Fireworks, UFOs and Anxiety: Weird Stories from The 1960s and Today

People across the United States have been reporting increased use of fireworks this spring and summer. The local, homegrown fireworks displays have started earlier in neighborhoods around the country and reportedly feature more intense explosives than in past years. A few different theories are floating around about why this might be. Personally I think it's because people are cooped up at home (and because Americans like to blow things up), but there have also been some conspiracy theories put forth to explain the increase in fireworks. As humans we like to find secret patterns in events. 

I won't repeat any conspiracy theories, but I will suggest something really bizarre: maybe extraterrestrials are behind this year's loud and extended fireworks display. They want you to be distracted by the noise and explosions so you won't see the UFOs hovering above us.

I'm just joking (mostly), but Satellite Internet has once again released its annual ranking of the states with the most UFO sightings. Based on data from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut were all in the top ten last year. Way to go New England! Rhode Island was 14th in the ranking, while sadly Massachusetts was all the way down at number 39. We need to do better.

Overall, Americans saw nearly twice as many UFOs in 2019 as they did in 2018. I am currently reading George Hanson's book The Trickster and the Paranormal, and Hanson points out that people tend to experience more paranormal phenomena (including UFOs) when they are stressed, anxious, or experiencing chaos. 

Huh. I think that is a pretty good description of how life has been in the U.S. for the last few years. Things have only gotten even more stressful in 2020 with the pandemic and political events, and according to NUFORC's data UFO sightings increased by 112% over 2019 in just the first three months of this year. I can only assume even more people will see UFOs as things get more and more stressful. Let's hope the number of UFO sightings (and our stress levels) start to go down at some point. 

July 2 is often celebrated as World UFO Day to commemorate the alleged saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico. Here in New England, the UFOs sometimes arrive a few days later, usually just in time for Independence Day and fireworks. For example, in 1960 a Massachusetts woman wrote to the United States Air Force inquiring about a UFO she and her boyfriend had seen over Revere Beach on July 4 of that year:

Could you please tell me whether anyone reported this sighting and whether it has been explained or not? Approximately 1,000 people might have been watching the same Fourth of July fireworks display and seen the same thing... 

My boyfriend... and myself were parked along the beach waiting for the fireworks to begin at about 10:00 pm. About 9:45 pm I noticed an orange disk in the sky a little right of center of (the) car. ... We watched it for about another 20 minutes before it moved swiftly down closer to the ocean where we were startled to see a reflection in the water of the orange disk above. It was hard to tell how low to the water it was or how big because is was out some distance. 

Eventually two more disks joined the first one, and then all three zoomed away "like lightning." The fireworks display began 20 minutes later. I don't know if the Air Force responded to the letter writer.

Strange objects returned to the Massachusetts skies in July of 1963. According to the July 9 issue of the Quincy Patriot-Ledger, two Air Force veterans saw a UFO over Dedham, Massachusetts on July 3. At least eleven other people had previously reported seeing something similar, mostly flying over towns on the South Shore. The object had a white light on top and an orange light on its bottom, which sounds a little like the orange UFOs seen in 1960 at Revere Beach. 

A few days later, on July 6, the Patriot-Ledger published an article by one of its reporters. In late June he had set up a camera in his Quincy back yard to photograph the motion of the stars. When he developed the film he saw patterns of lights on the photos as if objects had flown into view, hovered, and then left:

About two weeks ago I took a photograph that makes me wonder what is flying in our skies.  

The original purpose of the shot was to photograph the tracks left by stars passing overhead as the earth revolved.... 

This week I had the film developed. On the slide I immediately saw something which shouldn't have been there - a clear pattern of lights which moved into the camera's view, hovered in at least seven spots, then left the camera's view once more. 

The lights were orange, white and silver. A local UFO investigator claimed they were similar to lights seen by two teenage girls in West Quincy in mid-June. 

