence. This was a turning point in my young life. 86 00:10:53,000 --> 00:11:01,000 We had UFOs in my virtual backyard. We had government cover-ups. We had conspiracies. 87 00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:09,000 We had all the great elements that would hook a young mind into the field of ufology. 88 00:11:10,000 --> 00:11:19,000 I tried to start pushing back this phenomena as far as I could. 89 00:11:19,000 --> 00:11:27,000 And I actually came across a series of articles from 1909 involving mysterious airships. 90 00:11:27,000 --> 00:11:33,000 Now you're probably all familiar with the mysterious airships in California and Texas in the 1890s. 91 00:11:34,000 --> 00:11:42,000 And I hadn't been aware until recently of our own mysterious airships, you know, a decade or so later. 92 00:11:42,000 --> 00:11:49,000 But before I describe what was happening, I think it's important to know what was the state of aviation at the time. 93 00:11:49,000 --> 00:11:53,000 This plane on the top here, you can see it's one of the Wright brothers. 94 00:11:53,000 --> 00:11:55,000 He's talking to somebody in the Army. 95 00:11:56,000 --> 00:12:03,000 He just sold this little stick-in-fabric plane to the Air Force for $30,000. 96 00:12:03,000 --> 00:12:06,000 That is $30,009. 97 00:12:06,000 --> 00:12:14,000 To give you an idea, the average wage was $0.22 an hour, and the average worker made about $300 a year. 98 00:12:14,000 --> 00:12:18,000 So this was quite a remarkable fortune he made. 99 00:12:18,000 --> 00:12:23,000 So this was the Army's first airplane, state-of-the-art. 100 00:12:24,000 --> 00:12:31,000 It could go about 42 miles an hour, top speed, and could stale off maybe about an hour. 101 00:12:31,000 --> 00:12:37,000 But I read several accounts where the wise pilot would strap a canoe to the bottom, 102 00:12:37,000 --> 00:12:45,000 because if he were to be going over water, chances are he would be needing that canoe to get back home. 103 00:12:46,000 --> 00:12:54,000 The dirigible on the bottom here was a pretty pathetic example compared to the Zeppelins in Europe. 104 00:12:54,000 --> 00:12:58,000 This was the SC-1 with a top speed of about 20 miles an hour. 105 00:12:58,000 --> 00:13:01,000 It could stale off maybe two hours. 106 00:13:01,000 --> 00:13:09,000 The important thing in 1909, no airplanes had lights and no airplanes had yet flown at night. 107 00:13:10,000 --> 00:13:15,000 I believe the first night flight was in Buenos Aires in about 1910. 108 00:13:15,000 --> 00:13:22,000 So then how do we explain these mysterious airship sightings? 109 00:13:22,000 --> 00:13:27,000 It flies only at night and keeps folks up in Orange County. 110 00:13:27,000 --> 00:13:31,000 They were seeing a light that was moving from town to town. 111 00:13:31,000 --> 00:13:36,000 There was another one from the Newburgh Journal that was saying the airship was seen swooping. 112 00:13:37,000 --> 00:13:39,000 It was over the top of a mountain. 113 00:13:39,000 --> 00:13:50,000 People on the Hudson River, people across the river for hours were watching these lights just kind of swooping back and forth and slowly rising. 114 00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:57,000 There really wasn't anything we had that could stale off for that period of time, 115 00:13:57,000 --> 00:14:01,000 and as I said, there were no aircraft yet carrying lights. 116 00:14:01,000 --> 00:14:09,000 These sightings continued throughout New England, up through the Boston area, down to New York City. 117 00:14:09,000 --> 00:14:16,000 By the end of the year, thousands of people throughout the Northeast had seen these mysterious airships, 118 00:14:16,000 --> 00:14:19,000 or at least these mysterious lights at night. 119 00:14:19,000 --> 00:14:22,000 Now, nobody said they were extraterrestrials. 120 00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:27,000 You know, some people today said it was a product of mass hysteria. 121 00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:29,000 Well, what were they hysterical about? 122 00:14:29,000 --> 00:14:35,000 They thought the Wright brothers or Thomas Edison had invented some new aircraft, 123 00:14:35,000 --> 00:14:40,000 and they were excited for sure because they wanted to see this great advance in technology. 124 00:14:40,000 --> 00:14:46,000 Now, when I was doing my research, going through all the microfilm, 125 00:14:46,000 --> 00:14:53,000 I came across this article here and the title caught my eye, Human Volcano Erupts. 126 00:14:54,000 --> 00:15:00,000 I said, well, I have to see what this is all about, and it turns out, to my knowledge, 127 00:15:00,000 --> 00:15:04,000 it is the first UFO-related arrest. 128 00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:06,000 And I will just read this to you. 129 00:15:06,000 --> 00:15:16,000 Otto Pushman, Newberg's champion cusser, had been sent to jail for 30 days for using sulfurous language. 130 00:15:16,000 --> 00:15:21,000 During the nocturnal hours of Tuesday, he was discovered on Grand Street, 131 00:15:21,000 --> 00:15:26,000 looking for that ding-blasted airship that the Newberg papers tell about, 132 00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:30,000 and cursing fervently at the blankety-blanked moon. 133 00:15:30,000 --> 00:15:34,000 So here's a man standing, probably slightly inebriated, 134 00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:38,000 standing on a street corner in the middle of the night, cursing his head off. 135 00:15:38,000 --> 00:15:45,000 He wanted to see this mysterious airship, and for that, he was thrown in jail for 30 days. 136 00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:52,000 The New York papers started picking up on these. 137 00:15:52,000 --> 00:15:57,000 I found one article that said, the great airship mystery is solved. 138 00:15:57,000 --> 00:16:02,000 It was actually little Johnny Smith flying his kite in Central Park. 139 00:16:02,000 --> 00:16:09,000 And I started to get a little steamed, and then I found this, which I believe was in the New York Sun. 140 00:16:09,000 --> 00:16:14,000 And if you see a mysterious airship, well, it's probably Santa Claus, 141 00:16:14,000 --> 00:16:18,000 and you see he's carrying a lantern there, and that's what you saw, 142 00:16:18,000 --> 00:16:21,000 or maybe it's baby New Year coming to see. 143 00:16:21,000 --> 00:16:28,000 So here, 100 years ago, we have thousands of credible eyewitnesses 144 00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:32,000 over the course of at least six months, up and down the East Coast, 145 00:16:32,000 --> 00:16:36,000 and the newspaper is ridiculing everybody and making fun of it. 146 00:16:36,000 --> 00:16:44,000 So all the elements that frustrate us today were already in place 100 years ago. 147 00:16:45,000 --> 00:16:49,000 All right, the question everyone's always wants to know, the government, 148 00:16:49,000 --> 00:16:52,000 what did they know, and when did they know it? 149 00:16:52,000 --> 00:16:58,000 I decided to pull out a few cases just to illustrate that, at least in the Hudson Valley, 150 00:16:58,000 --> 00:17:03,000 the government knew a lot, and they knew it early, and they knew it for many decades. 151 00:17:04,000 --> 00:17:09,000 This gentleman here, Hank Vanderbake, was a corrections officer his entire life, 152 00:17:09,000 --> 00:17:14,000 and as he pointed out to me, we are trained to observe everything. 153 00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:17,000 If you work in a prison, you watch everything. 154 00:17:17,000 --> 00:17:22,000 Well, as a younger boy, he and his brother and some friends were playing, 155 00:17:22,000 --> 00:17:26,000 this was 1953 in the town of Sogerties, New York, 156 00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:29,000 and you can see he's standing by a baseball field here, 157 00:17:29,000 --> 00:17:32,000 and he's holding up a little piece of artwork he had done. 158 00:17:32,000 --> 00:17:35,000 It was a beautiful sunny warm day, they're all playing, 159 00:17:35,000 --> 00:17:39,000 and suddenly one of the boys says, you know, what is that? 160 00:17:39,000 --> 00:17:44,000 Look up, and this is the painting he did for me. 161 00:17:44,000 --> 00:17:48,000 He said there was a cigar-shaped object tapered at both ends, 162 00:17:48,000 --> 00:17:55,000 at least 300 feet long, with a series of circular, you know, it was the 1950s, 163 00:17:55,000 --> 00:18:00,000 so he described them as hula hoops of light that were at least 50 feet in diameter, 164 00:18:00,000 --> 00:18:03,000 alternating red and green. 