UFOs in Derry, and Bigfoot in the Orchard

My tastes in New England folklore are pretty broad. Sometimes my attention is captured by a 17th witchcraft story, sometimes by something more contemporary and paranormal. I say that because I was planning to write about an old witchcraft story from the New Hampshire mountains today, but at a party last night someone told me something too good to ignore. The witch story will wait until next week.

My friend David lives on Beaver Lake in Derry, New Hampshire. While talking with him at a birthday party for a mutual friend he asked me if I knew about the UFOs that had been seen in his neighborhood. When I said no, he pulled out his cellphone and showed me this video:



I don't know if the video is real or not, and I certainly don't like the creepy "UFOs are Satanic" preface. However I do think it is interesting and, like all UFO videos, a little freaky. What are these lights? Why are they hovering over a small lake in a residential neighborhood? I'm sure we'll never have authoritative answers to those questions, but David said he and his neighbors have also seen the lights in the sky.

As I wrote a few years ago, Beaver Lake is connected with some of the rare fairy folklore found in New England. A fairy named Tsienneto supposedly lived in the lake, and helped local heroes Hannah Duston and John Spark (who coined the phrase "Live free or die").

Some authors who write about the paranormal, like Patrick Harpur or Jacques Vallee, claim fairies and UFOs are two sides of the same coin. They're both both visitors from another world, but while our ancestors often placed this other world underground or in a mystical realm, we place it in outer space. Maybe Tsienneto has just upgraded her mode of transportation.

By the way, this isn't the first time UFOs have been seen in Derry. In October 1973 multiple witnesses saw a UFO splash into the waters of Rainbow Lake. According to an article in the Derry News, police divers searched the lake but did not find anything.

Here's another interesting video I found while poking around on YouTube. The video was uploaded recently, but apparently it is really from 2010. A Hubbardston, Vermont man noticed that apples had been disappearing from his orchard. When he set up a camera to capture the thief he got a photo of Bigfoot!



I love apples myself, so I can sympathize with Bigfoot here.

Next week I'm going to write about something "Olde Tyme", but as this week's videos show lots of strange things continue to happen in New England.