On July 11, the Patriot-Ledger reported that even more people had seen mysterious flying objects, which were often (but not always) described as having orange lights on the bottom and white lights on top. A total of 21 people reported seeing UFOs near the South Shore in June and early July of 1963. Gerald S. Hawkins, director of the Boston University Observatory and staff astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard College Observatory, said the photos taken by the Patriot Ledger reporter came "very close to scientific evidence about UFOs."

Very close, but not conclusive. There weren't any more reports from the South Shore after July 11, and no one proposed a definitive explanation for what had been seen. As in so many paranormal events, the different accounts and data seem like they are pointing towards something - but it's never clear exactly what. Everything appears to be coalescing into a coherent narrative, but never does. 

Were the objects seen in 1963 the same ones reported in 1960? They sound similar, but not identical, and not everyone in 1963 saw UFOs with orange lights. In both 1960 and 1963, the UFOs were seen in coastal areas near Boston, but not exclusively - the two Air Force vets saw one in an inland town west of Boston. 

In both years the UFOs were seen around early July. Perhaps that's just because more people were outside in the warmer weather and looking at the sky, possibly for fireworks. Maybe there's some other reason these things were sighted in the same season three years apart. I don't think we'll ever know.  

Humans like nice tidy stories to explain why anomalous things happen, whether it's an increase in fireworks or a rash of UFO sightings near Boston in the 1960s. The universe doesn't always provide us with easy answers though, even if they would make us feel less anxious. 

*****

I found the information about the 1960 and 1963 UFO sightings on Loren Goss's amazing UFO history site. It's definitely worth a visit. 

"Something I Wasn't Supposed To Be Looking At..." A Recent UFO Sighting

I often write about UFOs in January. I'm not sure why. Maybe the cold, dark skies at this time of year remind me the Earth is just one little planet in a vast teeming universe. I see stars when I leave the house in the morning and stars when I come home at night. Who knows what else I might see?

Well, I might see a large diamond-shaped craft hovering in the sky. According to the National UFO Reporting Center (NURC), that's what a woman saw while driving home from work on Route 5 in Easthampton, Massachusetts on January 3, 2019. The sun had set and she was approaching the Easthampton/Northampton line when she noticed something unusual:

I saw three stationary bright white lights hovering over the Connecticut river between Mt. Tom and Skinner Mt. The lights were in a straight row, with the 2 outer lights being slightly larger. Of the three lights, the center one was strobing slowly which I thought was odd since planes usually have the lights on their wings flashing. This was a pure, bright, white light, not a yellow light that incandescent bulbs emit. The center light was level with the other two and was pulsating separately. The center light emitted a more "rainbow" like light, similar to a moonstone, but was mostly white-passing.

The witness pulled over to better see what was happening. Whatever she was seeing was about half a mile away. At first she thought it might be a plane landing at a nearby airfield, but these lights were not the normal lights usually seen on a plane. She then considered that it might be a helicopter, since it seemed to be stationary, but it was much too large. Maybe a drone? Much, much too large for that. 

The witness was able to see the bottom of the craft once it tilted and began to fly away. 

There were 4 identical sized pure white bright lights emitting from the bottom of the craft in a square/diamond shape. In addition, there were 2 more of the smaller center-strobing lights beneath the craft, below where the center one was seen when I first saw the craft facing toward me. I turned off my radio and lowered my window to hear if it was making any sound, but I didn't detect that it was.

Well, that certainly doesn't sound like an airplane to me. The witness provided some drawings of the craft to the NURC. See below. Large, rectangular, silent flying objects don't seem normal to me. 

The witness felt that this might not be a natural phenomenon and that the craft (if that's what it was) was aware that she was observing it. If she could see it, then could the beings inside see her?

I felt like I was looking at something I wasn't supposed to be looking at, as it only changed course after I had pulled off the road and started intently staring at it. I was shocked no one in front or behind me had pulled over to witness it with me. After about 1 minute of direct sight with the craft, it began travelling away from me, following the river north/northeast, I decided I wanted to head home as I was scared about the actuality of what I had just seen. 

It was not my first time seeing a UFO, but it was the first time I had seen one this close up.