165 00:18:03,000 --> 00:18:09,000 Well, this is 1953, they weren't thinking aliens, they're thinking Russian bomb. 166 00:18:09,000 --> 00:18:13,000 Kids are running home, getting their mothers, their mothers are coming out, screaming, 167 00:18:13,000 --> 00:18:15,000 you know, the Russians are attacking. 168 00:18:15,000 --> 00:18:20,000 They call the local police, the police see this, what are they going to do? 169 00:18:20,000 --> 00:18:23,000 So they call Stewart Air Force Base. 170 00:18:24,000 --> 00:18:30,000 About 20 minutes later, this object has not moved, not an inch in all that time. 171 00:18:30,000 --> 00:18:34,000 Three fighter jets come roaring up the Hudson Valley, 172 00:18:34,000 --> 00:18:39,000 so you can imagine the paranoia this called, caused up and down the Hudson Valley. 173 00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:44,000 And as they're approaching this object, everybody's expecting at any moment 174 00:18:44,000 --> 00:18:49,000 that they're actually going to fire upon it, it moves ever so slightly, 175 00:18:49,000 --> 00:18:54,000 and he said in a blink of an eye, it just went absolutely gone, 176 00:18:54,000 --> 00:18:58,000 just a tiny little speck and then disappeared. 177 00:18:58,000 --> 00:19:03,000 The next day, of course the newspaper had to answer for this, 178 00:19:03,000 --> 00:19:08,000 because, you know, it's the Cold War and why are we scrambling fighter jets 179 00:19:08,000 --> 00:19:10,000 in the Hudson Valley of New York? 180 00:19:10,000 --> 00:19:14,000 No reason to panic populace, it was only a weather balloon. 181 00:19:15,000 --> 00:19:22,000 I was fortunate enough to have a man from the Air Force approach me 182 00:19:22,000 --> 00:19:29,000 and tell me that in 1968 he was working at Stewart Air Force Base in the Sage Building. 183 00:19:29,000 --> 00:19:34,000 And this is this massive blockhouse of a facility here, 184 00:19:34,000 --> 00:19:38,000 and I said, well what does Sage stand for? 185 00:19:38,000 --> 00:19:41,000 He said, oh that's semi-automated ground environment. 186 00:19:41,000 --> 00:19:44,000 I said, I know you think you're helping. 187 00:19:44,000 --> 00:19:47,000 I said, I still have no clue. 188 00:19:47,000 --> 00:19:57,000 What it was was a radar installation in a national network that covered the entire country. 189 00:19:57,000 --> 00:20:01,000 In fact, if you feel like it, you can read up on Sage, 190 00:20:01,000 --> 00:20:07,000 there was more manpower and more money expended in this Sage network 191 00:20:07,000 --> 00:20:09,000 than there was in the Manhattan Project. 192 00:20:09,000 --> 00:20:16,000 So nothing, nothing flew through US airspace without a Sage facility 193 00:20:16,000 --> 00:20:19,000 picking it up and tracking it across the country. 194 00:20:19,000 --> 00:20:24,000 He said one night they're all sitting at their stations and suddenly somebody gets very excited. 195 00:20:24,000 --> 00:20:29,000 Now when you have your finger on the nuclear arsenal, 196 00:20:29,000 --> 00:20:33,000 when somebody gets excited it's something to pay attention to. 197 00:20:33,000 --> 00:20:41,000 Well, one of the Sage facilities down south picked up an object traveling at about the height of airlines, 198 00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:50,000 where airline traffic is, only this thing was traveling at a stunning, remarkable, inexplicable rate of speed. 199 00:20:50,000 --> 00:20:54,000 They knew it wasn't ours, they knew it wasn't the Russians, 200 00:20:54,000 --> 00:20:59,000 and they watched this thing tracked it fully across the country until it disappeared. 201 00:21:00,000 --> 00:21:10,000 He said they spoke about this for months, for years, that that was the night everybody in that building knew that there was something out there. 202 00:21:10,000 --> 00:21:15,000 So once again, obviously the government knew about it, there wasn't anything in the papers, 203 00:21:15,000 --> 00:21:18,000 and of course they weren't about to publicize that. 204 00:21:18,000 --> 00:21:24,000 And this Sage building still does exist, it's gutted now, I hope they do preserve it. 205 00:21:24,000 --> 00:21:28,000 I think it should be turned into a UFO museum, what do you think? 206 00:21:29,000 --> 00:21:38,000 This is a story I have not even written about yet, this is unpublished, it's come to me so recently. 207 00:21:38,000 --> 00:21:44,000 I didn't realize that major airports have plain spotters, 208 00:21:44,000 --> 00:21:53,000 trained individuals who look for, to try to identify civilian, military, and commercial aircraft, 209 00:21:53,000 --> 00:21:58,000 then match the tail numbers to what the transponder is telling them. 210 00:21:58,000 --> 00:22:01,000 Sounds simple enough, why would they want to do that? 211 00:22:01,000 --> 00:22:06,000 Because people like drug dealers would steal a plane, change the tail number, 212 00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:13,000 and be stupid enough to fly into a major airport like LaGuardia with a plane full of drugs and think nobody would notice. 213 00:22:13,000 --> 00:22:22,000 So that was her job to identify these aircraft, if it was at night, by their configuration of lights, 214 00:22:22,000 --> 00:22:30,000 and when it was within range, get the tail number, and she said over the years they caught many, many, many, many people. 215 00:22:30,000 --> 00:22:34,000 So she identified aircraft for a living. 216 00:22:34,000 --> 00:22:43,000 She was near Westchester County airport in 1983, and she and her mother were coming back from shopping, 217 00:22:43,000 --> 00:22:50,000 and she comes over a hill and she says there's a massive object taking up the entire sky, 218 00:22:50,000 --> 00:22:55,000 lights all around it, clearly nothing she had ever seen in her life, 219 00:22:55,000 --> 00:23:00,000 nothing she thought we could possibly even create ourselves. 220 00:23:00,000 --> 00:23:07,000 So she knew the man who worked at the radar tower at Westchester, Westchester. 221 00:23:07,000 --> 00:23:11,000 She called him up, she said I'm in such and such a location, what do you see? 222 00:23:11,000 --> 00:23:14,000 And he starts yelling, we see it, we see it. 223 00:23:14,000 --> 00:23:18,000 It's massive, we have no idea what it is, very excited. 224 00:23:18,000 --> 00:23:24,000 She says well I'll come in tomorrow, I want to keep following this thing, we'll talk about it. 225 00:23:24,000 --> 00:23:30,000 Next morning she pulls into the parking lot, and this radar man is running around the parking lot like a crazy man. 226 00:23:30,000 --> 00:23:32,000 She says what the heck is he doing? 227 00:23:32,000 --> 00:23:38,000 He was waiting for her, soon as she pulled in he ran up and said it was a flock of birds, 228 00:23:38,000 --> 00:23:43,000 I'm telling you it was a flock of birds, don't say anything, we'll lose our jobs or worse. 229 00:23:43,000 --> 00:23:46,000 She's like you know what are you talking about? 230 00:23:46,000 --> 00:23:52,000 You said you had this radar contact, he says I know, but just after we hung up, 231 00:23:52,000 --> 00:23:59,000 members of the Air National Guard who were stationed at Westchester County Airport at this point, 232 00:23:59,000 --> 00:24:07,000 kicked in the door of the tower with their guns drawn, and told them you are looking at a flock of birds, 233 00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:11,000 and that's it, end of story. 234 00:24:11,000 --> 00:24:17,000 I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but the Air National Guard left Westchester County Airport the following year, 235 00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:24,000 but what right did they have to burst into a civilian radar tower and threaten people, 236 00:24:24,000 --> 00:24:31,000 and apparently they threatened every single employee there at the time. 237 00:24:31,000 --> 00:24:39,000 So clearly they had it, they even admitted that the Air National Guard had this object on their radar as well, 238 00:24:39,000 --> 00:24:43,000 and once again nothing came of it. 239 00:24:43,000 --> 00:24:50,000 Indian Point, this is our nuclear facility on the Hudson River in Buchanan. 