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A Sighting At The University of Bridgeport

Fom Night Siege : The Hudson Valley Ufo Sightings - Available at Amazon.com

WE HAD A SPECTACULAR view of the object one night, although we immediately suspected it was a hoax. It happened on the evening of March 21, 1985. We had taken part in a ninety-minute call-in show about the Hudson Valley UFO sightings, carried by a cable TV system. The show originated from the University of Bridgeport, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and with us (Philip Imbrogno and Bob Pratt) were fellow investigators Sheila Sabo and George Lesnick.

Throughout the program, calls came in from people in Bridgeport telling us that they had seen the UFO at one time or another. Some of the sightings took place in Westchester County, New York, and Fairfield County, Connecticut. From their descriptions, there was no doubt they had seen the mysterious UFO everybody else was seeing.

Initially, we thought they were lights on top of the building. Then we realized they weren't connected to the building in any way. From the circular pattern the lights formed, we thought this just might be the UFO we had been chronicling for the past two years.

At the same time, we thought it just might be a hoax. After all, we had just spent ninety minutes on TV talking about the UFO and showing the July 24 videotape, and as soon as we walked out of the building there was this magnificent display of lights waiting for us. The lights were so bright that they lit the tops of the buildings below. If it was a hoax, somebody had done a very good job.

We jumped in the car and drove toward the lights. As we did, the lights began to move slowly north. We hurried along in an effort to get under them and get a better look.

Now the lights stopped and hovered almost directly above Interstate 95, which crossed over the street a short distance ahead of us. We stopped and got out. A number of other people were standing in the street looking at this thing in the sky.

It had seven intensely bright white lights in an elliptical pattern. They were about seventy-five degrees up from the horizon and almost directly over our heads.

We lined up the lights with a lamp post on the overpass, checked our watches, and waited. The lights stayed there for a little more than five minutes, then began to move slowly and turn to the east.

By now we had dismissed the idea of a hoax and concluded we were watching the famous Hudson Valley UFO. We discovered that we had no camera or binoculars with us-especially unfortunate because we had plenty of time to take photos.

As the object turned to the east, the lights seemed to be going out one by one. Then we realized they were not going out at all, but were being blocked from sight by some kind of structure or undercarriage.

One of the fascinating things at the moment was that as the object turned, it did not bank the way a plane would but simply moved sideways, just the way many witnesses had described. At no time could we hear any sound.

When the object completed its turn, we could no longer see any of the seven bright, white lights, but we could see about twenty smaller lights of different colors with a faint orange glow around them that partially illuminated some type of dark structure. These lights formed a boomerang shape or half circle, and we had the impression we were seeing the back of this strange aerial ship.

The object then picked up speed and moved fairly quickly to the northeast. We jumped in the car and followed it on the interstate and nearly had an accident. Most of the motorists were driving erratically, trying to watch the object and drive at the same time. The object passed over the highway directly ahead of us, and the driver in front of us, apparently startled by what he saw, slammed on his brakes. Only George Lesnick's driving skills saved us from a serious accident.

As the UFO crossed the highway, we could again see a dark structure connecting the lights, which were now once more in an elliptical pattern. The object seemed to glide effortlessly across the sky. It then moved away from the interstate. We tried to follow, but we lost it in the west.

As we headed for our home base in Fairfield, a tenminute drive south of Bridgeport, we tuned in to WICC, a Bridgeport radio station. The Tiny Markel talk show was on, and people were phoning in from all over greater Bridgeport reporting that they had just seen the UFO.

When we arrived in Fairfield, we phoned Markel, who we had known since the Brewster conference. He was amazed at the number of calls he'd been getting about the UFO and said he'd never been deluged with calls like that before.

Tiny gave his listeners our phone number, and the phone began to ring almost immediately. The calls continued until 3:00 A.M. the following morning.

At 11:00 PM., we tuned in to New Haven television station WTNH. A number of the station's employees had seen the UFO pass over New Haven at 10:00. They had tried to videotape it, but the tape showed nothing but the black sky.

During the newscast, the weatherman said the whole thing was caused by ultralight planes in formation-but we and all the witnesses we talked to knew this was not true.

The next day WTNH took a viewer poll, asking viewers what they thought they saw. Eighty-five percent of those responding believed they had seen a UFO. Ten percent were not sure, and five percent thought they had seen planes or a blimp or helicopters.

In the following days, the FAA said planes were responsible for the UFO sightings and that the pilots had been arrested by state police in New York. We checked with the state police and were told that no one had been arrested.

Whatever was in the sky that night certainly was not a formation of planes. We got a good look at it and watched it hover silently for more than five minutes.

We received reports from a number of excellent observers and were able to triangulate the UFO's approximate position and altitude as it hovered above the interstate at 9:15 PM. Our calculations showed the object was between 1,200 and 1,500 feet high, was approximately 250 feet wide, and was located 200 yards west of Exit 25, at Fairfield Avenue.

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