I really like this phrase: "I felt like I was looking at something I wasn't supposed to be looking at..." It's ambiguous and very evocative. Was she seeing something secret that no one was supposed to see? She seems to imply the giant craft (which none of the other motorists even notice) flew away when its pilots realized she could see them. It's as if for a brief moment she was able to see behind the curtain - and saw one of the things that hover in our skies normally unseen. It was almost like a religious experience. Perhaps the craft wasn't even a physical object at all, which might explain why no one else seemed to witness it. 

"I felt like I was looking at something I wasn't supposed to be looking at..." That phrase could also be interpreted to mean she was looking at something that wasn't supposed to exist. Large diamond-shaped craft that hover silently in the sky aren't supposed to exist, at least according to what we know. It was something inexplicable and beyond the normal rules of our world. Overall, just a strange and beautiful UFO account. 

Odds Are Good You'll See A UFO in New England

A group called Casino.org has analyzed decades of UFO sightings and come up with some fascinating data about those strange objects we see in the sky. Casino.org usually analyzes data about the gambling industry, but I'm glad they've broadened their scope.

According to their study, these are the ten states where you are most likely to see a UFO:

1. Wyoming
2. VERMONT
3. Montana
4. North Dakota
5. Alaska
6. Hawaii
7. New Mexico
8. RHODE ISLAND
9. NEW HAMPSHIRE
10. MAINE

It's interesting that four of the top ten states are in New England, and I wonder why that is. My first thought was "Oh, they are all rural states," but is that true? Rhode Island has some very dense urban areas, and other states that are more rural than these four didn't make the list. Where's South Dakota, for example?

I was a little disappointed that Connecticut and Massachusetts didn't make the top-ten list, but they also didn't make the list of states were you are least likely to report a UFO. So there is something about New England that makes it a good region for UFO sightings, but I am not sure what.  I would be happy to hear your thoughts.

You can see the interactive map here. 

Since Casino.org usually looks at gambling, they express your likelihood of seeing a UFO in terms of odds. Vermont has a population of 623,657 and more than 2,493 UFOs have been sighted there in the last 78 years, so the odds of a Vermonter seeing a strange object in the sky is 250/1. In that same period Rhode Island has reported 3,088 sightings (odds: 324/1), while 3,627 UFOs have been seen in New Hampshire (odds: 369/1). Mainers have seen 3,605 weird flying objects, giving you a 370/1 chance of seeing one in the Pine Tree State.

Quantifying things like this really provides a good idea of how widespread the phenomena is. Casino.org claims there have been 259,691 reported UFO sightings in the United States since the last century. That seems like a lot to me, and the authors of the study say the US is one of the countries where people are most likely to see a UFO.

Personally, I would love to see a UFO as an adult. I think it would be cool! Some of my fellow citizens apparently have more negative feelings about UFOs. In fact, some 40,000 Americans have taken out insurance against alien abduction. According to trade publication Business Insurance, you can purchase a policy from a company in Florida:

The Palm Beach Post contacted Mike St. Lawrence, who has been operating The Alien Abduction & Casualty Insurance Co. out of his home in Altamonte Springs, selling $20 policies since 1987. “People buy them for somebody else,” Mr. St. Lawrence told a reporter. “They usually just make themselves the beneficiary.”

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to collect on their policy?

This all sounds like light-hearted fun, but The New York Times did recently publish an article about how the US government has been studying UFOs for years. Someone in the Pentagon takes it all very seriously. Maura Sullivan, a Democrat running for congress in New Hampshire, recently gave The Conway Daily Sun her thoughts on the topic:

Asked if she would address news reports about military footage of UFOs, including a New York Times story from a retired Navy pilot who now lives in New Hampshire, Sullivan said she would look into it as part of her job on Armed Services Committee. 

"I would be asking questions about digging deeper into the UFO issue," said Sullivan, who said she also would ask the Pentagon about its personnel and training budget because she is concerned about military accidents like the recent helicopter crash that killed a soldier from New Hampshire.

Will candidates in the other top-ten UFO states also address this issue? I guess we'll have to watch the election coverage to find out.