240 00:24:50,000 --> 00:25:03,000 A lot has been written about this, there was a big night in July of 1984 where a massive V shaped object was hovering directly over reactor 3, 241 00:25:03,000 --> 00:25:08,000 which was the only functional reactor at the time. 242 00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:17,000 There were reports that the guards were ready to fire upon this, there were conflicting reports whether they did fire upon it or not. 243 00:25:17,000 --> 00:25:25,000 It had been written about, people had spoken about it, but I wanted to interview somebody who was actually there. 244 00:25:25,000 --> 00:25:34,000 So just this past May, a man came up to me with the agreement of anonymity, 245 00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:44,000 and he said he was not there for that July incident, but the following year he was on duty one night and what his supervisor called, 246 00:25:44,000 --> 00:25:47,000 he picked up the phone, he said, they're back. 247 00:25:47,000 --> 00:25:50,000 He said, well what are you talking about, who's back? 248 00:25:50,000 --> 00:25:52,000 He said the UFO. 249 00:25:52,000 --> 00:25:59,000 He goes running outside, he said this thing was so huge, it just covered horizon to horizon. 250 00:25:59,000 --> 00:26:03,000 He said, they tried photographing, they couldn't get it all in the same frame. 251 00:26:03,000 --> 00:26:13,000 With a video camera they basically had to pan 180 degrees, simultaneously every security system in the plant shut off. 252 00:26:13,000 --> 00:26:18,000 And he said they're all standing there nervously, do we shoot, do we not shoot, what do we do? 253 00:26:18,000 --> 00:26:21,000 They didn't know what to do. 254 00:26:21,000 --> 00:26:28,000 And I asked him to describe it, he said, it looked roughly rectangular, I said, any sound whatsoever. 255 00:26:28,000 --> 00:26:30,000 I thought this was very curious. 256 00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:38,000 He said it was silent except for an occasional, he says, you know those big metal canoes when they flex? 257 00:26:38,000 --> 00:26:44,000 He said he almost heard this kind of grinding like this massive craft was flexing a little. 258 00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:52,000 I don't know what was causing that sound, but he said he still got goose bumps every time he thought of that sound. 259 00:26:53,000 --> 00:27:00,000 I also interviewed a couple of civilians who lived across the river from Indian Point. 260 00:27:00,000 --> 00:27:07,000 And this was an October incident, at least a third incident, and he said he went to take out the garbage 261 00:27:07,000 --> 00:27:14,000 and there was this huge, roughly triangular craft just hovering motionlessly over Indian Point. 262 00:27:14,000 --> 00:27:19,000 His wife came out in her underwear to see it, he said, I don't care if you're wearing nothing, you get out here. 263 00:27:19,000 --> 00:27:23,000 And they're watching this object just in awe. 264 00:27:23,000 --> 00:27:31,000 And he said, he used very colorful language, which I will not use, but he said the thing just went, took off. 265 00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:37,000 A few seconds later, a military helicopter came by as if it was in pursuit. 266 00:27:37,000 --> 00:27:42,000 I said, can you give me an idea of the scale of these objects? 267 00:27:42,000 --> 00:27:47,000 He said, imagine the typical lampshade in a living room. 268 00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:54,000 He said the military helicopter would have been like a fly on that object. 269 00:27:54,000 --> 00:27:57,000 So that gives you an idea of the scale. 270 00:27:57,000 --> 00:28:01,000 I have interviewed several other people from surrounding towns. 271 00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:12,000 As far as I can determine, there have been at least six, possibly seven independent nights, different nights, 272 00:28:12,000 --> 00:28:18,000 when huge, massive craft have been hovering over Indian Point. 273 00:28:18,000 --> 00:28:24,000 Some of the official excuses were formations of ultralights. 274 00:28:24,000 --> 00:28:37,000 And I will get into that ridiculousness in a moment, but why ultralights were allowed to violate highly restricted airspace 275 00:28:37,000 --> 00:28:41,000 and why they would want to hover over a nuclear power plant? 276 00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:47,000 I mean, it's all absurd, but I will discuss, in fact, I will discuss in ultralights now, 277 00:28:47,000 --> 00:28:55,000 because people would tell me, oh, you know, I saw the triangle, but they said it was just ultralights. 278 00:28:55,000 --> 00:29:01,000 I said, have you ever seen an ultralight? Have it been in an ultralight? Nobody knew. 279 00:29:01,000 --> 00:29:07,000 So I realized if I want to discredit something, I need to know what I'm talking about. 280 00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:10,000 I need to go up in an ultralight. 281 00:29:10,000 --> 00:29:19,000 So fortunately in the Hudson Valley, not too far away, there was an airport that specializes in the ultralight craft, 282 00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:24,000 and you can see what I'm in is an experimental craft, so I felt much more secure. 283 00:29:24,000 --> 00:29:32,000 It's not bad enough that these are go-karts with weed-wacker engines on them. 284 00:29:32,000 --> 00:29:35,000 I had to be in an experimental one. 285 00:29:35,000 --> 00:29:43,000 But it was critically important because I wanted to know the sound, I wanted to know the flight characteristics. 286 00:29:43,000 --> 00:29:51,000 I want to know if there were 25 not wins that night, could a formation of ultralights stay in formation? 287 00:29:51,000 --> 00:29:56,000 And I learned an enormous amount, and I also had the time of my life. 288 00:29:56,000 --> 00:30:00,000 It was the most sublime experience. 289 00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:05,000 There's nothing around you, you feel like you're the one doing the flying. 290 00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:12,000 But the noise is deafening. You can see I'm on a headset here, and even with that, we had earplugs, headsets. 291 00:30:12,000 --> 00:30:20,000 You have to shout at the top of your lungs to be heard. That's how loud an ultralight is. 292 00:30:20,000 --> 00:30:29,000 So when 100 people are standing on the side of the road, and there's a massive silent triangle hovering over them for 20 minutes, 293 00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:34,000 and you could hear a pin drop, that is not a formation of ultralights. 294 00:30:34,000 --> 00:30:42,000 I can state that categorically now. It would sound like a flock of weed-wackers over your head. 295 00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:49,000 But to this day, 30 years later, I can't tell you how many people say, 296 00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:59,000 why are you wasting your time studying the giant triangles when everybody knows they were just formations of ultralights? 297 00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:05,000 So unfortunately, I had to devote an entire chapter in my book to why they were not ultralights. 298 00:31:05,000 --> 00:31:13,000 The only ultralight that is motionless is one that has crashed to the ground because it's trying to be motionless. 299 00:31:13,000 --> 00:31:17,000 So I don't want to hear any more about ultralights. 300 00:31:17,000 --> 00:31:26,000 All right, the giant triangles themselves, the real big wave began the night of December 31st, 1982. 301 00:31:26,000 --> 00:31:35,000 But I have reports from people as early as the late 1970s seeing these as well. 302 00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:42,000 But this is the date that most people pin on this. It was featured in Unsolved Mysteries in 1992. 