UFOS Old and New, from Vermont and Massachusetts

I'm taking a break from witches and "Olde Tymey" folklore this week to post about more recent folklore, namely UFOs. Strange stories aren't just a thing from from the past; people also encounter strange phenomena today.

Up first: was a giant UFO hovering over a lake on the Vermont border? The answer is yes, according to UFO Sightings Daily. A blogger named Scott Waring posted the following image to that site after he found it on Google Earth street view:

You can check out the image yourself on Google here. The UFO is allegedly hovering over Lake George, which is on the border of Vermont and New York. I think it is on the New York side in this photo, but maybe it floated over to Vermont as well.

Here how the news was reported by the U.K.'s Daily Express:

UFO-SPOTTERS were sent into a frenzy when an unexplained silver-grey sphere was captured on a Google Earth camera as it hovered in the skies above the USA. The orb was seen floating above trees on the border between Vermont and New York State. 

UFO enthusiasts were quick to declare a finding although many viewers thought the mystery object was actually a drop of water on the camera lens.

It looks more like a motorcycle helmet than a water drop to me. It also reminds me of this smiley face spaceship from the 1980s movie Heavy Metal. 

Check out this Youtube video if you want to read more suggestions about what the Lake George UFO might be. Some viewers think if might just be the Google Photo sphere icon, which unfortunately seems likely (see below). I'd rather think it was a giant smiley face UFO than a corporate logo. 

The Google photo sphere icon. 

But still, whether or not the Lake George UFO is real, what remains interesting is that people continue to see UFOs. As I've mentioned on this blog before, I saw a UFO in Haverhill, Massachusetts in the 1970s when I was a small child. One summer evening I was outside in my family's back yard with my brother and a boy who lived nearby. As we played in the dusk we saw a bright light descend from the sky and go down behind a hill. We were terrified and all ran into my parents' house. Our neighbor was so scared he refused to go home until his parents came back from the meeting they had gone to. 

This happened a long time ago but the memory and the fear we felt still remain vivid. We were all very young, so who knows what we really saw. Was it a helicopter? A falling star? Fireworks? They are all possibilities, but since it was the 1970s we fervently believed that flying saucers lurked in the night sky. We all knew that strange light was really a craft piloted by alien creatures. 

The UFO we saw probably had a mundane explanation, but apparently we weren't the only children who saw strange things in Haverhill. My brother recently found record of a UFO sighting that also occurred in our hometown, but many years earlier:

Ufologist Loren Gross reported that in Haverhill, Massachusetts, USA, on December 17, 1959, at 08:00 a.m., four children on a school bus saw a flash in the sky, then watched a silver, domed disc land in a field. 

A door on the craft opened and a humanoid occupant exited. (from URECAT - UFO Related Entities Catalog, an online resource of extraterrestrial sightings)

The original source is a self-published booklet by Loren Gross called "The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs A History. 1959: October-December." I found a PDF copy online, which contains this detailed account:

...Darcelle Nolan, 8, a second grader at St. Joseph School, told of seeing something even more startling yesterday morning on Broadway in Ayers Village while enroute to school on the school bus. 

Darcelle, along with nine-year-old Diane Pearson of 1320 Broadway, reported that they saw a bright flash in a field nearby, and 'we saw something round, silvery colored land in the field and it had a dome on top. A door opened and something in light colored clothes got out.'

She reports that four children on the bus saw the object. Her mother, Mrs. Richard Nolan of 16 South Crystal St., said this morning, 'At first I didn't believe it, but after she told me the story, I believed her. She's not the type to make up stories.' 

Gross also notes that a child at Haverhill's Tilton School saw something strange in the sky a few days earlier. Perhaps Haverhill was having a pre-Christmas UFO scare? Gross writes that he found these accounts in press reports.

Is there any connection between what the kids saw in 1959 and what we saw in the 1970s? Maybe the only connection is that we were all young. I don't have a nice summary statement to wrap this post up, but I think that's probably appropriate when writing about UFOs. They're just weird and hard to categorize. Whether they are corporate logos or spaceships from another planet I think we'll be hearing about them for as long as we live.

UFO Hunters Rescued By Police

Being a paranormal researcher probably has a lot of risks associated with it. You might get kidnapped by Bigfoot, for example, or maybe abducted by aliens. Ghost hunters even occasionally bring home a spirit with them, which isn't usually a good thing.

Happily, I think most of those risks are pretty rare. Has anyone been kidnapped by Bigfoot in living memory? This doesn't mean monster- and ghost-hunting are risk free, but the risks are usually just those associated with being outdoors in isolated areas. You know, things like catching Lyme disease, falling and breaking a leg, or stumbling upon a group of drug-using teenagers.

On Thursday, June 8, three young UFO hunters had to be rescued from the Blue Hills, which are located just south of Boston. The three teenagers had come from the Plymouth area to watch the skies for strange objects. For those of you not familiar with them, the Blue Hills are the highest hills in the Boston area so they afford a good view the night sky.

Unfortunately the trio was a little unprepared for their excursion. It took them longer to climb to the top of Buck's Hill than they thought, they hadn't brought any flashlights, and one of them was only wearing slippers. To make things worse, the terrain was wet and extremely rocky. They didn't have any trouble getting to the top of the hill, but rather than risk descending in the dark they called for help.

The State Police arrived on the scene with several patrols, police dogs, and even a helicopter. They eventually found the teens and led them down the hill along a less treacherous path. So, although they probably should have been better prepared at least the trio was wise enough to know when they needed help.
 
The story has a happy ending, but it's made even happier by this: the UFO hunters found what they were looking for. One of the teens who is a self-described "UFO magnet" told WHDH-TV the following:

"We saw a couple we had never seen before... We saw these two ships that had like these bright spotlights and then we saw this weird orb thing that was like a spotlight..."

She also told The Boston Globe that,

“We should’ve brought flashlights and charged our phones and maybe brought better hiking gear,” she said. “But it was overall very worthwhile because it was a beautiful hike.”

As far as seeing the UFOs, she said: “It was very interesting, but also pretty creepy.”

Better creepy than dangerous. If you're going to explore lonely places at night please be careful out there. I don't think the aliens will get you but the ticks, rabid raccoons and slippery rocks just might.

New Englanders See A Lot Of UFOs!

The headline for this weeks blog post says it all.

The National UFO Reporting Center (UFORC) recently released some global statistics regarding UFO sightings. Guess what? People in New England see more UFOs per capita than most other people in the United States. I have always suspected that our part of the country was spookier than others. Perhaps this is some tangible proof.

Here is a map of the United States showing per capita UFO sightings. As you can see, New England is redder than much of the country. Red = more UFO sightings/person.

Map from VizThis.

The northern New England states (Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont) are all way above average. It seems like Vermont is definitely the place to go if you are eager to see a UFO. Rhode Island and Connecticut are also above average. Oddly, although Massachusetts leads the nation in many measures, it is only average for UFO sightings. Massholes, we need to step it up! Turn off Netflix and go outside more please.

The map raises a lot of questions. For example, at first I thought "Oh, the rural states tend to see more UFOs than the heavily urbanized states. They have less light pollution so people can see the night sky more clearly." But on second thought, I realized that some relatively rural states don't see many UFOs at all, particularly in the South. So much for that theory. And Rhode Island and Connecticut have a lot of cities and big suburbs anyway.

I also thought that maybe UFO sightings were correlated to political affiliations. Did states that voted for Clinton tend to see more UFOs? It looks like they did, but people in the big Western also states see a lot of UFOs and they voted for Trump. So maybe that correlation doesn't really work.

I have read that some UFOlogists think the number of sightings is declining. That may be the case elsewhere in the world, but the number here in the United States has actually increased in the last few decades. Here is another graphic showing that UFORC data:

Chart from VizThis

Are people actually seeing more UFOs, or are they just reporting them more. The big spike in sightings happened after the Internet was created, and along with it multiple ways to report sightings. Prior to the Internet it was not easy to find a UFO research organization, never mind report a sighting. People might just be reporting more of them since it is now easier to do.