303 00:31:42,000 --> 00:31:50,000 Probably a lot of you saw that. This is a representation of one of the craft that many people saw. 304 00:31:50,000 --> 00:32:00,000 And this man was featured in that show, Dennis Sant. He is now the town clerk, the county clerk for Putnam County. 305 00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:04,000 And he had his sighting on March 17th, 1983. 306 00:32:05,000 --> 00:32:09,000 And a remarkable sighting, I will explain it in a moment. 307 00:32:09,000 --> 00:32:19,000 And he got some publicity from that, did a lot of talk shows and drew the attention of this man, Dr. J. Allen Hineck. 308 00:32:19,000 --> 00:32:23,000 You can see they're sharing a pipe here in Dennis's home. 309 00:32:23,000 --> 00:32:31,000 And I contacted him 30 years later and I said, I know you don't do interviews anymore. 310 00:32:31,000 --> 00:32:39,000 But I was trying to look at this as how did these sightings in the 1980s affect people through their lives? 311 00:32:39,000 --> 00:32:44,000 We're now 30 years removed. Has it influenced them? 312 00:32:44,000 --> 00:32:50,000 And he said, you know, that's an intriguing question. And he said he would be willing to speak with me. 313 00:32:50,000 --> 00:32:56,000 So here he is 30 years later. He was kind enough to be filmed. 314 00:32:56,000 --> 00:33:01,000 But his story was that he saw something that looked like this. 315 00:33:01,000 --> 00:33:06,000 When he first saw it, he said it looked L shaped. 316 00:33:06,000 --> 00:33:13,000 And it was hovering over Route 84, which is a major, major highway in New York. 317 00:33:13,000 --> 00:33:18,000 He said about 100 cars were pulled over. People were out of their cars. 318 00:33:18,000 --> 00:33:22,000 His house, this was an elevated section of 84. 319 00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:28,000 His house was just below that, maybe about 80 feet down. 320 00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:37,000 And he's looking at this. And as he's thinking, I wish I could have a better look, he said it tilted like this to a V shape. 321 00:33:37,000 --> 00:33:41,000 And the V shaped moved straight for him. 322 00:33:41,000 --> 00:33:46,000 And we are standing in his backyard and you can see the overgrown part behind us. 323 00:33:46,000 --> 00:33:50,000 That was a marsh back in 1983. 324 00:33:50,000 --> 00:33:55,000 This craft hovered at tree top level over this marsh. 325 00:33:55,000 --> 00:34:01,000 He said it had so many lights. He said it was lit up like a Friday night football game. 326 00:34:01,000 --> 00:34:06,000 You could see everything everywhere. And he was standing under this, no sound. 327 00:34:06,000 --> 00:34:09,000 And I said, really, how close do you think it was? 328 00:34:09,000 --> 00:34:14,000 He says, if I was young again and had a baseball, I easily could have hit it. 329 00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:20,000 And it was just a remarkable, credible eyewitness. 330 00:34:20,000 --> 00:34:27,000 Now he worked for the town back then. He called the local sheriff's office and they said, Dennis, calm down. 331 00:34:27,000 --> 00:34:36,000 It was a formation of, I don't even want to say the word, small fabric and tubular framed aircraft. 332 00:34:36,000 --> 00:34:41,000 And he's like, BS it was. Don't you tell them. They hung up on him. 333 00:34:41,000 --> 00:34:45,000 And these are people he knew and worked with. 334 00:34:45,000 --> 00:34:55,000 The wave continued with another mass sighting just a week, exactly a week later on March 24th, 1983. 335 00:34:55,000 --> 00:35:01,000 These three women were coming back from Fordham University in New York City, driving up the Teconic. 336 00:35:01,000 --> 00:35:05,000 And they were coming back from graduate courses. They were all teachers. 337 00:35:06,000 --> 00:35:11,000 And they saw some very bright lights. They saw the usual routine. 338 00:35:11,000 --> 00:35:16,000 People are pulled off on the sides of the road, out of their cars. 339 00:35:16,000 --> 00:35:21,000 So they got out and this is a sketch one of the Lady Sons did. 340 00:35:21,000 --> 00:35:33,000 Massive triangle, silent, incredibly bright lights, hovered at tree top level over them for a full 20 minutes. 341 00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:44,000 Now, when a sighting of five or 10 seconds can influence your life, I just can't imagine what 20 full minutes would be. 342 00:35:44,000 --> 00:35:51,000 Unfortunately, the lady in the middle there, Jackie, just got so unnerved and she said, I just have to get out of here. 343 00:35:51,000 --> 00:35:54,000 I can't stand it anymore. So they left. 344 00:35:54,000 --> 00:36:00,000 But thousands and thousands of people saw this triangle that night. 345 00:36:00,000 --> 00:36:09,000 A young man saw it that night, a 17 year old high school student who was president of his photography class, came out of school, 346 00:36:09,000 --> 00:36:19,000 saw this brilliantly lit triangle, which I hope you can see, looks like a beam of light is coming down, illuminating perhaps water. 347 00:36:19,000 --> 00:36:22,000 Can you tell from, you can see the ground is illuminated. 348 00:36:22,000 --> 00:36:26,000 So whatever this light was, was propagating down to the surface. 349 00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:29,000 He took this photo, he showed it to the police. 350 00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:37,000 It was published in the newspaper and you know what the police told him, what it was, a formation of. 351 00:36:37,000 --> 00:36:48,000 So one of the teachers had saved this clipping and she gave it to me and I said, well, this, this just might be the best photograph from the whole 1980s wave. 352 00:36:49,000 --> 00:36:54,000 So I looked him up. He's still 30 years later living in Mayo pack. 353 00:36:54,000 --> 00:36:57,000 And I said, you know, this is going to be a little blast from the past. 354 00:36:57,000 --> 00:37:04,000 I said, but are you the Jeffrey Salmonays who took the photo of the UFO and there was silence for a moment. 355 00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:06,000 He's like, oh my God. 356 00:37:06,000 --> 00:37:08,000 He said, yes, yes, I did. 357 00:37:08,000 --> 00:37:10,000 And he goes, but why are you interested in that? 358 00:37:10,000 --> 00:37:13,000 It was just a formation of ultra. 359 00:37:13,000 --> 00:37:17,000 I said, did you even look at your own photo? 360 00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:22,000 I said, you have a solid lit up triangle with a light beaming down. 361 00:37:22,000 --> 00:37:24,000 He goes, oh yeah, yeah, look at that. 362 00:37:24,000 --> 00:37:27,000 I said, do you have the negative please? 363 00:37:27,000 --> 00:37:30,000 I wanted to get it into the hands of photographic experts. 364 00:37:30,000 --> 00:37:32,000 I waited several weeks. 365 00:37:32,000 --> 00:37:33,000 I called him back. 366 00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:37,000 He goes, you know, I found the original photograph and negative in the attic. 367 00:37:37,000 --> 00:37:38,000 I said, hallelujah. 368 00:37:38,000 --> 00:37:40,000 I'm out the door. 369 00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:42,000 I'm coming to get it now. 370 00:37:42,000 --> 00:37:46,000 He said, no, one of my kids took it to show and tell and I don't know where it is now. 371 00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:53,000 So close yet so far, but at least we still have this newspaper clipping. 372 00:37:55,000 --> 00:38:00,000 I think I mentioned that the production company that made the film was called Big Guy Media. 373 00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:03,000 And this is why it is called Big Guy Media. 374 00:38:03,000 --> 00:38:07,000 That is Felix Oliveieri, the director. 375 00:38:07,000 --> 00:38:15,000 And he is miking up a little Maureen Davis there who is still a research librarian. 376 00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:18,000 She was a kick to interview. 377 00:38:18,000 --> 00:38:21,000 She says, Linda, I have to tell you, you know, I'm a research librarian. 378 00:38:21,000 --> 00:38:24,000 I'm not that creative. 379 00:38:24,000 --> 00:38:26,000 I don't make up stories. 380 00:38:26,000 --> 00:38:29,000 Okay, Maureen, I believe you just tell your story. 381 00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:38,000 But why I wanted to mention her is she had the unique perspective of actually seeing up inside one of these massive triangles. 382 00:38:38,000 --> 00:38:42,000 She was at the bus stop waiting for her husband to come home from the city. 383 00:38:42,000 --> 00:38:50,000 And she looked up and saw these lights in the sky and as it moved closer, she described a giant triangle. 384 00:38:50,000 --> 00:38:54,000 And I said, was it the size of a football field because that's what everybody uses. 385 00:38:54,000 --> 00:38:56,000 She says, no. 386 00:38:56,000 --> 00:38:58,000 So I'm like, well, what was it? 387 00:38:58,000 --> 00:39:01,000 She says, more like a football stadium. 388 00:39:01,000 --> 00:39:02,000 Okay. 389 00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:08,000 And she said, a little red, I hear this all the time, a little red light came up from behind. 390 00:39:08,000 --> 00:39:14,000 There was suddenly an opening in the craft and this little red light went up inside. 391 00:39:14,000 --> 00:39:17,000 And as it did, she could see up in it. 392 00:39:17,000 --> 00:39:19,000 And she's, I loved her description. 393 00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:23,000 She says, you know, the balconies on a high rise apartment. 394 00:39:23,000 --> 00:39:25,000 She said, that's what it looked like. 395 00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:29,000 She could see many layers lit up inside this craft. 396 00:39:29,000 --> 00:39:32,000 It was just, it was just a remarkable story. 397 00:39:32,000 --> 00:39:37,000 And as she is a reference librarian, I have to believe her. 398 00:39:37,000 --> 00:39:44,000 Well, we remember poor Otto Pushman, who was arrested for cursing at the moon. 399 00:39:44,000 --> 00:39:54,000 Jump ahead to the 1990s when Pine Bush, New York became what they still call the Northeast capital, UFO capital. 400 00:39:54,000 --> 00:40:03,000 And every night, hundreds of people from the tri-state area would gather on these deserted old farm roads and were, 401 00:40:03,000 --> 00:40:12,000 had this most incredible show of lights in the woods coming up out of the ground, large triangles, small triangles. 402 00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:20,000 You name it, just about any night of the week in the, in the early, late 80s, early 90s, something could be seen. 403 00:40:20,000 --> 00:40:28,000 At the same time, developers were buying up the old farms and putting in these McMansion houses. 404 00:40:28,000 --> 00:40:39,000 Who's going to want to buy a big new expensive house when you have 300 crazy ufologists, ufologists standing in your, your road every night? 405 00:40:39,000 --> 00:40:43,000 So they started throwing down tax on the side of the road. 406 00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:49,000 So anybody who pulled up and stopped their car would get two, three, four flat tires. 407 00:40:49,000 --> 00:40:51,000 That wasn't working. 408 00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:56,000 So they, they applied some pressure to the local town council. 409 00:40:56,000 --> 00:40:59,000 They actually passed an ordinance. 410 00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:06,000 It was illegal to sky watch in the town of Crawford, which was where Pine Bush. 411 00:41:06,000 --> 00:41:14,000 If you went out of your house, stood by the side of the road and looked up at the sky, you could be ticketed. 412 00:41:14,000 --> 00:41:18,000 Well, times have changed in Pine Bush. 413 00:41:18,000 --> 00:41:23,000 They now, they now embrace their UFO heritage. 414 00:41:23,000 --> 00:41:37,000 They realize there are economic advantages, shall we say, and they every year now they have a UFO festival and it's, it's a remarkable event. 415 00:41:37,000 --> 00:41:45,000 The diner in town is now the cup and saucer diner where people come and talk about their UFO stories. 416 00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:51,000 The man who owns the diner, Dino, he has this UFO patrol car here. 417 00:41:51,000 --> 00:41:54,000 He leads the parade. 418 00:41:54,000 --> 00:42:01,000 People dress themselves as aliens, their cars are aliens, they dress their dogs as aliens. 419 00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:03,000 So it's a lot of fun. 420 00:42:03,000 --> 00:42:17,000 But at the same time, they do have a series of lectures where they do, you know, for the serious UFO enthusiast, they have, they have lectures and presentations and they're trying to expand it, 421 00:42:17,000 --> 00:42:21,000 possibly get a conference going with it. 422 00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:33,000 But many people think that whole Pine Bush phenomena ended in the mid 1990s, but that is definitely not the case. 423 00:42:33,000 --> 00:42:39,000 The last two, three years, massive rectangles are now being seen. 424 00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:44,000 This is a sketch made by a member of law enforcement who lives in Pine Bush. 425 00:42:44,000 --> 00:42:58,000 I interviewed three separate people, somewhat on a diagonal line of the way this object was moving over the course of the night and got three eye witness accounts of the same object. 426 00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:06,000 Most recently, I'd say three weeks ago, this object was seen again by multiple eye witnesses. 427 00:43:06,000 --> 00:43:13,000 The same characteristics of the massive silent triangles, but now they are rectangles. 428 00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:17,000 So we are hoping to spread the word. 429 00:43:17,000 --> 00:43:25,000 Someone asked yesterday at the press conference the value of social media in ufology. 430 00:43:25,000 --> 00:43:37,000 It's because it's the great thing is as soon as you get a sighting, put it on the Facebook page, everybody knows to go outside that night and look for it and then post their sightings if they have it. 431 00:43:37,000 --> 00:43:50,000 It's immediate feedback. You don't have to wait for three weeks later to hear from a friend of a friend that the same night you can be out there looking for these. 432 00:43:50,000 --> 00:44:01,000 When I first started this research, I thought for the most part I was going to interview people who saw lights in the sky, something darting by. 433 00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:07,000 And my very first interview really blew my doors off. 434 00:44:07,000 --> 00:44:14,000 We invited a man to my house. He didn't want to be his identity known. 435 00:44:14,000 --> 00:44:20,000 Actually, he didn't care, but his kids said they'd kill him if he went out in public about this. 436 00:44:20,000 --> 00:44:32,000 But he started having experiences, missing time, seeing short figures with large eyes back in the 1950s when he was a child. 437 00:44:32,000 --> 00:44:39,000 When he grew up, he was going to the store one night. There was a small country store that closed at midnight. 438 00:44:39,000 --> 00:44:47,000 He left his house about 10 o'clock. He should have been at the store at 10.02. That's how close it was. 439 00:44:47,000 --> 00:44:57,000 But at this point in the road where he's pointing, he saw large egg-shaped craft similar to what he saw as a child. 440 00:44:57,000 --> 00:45:05,000 The next thing he knows, the craft is taking off. He's a little disoriented, doesn't think anything of it. His car is now off. 441 00:45:05,000 --> 00:45:13,000 He didn't know how that happened. He starts his car, goes to the store, and they said, well, it's a good thing you got here. We're just about to close. 442 00:45:13,000 --> 00:45:23,000 He said, you don't close till midnight. They said, it's midnight now. So two hours were missing. He got home. His wife was hysterical, wondering where he had been. 443 00:45:23,000 --> 00:45:36,000 The next day, he's not feeling well. He starts getting severe bloody noses. His leg is sore. He finds a large, carterized scoop mark in his thigh. 444 00:45:36,000 --> 00:45:49,000 That night, he received three triangular indentations in his neck, which the scars are still there today. So deep. I actually touched them. You can put your finger in them. They're so deep. 445 00:45:49,000 --> 00:46:01,000 I wanted to speak to his mother, who was 83 at the time, because I wanted to know what kind of a boy was he. Was he very imaginative? Did he make up stories? 446 00:46:01,000 --> 00:46:12,000 So we invited her to be filmed. She was a wonderful, wonderful woman. And I'm sad to say she just passed away two weeks ago at the age of 85. 447 00:46:12,000 --> 00:46:23,000 But she was wonderful. We had kept in touch the last couple of years. But she's saying, oh, yes, I remember him telling me there were strange lights and there were people in his room. 448 00:46:24,000 --> 00:46:32,000 And she's saying something. The way she's describing these short figures with the bright white heads and the big dark eyes. 449 00:46:32,000 --> 00:46:44,000 And I said, wait a minute. Did you see these two? She goes, well, yeah, the first time was 1937. And I, yeah, that was my reaction. 450 00:46:44,000 --> 00:46:55,000 I said, OK, we need to start from the beginning here. She started seeing these beings, having missing time, experiences, 1937. 451 00:46:55,000 --> 00:47:05,000 She marries a man who also lived in the same apartment building, also had similar experiences. They have children who all had similar experiences. 452 00:47:05,000 --> 00:47:10,000 The grandchildren and now the great grandchildren are all experiencing the same thing. 453 00:47:10,000 --> 00:47:23,000 So that's four. This was my first case, a four generation abduction case, which I said, OK, we're getting into more than little lights in the sky now. 454 00:47:24,000 --> 00:47:35,000 Thanks to a Mufon journal from the 1980s, I came across an article written by Bud Hopkins about a case that was also local in my area. 455 00:47:35,000 --> 00:47:50,000 In fact, just the next town over from where I grew up, 1929, where a girl was outside playing and she saw metallic craft, saw small misshapen figures as she called them. 456 00:47:50,000 --> 00:47:58,000 And several hours of time was missing and she had all the classic post abduction symptoms after that. 457 00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:02,000 So we are pushing back the envelope even further. 458 00:48:02,000 --> 00:48:13,000 There was a very unique case. I should mention that that girl in 1929 had said that time seemed to stand still. 459 00:48:14,000 --> 00:48:20,000 And I had had a different case back in 1984. 460 00:48:20,000 --> 00:48:29,000 A teenage girl and her mother saw this massive triangle coming over their house and she wanted to run out and see it. 461 00:48:29,000 --> 00:48:34,000 So did the mother and the husband is inside yelling, don't go out there, they'll suck you up. 462 00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:44,000 But they went outside anyway. The mother got afraid and she hid behind a shed and she realized later that would have done any good. 463 00:48:44,000 --> 00:48:52,000 But during this sighting, the daughter says to the mother, don't be afraid, mom, they're probably just coming back to check on me. 464 00:48:52,000 --> 00:49:00,000 And in the excitement, she didn't know what to think. Later on, she said, wait a minute, what were you talking about there, coming back to check on you. 465 00:49:00,000 --> 00:49:10,000 She said, well, when we lived in the town of Montgomery 12 years ago, she was playing in her sandbox and she's looking up at her mother in the window who was washing dishes. 466 00:49:10,000 --> 00:49:13,000 She could see her in the kitchen window. 467 00:49:13,000 --> 00:49:20,000 And she said all of a sudden time froze. The bird stopped singing. Her mother was frozen in place. 468 00:49:20,000 --> 00:49:27,000 It seemed like everything stopped. And she felt suddenly as if she was on some sort of examination table. 469 00:49:27,000 --> 00:49:36,000 And she heard voices saying, we can't keep her. We have to send her back. She's damaged. 470 00:49:36,000 --> 00:49:42,000 Next thing she knows, she's back in her sandbox playing. Well, she had never told her mother this. 471 00:49:42,000 --> 00:49:52,000 And when she finally did tell her mother this, she was, the mother was stunned because what the little girl didn't realize is when she was a baby, 472 00:49:52,000 --> 00:50:00,000 she had a condition that she needed to have a drain put into her brain, which was still there to that day. 473 00:50:00,000 --> 00:50:09,000 So in effect, she wasn't a good specimen because she was damaged. 474 00:50:09,000 --> 00:50:16,000 We all in the field encounter some very interesting people who have some dubious stories. 475 00:50:16,000 --> 00:50:25,000 I was contacted by a gentleman who was on a local school board. He was also a local official, elected official. 476 00:50:25,000 --> 00:50:30,000 And he started telling me this story of how a triangle came over his house. 477 00:50:30,000 --> 00:50:34,000 And the next night he started seeing squirrel people and owl people. 478 00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:41,000 And of course I'm picturing big bushy furry tails and 12 foot feathered things. 479 00:50:41,000 --> 00:50:48,000 And I said, you know, let's stop here. I need some clarification. I said, can you draw me a sketch? 480 00:50:48,000 --> 00:50:53,000 I need to know what you're talking about. And this is what he sent me. 481 00:50:53,000 --> 00:51:02,000 The one in the bottom right, he said he described as a squirrel person because it had very narrow head and huge eyes. 482 00:51:02,000 --> 00:51:12,000 And the thing that started showing up in his bedroom, he called an owl person because it had a very circular white round head. 483 00:51:12,000 --> 00:51:20,000 And he said these beings would appear several times a week. He started getting incredibly severe nosebleeds. 484 00:51:20,000 --> 00:51:26,000 He went to a doctor and they couldn't find out what was going on. 485 00:51:26,000 --> 00:51:34,000 They finally put one of those fiber optic scopes up into his sinuses and found all kinds of cuts and abrasions. 486 00:51:34,000 --> 00:51:39,000 And they said, who's been operating on you? You know, what is he going to say? 487 00:51:39,000 --> 00:51:45,000 He says, I don't know how this has happened. It got so severe it went on for so many months. 488 00:51:45,000 --> 00:51:50,000 He just left his house. He had to move. Unfortunately the activity did not continue. 489 00:51:50,000 --> 00:51:55,000 Now this man was brave enough to let me use his real name. 490 00:51:55,000 --> 00:52:06,000 And I said, I really appreciate that. I said, but honestly, if you ever have any hope of being elected again, I'm just going to make up a name for you. 491 00:52:06,000 --> 00:52:12,000 There's no sense. He gave me his story. I know who he is. I can contact him at any point. 492 00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:21,000 But you know, the nature of the world, there's no sense bringing on that kind of ridicule and ruining your career. 493 00:52:21,000 --> 00:52:28,000 I don't want to ignore the classic flying saucers, which the Hudson Valley over the years has had many of. 494 00:52:28,000 --> 00:52:39,000 This is beautiful Lake Oskawana in Putnam County. And one night three girls were standing near this dock and they saw several lights coming. 495 00:52:39,000 --> 00:52:54,000 We're looking to the north here coming south across the lake, which turned out to be this massive circular craft which hovered over this cove, as you can see, just a few hundred feet from them. 496 00:52:54,000 --> 00:53:02,000 It was a very interesting story. She was about 14 at the time. She's now in her 40s with kids of her own. 497 00:53:02,000 --> 00:53:15,000 And she mentioned to me that her mother had had a sighting. So I didn't want to do this together. I separately spoke to her mother and asked them both to make sketches of what they had seen. 498 00:53:15,000 --> 00:53:22,000 Now the mother here, Carol, in the green shirt, she was also 14 years old at the time. 499 00:53:22,000 --> 00:53:34,000 Her sighting was at the top of an apartment building in the Bronx of all places. And she drew this sketch of the circular craft with the rectangular windows you can see along the middle. 500 00:53:34,000 --> 00:53:43,000 Her daughter isn't such a good artist, something similar. But when the daughter saw the mother's sketch, she says, no, that's what I saw. 501 00:53:43,000 --> 00:53:57,000 I thought this was fascinating, both at the age of 14, one in 1960 and then one in 1980. They both saw, if not the same craft, a very similar one. 502 00:53:57,000 --> 00:54:12,000 Another wonderful witness to a flying saucer at Lake Oskawana was this woman, Gloria Lapala. About 30 years ago, she's in her kitchen ironing and she had a view out over this deck. 503 00:54:12,000 --> 00:54:25,000 And fortunately, she was a better artist and she sketched this for me. She said, this is what she saw. It moved so slow, she was actually walking under it, keeping pace with it as it was moving. 504 00:54:25,000 --> 00:54:38,000 She called the local police force and I want to mention this story also because this is probably the most honest answer anyone has ever received trying to report a UFO. 505 00:54:38,000 --> 00:54:48,000 She said, officer, can you tell me what is going over Lake Oskawana? And he said, I'll be damned if I know, lady. 506 00:54:48,000 --> 00:54:57,000 They had received tons of calls, they saw it and I said, that's a perfectly legitimate answer. Don't make something up. 507 00:54:57,000 --> 00:55:05,000 Don't insult the witness by coming up with something stupid. Admit you don't have any clue either. 508 00:55:05,000 --> 00:55:15,000 Alright, there's been some talk of Project Blue Book this weekend and I was naive enough to thought I should just look at the unexplained cases. 509 00:55:15,000 --> 00:55:27,000 But I decided, you know what, I'm going to pull out every single Hudson Valley case. This was a months long project and examine each one. 510 00:55:27,000 --> 00:55:40,000 And the first one I came upon was actually from Stewart Air Force Base. And as you can see on the project record card, it was evaluated as a balloon, surprise, surprise. 511 00:55:40,000 --> 00:55:56,000 But then I, going through the entire file, you see on the second page there, here's a letter written from Stewart Air Force Base to Wright Patterson Air Force Base talking about possible unconventional aircraft. 512 00:55:56,000 --> 00:56:11,000 Now why would you call a weather balloon an identified weather balloon unconventional aircraft? So I started reading the actual statements by the Lieutenant and the captain who had the sightings. 513 00:56:11,000 --> 00:56:24,000 The one officer said that the object did not appear to be conventional aircraft and in his judgment displayed convincing traits of planned maneuverability. 514 00:56:24,000 --> 00:56:31,000 In other words, something someone was steering this, which discounted the theory of it being a weather balloon. 515 00:56:31,000 --> 00:56:47,000 We find out it had been seen on other nights by other people. And the kicker, the last line of the last page, they admit no weather balloons were released during the period of observation and no local aircraft were taking off and landing. 516 00:56:47,000 --> 00:57:03,000 So I was incensed. I was just so, I think I got up and stomped around my office and I was like, how could they just come out with these blatant lies? So I realized I had to go through and read the full files of every single case. 517 00:57:03,000 --> 00:57:22,000 And here was another one that just raised my blood pressure. Here was an object which was Wappinger Falls, New York. It was considered to be a meteor. If you read the entire report, it was seen by multiple eyewitnesses over the span of two weeks. 518 00:57:22,000 --> 00:57:38,000 And one of the witnesses hiked back into the woods where she saw one of these lights land, got within 150 feet, drew this sketch of this circular domed object, said it was about the size of a Volkswagen, gave very detailed reports. 519 00:57:38,000 --> 00:57:55,000 And still, this was, the conclusion was it was a meteor. And I started joking that the Blue Book staff had one of those magic eight balls and they would shake it and oh, today it's a meteor, you know, oh, I was hoping for swamp gas. 520 00:57:56,000 --> 00:58:14,000 It's just so random and so insulting. So I urge you don't be fooled by the unexplained or the lack of information. Read every word of every case because there's a lot hidden in plain sight there. 521 00:58:15,000 --> 00:58:31,000 Some more recent sightings in the Hudson Valley. This is my chiropractor of all people who calls me one afternoon and says I have video of a UFO and I know him very well and I said, all right, I believe you. 522 00:58:31,000 --> 00:58:38,000 But then he went on to describe it. He's a real aviation buff. He can identify aircraft just by hearing them. 523 00:58:38,000 --> 00:58:48,000 He said he was out raking leaves and he saw very bright, bright light in the sky. He had time to run in and get his glasses. Then he had time to run in and get his binoculars. 524 00:58:48,000 --> 00:59:02,000 And he said it looked like an upright telephone pole covered in chrome. Now there were about 25 mile an hour winds at the surface. So obviously winds were much higher aloft. 525 00:59:03,000 --> 00:59:14,000 So this couldn't possibly have been a balloon because for at least 10 minutes he described it as being pinned to the sky. He ran in and got his camcorder. 526 00:59:14,000 --> 00:59:19,000 The only tape he could find was his sister's wedding video. 527 00:59:20,000 --> 00:59:29,000 And God love him. He taped over that and I said, you know, don't worry, your sister can always get married again. 528 00:59:29,000 --> 00:59:35,000 But how often do you have an opportunity to film a UFO? 529 00:59:36,000 --> 00:59:45,000 So he filmed several minutes of this. I later found other people who had posted similar videos on YouTube. 530 00:59:45,000 --> 00:59:56,000 And there was also a man about 30 minutes from us who he is a professional aerial photographer for Hollywood. 531 00:59:56,000 --> 01:00:04,000 He used his special high definition cameras to film this object for two solid hours. 532 01:00:04,000 --> 01:00:14,000 He's also a pilot. He called the FAA. He called air traffic control. Nobody gave a damn. Everybody hung up on him. Nobody cared. 533 01:00:14,000 --> 01:00:23,000 We had this massive object pinned in the sky in New York airspace, controlled airspace and nobody cared. 534 01:00:24,000 --> 01:00:34,000 All right, I want to finish with one of my favorite stories and hopefully one that we will soon be getting more information on. 535 01:00:34,000 --> 01:00:45,000 In Monroe, New York, which is in Orange County on the other side of the country, there was a couple who lived in a house set pretty far back off the road. 536 01:00:45,000 --> 01:00:53,000 And she said she was always nervous about break-ins. So she got a couple of big dogs to guard dogs. She was always a little nervous. 537 01:00:53,000 --> 01:01:00,000 And she said one night it was like there were two Mack truck headlights suddenly shining in her bedroom window. 538 01:01:00,000 --> 01:01:07,000 The dogs are going ballistic. Normally she would be screaming and yelling, calling the police. 539 01:01:07,000 --> 01:01:11,000 She said, oh well, I'll just find out what it was in the morning. 540 01:01:11,000 --> 01:01:18,000 Next thing she knows, she's out cold. She wakes up in the morning. Her recollection slowly comes back. 541 01:01:18,000 --> 01:01:24,000 She wakes up her husband, who was a science teacher, and says, you know, there were lights. 542 01:01:24,000 --> 01:01:30,000 I think it was aliens and he's thinking, uh-huh. He said, I need proof. 543 01:01:30,000 --> 01:01:40,000 So he says, I'll go outside and I see if I see anything. He comes back in. Why does a sheet call the state police, call the Air Force, call the mayor, call everybody? 544 01:01:40,000 --> 01:01:47,000 What's the matter? Well, they were doing construction on the house and they had a truckload of sand delivered. 545 01:01:47,000 --> 01:01:55,000 A mountain of sand was in the driveway. It was there when they went to bed, when he went out that morning. 546 01:01:55,000 --> 01:02:06,000 All the sand was blown away except for these concentric circles of sand that were fused and pressed into the blacktop. 547 01:02:07,000 --> 01:02:15,000 So Maya, thank heaven she had the foresight to take photographs. She took a series of Polaroid pictures. 548 01:02:15,000 --> 01:02:20,000 It seems to be about 18 to 20 feet in diameter, the largest circle. 549 01:02:20,000 --> 01:02:29,000 I said, is this still in your driveway? She says, well, we never dug it up, but we put another layer of blacktop over it. 550 01:02:29,000 --> 01:02:37,000 And I want to get a team there to take core samples. She said, we can dig up her driveway. 551 01:02:37,000 --> 01:02:48,000 I would love to get a sample of this and see was this sand heated to the point where it vitrified or physically fused with that blacktop. 552 01:02:48,000 --> 01:02:55,000 So hopefully there will be a very exciting addendum to this case. 553 01:02:55,000 --> 01:03:05,000 So even 30 years later, don't give up. Keep at it. Keep literally digging and hopefully more information will come to light. 554 01:03:05,000 --> 01:03:12,000 So just in summary, there have been over 100 years of activity in the Hudson Valley, no question. 555 01:03:12,000 --> 01:03:20,000 Many cases are multi-generational, far more abductees and contactees than I had ever imagined possible. 556 01:03:20,000 --> 01:03:28,000 Massive triangles and Vs in the 1980s and 90s is probably the most well-known of the events. 557 01:03:28,000 --> 01:03:35,000 There's a lot of involvement with the Hudson River itself, lakes, and a lot of reservoirs, objects coming in and out of them. 558 01:03:35,000 --> 01:03:41,000 Involvement with the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant as well as power lines. 559 01:03:41,000 --> 01:03:50,000 Involvement with Stuart Air Force Base going back at least to the 1950s and that it is still going on today. 560 01:03:50,000 --> 01:03:56,000 So as I said at the beginning, I invite you to draw your own conclusions. 561 01:03:56,000 --> 01:04:07,000 But this, if not the number one hotspot in the country, I think definitely deserves honorable mention as an incredibly active location. 562 01:04:07,000 --> 01:04:12,000 Is this the area where Whitley-Streiber had his experiences in communion? 563 01:04:12,000 --> 01:04:20,000 Yes, in fact, Whitley-Streiber's cabin where those experiences took place is probably about a 20-minute drive from Pine Bush. 564 01:04:20,000 --> 01:04:21,000 Okay, thank you. 565 01:04:21,000 --> 01:04:24,000 Thank you. Hello. 566 01:04:24,000 --> 01:04:29,000 Yes, I was wondering if you could tell us one of your personal stories. 567 01:04:29,000 --> 01:04:33,000 I know you have one that involves the reaction of a police officer. 568 01:04:33,000 --> 01:04:37,000 You want the bathrobe story, I know you. 569 01:04:37,000 --> 01:04:47,000 I was in college, I was studying for an organic chemistry test, and I was wearing a red fuzzy bathrobe and slippers, you know, relaxing, doing my work. 570 01:04:47,000 --> 01:04:56,000 And a friend's mother called and said, go outside right now, something just passed over our town and is headed for your town. 571 01:04:56,000 --> 01:05:09,000 So my boyfriend and I ran outside three large, round, soft, yellow, white lights flying in a V-shaped and they split off in different directions. 572 01:05:09,000 --> 01:05:13,000 Now remember that Vincent Perna picture from Lake Tirati? 573 01:05:13,000 --> 01:05:15,000 I remembered that picture. 574 01:05:15,000 --> 01:05:17,000 I said, let's go up to the lake. 575 01:05:17,000 --> 01:05:19,000 It was about 20 minutes away. 576 01:05:19,000 --> 01:05:24,000 I said, I know it's a long shot, but there have been UFOs sighted there before. 577 01:05:24,000 --> 01:05:26,000 Who knows? It's a chance. 578 01:05:26,000 --> 01:05:28,000 So I didn't change. 579 01:05:28,000 --> 01:05:36,000 I just jumped in the car in my red fuzzy bathrobe and we went speeding up there and we sat and we waited and we waited. 580 01:05:36,000 --> 01:05:41,000 And maybe 20 minutes went by and I was just about to give up. 581 01:05:41,000 --> 01:05:52,000 And all of a sudden, here's this yellowish white light coming from the north, one from the south, one from the east, and they're on this collision course. 582 01:05:52,000 --> 01:05:54,000 And we were getting very nervous. 583 01:05:54,000 --> 01:05:56,000 Oh my God, they're going to crash. 584 01:05:56,000 --> 01:06:11,000 Well, they did come together in this blinding, brilliant blue flash, indescribable, and as one solid pulsating blue light, it lowered slowly onto the top of this mountain. 585 01:06:11,000 --> 01:06:15,000 Well, bathrobe and slippers and all, I'm ready to run up this mountain. 586 01:06:15,000 --> 01:06:28,000 At this point, the state trooper pulls up and he wants to know what a girl in a bathrobe is doing in a car with two men late at night in the middle of a state park. 587 01:06:28,000 --> 01:06:31,000 So I didn't want to sound inebriated or anything else. 588 01:06:31,000 --> 01:06:36,000 And I finally just said, look, officer, would you please turn around and look? 589 01:06:36,000 --> 01:06:39,000 And he turns around and he was annoyed. 590 01:06:39,000 --> 01:06:46,000 But he turns around and look, white as a sheet, he turns and he goes, get out of here, go, go now. 591 01:06:46,000 --> 01:06:48,000 So he was terrified. 592 01:06:48,000 --> 01:06:50,000 We jumped in the car. 593 01:06:50,000 --> 01:06:52,000 We, you know, we took off. 594 01:06:52,000 --> 01:06:54,000 He passed us. 595 01:06:58,000 --> 01:07:00,000 He was hauling. 596 01:07:00,000 --> 01:07:01,000 He went by. 597 01:07:01,000 --> 01:07:05,000 He didn't want any part of whatever that was. 598 01:07:06,000 --> 01:07:08,000 Yes. 599 01:07:08,000 --> 01:07:10,000 Thank you for the excellent presentation. 600 01:07:10,000 --> 01:07:12,000 Thank you. 601 01:07:12,000 --> 01:07:20,000 From your account, it seems that there was a spike in sightings in early 1980s, 1982, 83. 602 01:07:20,000 --> 01:07:26,000 In the early 50s, there was another spike in sightings. 603 01:07:26,000 --> 01:07:39,000 Now, both the early 50s and early 1980s, especially culminating in 1983, were times when the danger of nuclear war was at its height. 604 01:07:39,000 --> 01:07:44,000 I mean, we have those graphs now describing the level of the nuclear threat. 605 01:07:44,000 --> 01:07:45,000 Right. 606 01:07:45,000 --> 01:07:53,000 So those specific, and also you mentioned that in recent years, you say that 2012, there was another increase. 607 01:07:53,000 --> 01:08:08,000 Now, if you look at the studies of the level of danger of nuclear war, we are now at a period when that danger has reached a level comparable, actually exactly the same level as 83 and 53. 608 01:08:08,000 --> 01:08:10,000 Do you think that there might be a connection? 609 01:08:10,000 --> 01:08:14,000 Well, that's fascinating because there was so much involvement with the Indian Point. 610 01:08:14,000 --> 01:08:19,000 Demonstrations that they could fly over a nuclear facility and shut down the systems. 611 01:08:19,000 --> 01:08:22,000 So that might add to the weight. 612 01:08:22,000 --> 01:08:24,000 But that's just a nuclear reactor. 613 01:08:24,000 --> 01:08:25,000 Right. 614 01:08:25,000 --> 01:08:34,000 But obviously, if there's danger of nuclear war, and perhaps they want to show what they can do to nuclear facilities. 615 01:08:34,000 --> 01:08:36,000 So that's fascinating. 616 01:08:36,000 --> 01:08:38,000 That is certainly a possibility. 617 01:08:38,000 --> 01:08:39,000 Thank you. 618 01:08:39,000 --> 01:08:40,000 Thank you. 619 01:08:40,000 --> 01:08:41,000 All right. 620 01:08:41,000 --> 01:08:48,000 If anybody else has any questions or comments or wants to share a story, I will be in the vendor room the rest of the afternoon. 621 01:08:48,000 --> 01:08:52,000 And again, I really want to appreciate, I want to thank Mufon. 622 01:08:52,000 --> 01:08:57,000 I really appreciate this opportunity to share a topic that is near and dear to me. 623 01:08:57,000 --> 01:08:58,000 So thanks again. 624 01:09:18,000 --> 01:09:20,000 Thank you. 625 01:09:48,000 --> 01:09:50,000 Thank you.