One other fun fact from the UFORC report: the type of UFOs people see has changed over time. These days more people report strange lights in the sky than any other form of UFO. Actual flying saucers are now in a distant second place, followed by spherical, triangular, and cigar-shaped objects.

If you want more information, check out VisThis, which is where I found the graphics for this week's post. It is a great site! They have many more charts explaining the UFORC report.

Recent UFO Sightings, Plus the UFO I Saw As A Child

While we were all busy celebrating the holidays last month, some people spent December seeing strange lights and objects in the sky. I don't think any of them were flying reindeer. Read on!

On the night of December 10, someone in the Maine town of East Baldwin reported seeing an enormous flying craft the size of a football stadium. It was accompanied by two smaller objects flying next to it. The witness had trouble seeing the largest UFO clearly, and speculates that some type of force field may have been responsible.

That's all pretty strange, but it gets stranger:

As the formation approached, I was hit with a wave of nausea, felt anxiety and fear. One of my K-9's ran off back to the house and the other cowered behind me. Both have been agitated ever since and hesitant to go out at night. I have felt ill and uneasy ever since as well. I later heard that there were an unusual number of ambulance calls in the area for anxiety or heart attacks the following day. I looked online and saw that another Maine couple in Windsor saw the giant craft that night and fell ill themselves. I am a trained observer and out every night with my dogs. I have seen many other "craft" but never so close as to be able to determine that they were not made on Earth (that we know of). I am concerned about the health effects of whatever force field overflew us at such a low altitude to make us feel instantly sick.

Yikes! That's creepy stuff. Happily, a sighting on December 5 in Kingston, New Hampshire was less traumatic. The witness was inside their house watching TV when they heard a helicopter approaching. This was unusual so the witness went outside to see what was happening. The helicopter was not yet overhead, but some type of large dark object was. It did not have any lights on it and the witness was only able to see it because it blocked out the stars overhead. Before it flew off the witness saw a single pale red light appear on the flying object. After it disappeared from view the helicopter finally appeared and flew off after it, as if in pursuit.

On December 14, someone outside taking a cigarette break from work in South Burlington, Vermont took a photo of the moon. They didn't notice anything unusual. When they went back inside and looked at the photo they noticed the following:

Is it an alien craft? A lens flare? An airplane? I don't have a clue. I suppose that's what makes these flying objects unidentified.

There were also UFO sightings during December in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Surprisingly, there weren't any reported in Rhode Island. I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps Rhode Islanders have better things to do than look up at the night sky, or maybe Rhode Island is so small that UFOs fly over it before they have a chance to be seen? OK, I'm kidding on both of those, but I do wonder why no one reported any UFOs there.

I found all these reports by looking through the MUFON database online. MUFON, or the Mutual UFO Network, has been collecting UFO reports for decades and they are a great source if you like to read about UFO sightings, which I do. I grew up in the 1970s when UFOs were everywhere in popular culture and I still have a fondness for them.

When I was very small, my brother, a young neighbor and I once saw a UFO. It was nighttime and we were standing in our backyard when we saw a very bright light descend from the sky and go down behind a hill. We were terrified. We ran into our house and told my parents what we had seen. I don't remember their response, sadly, but I don't think they were particularly concerned.

What I do remember is the amazement and fear that I felt. I had seen something from another world. It was thrilling but scary. Would we see alien creatures next? That thought terrified me. My brother and our neighbor felt the same way; our neighbor's parents were out and he refused to go home until they came back later that night. I seem to recall being afraid that something would look in my bedroom window (even though I slept on the second floor). I suppose I can understand why the witness in East Baldwin felt sick and uneasy, even if a force field was not present.

We were quite young (I was only in elementary school, if not kindergarten) and the media was full of UFO stories at the time. It's no wonder we were freaked out. Did we really just see a falling star? A lone bottle rocket? A very silent helicopter? It could have been any of those things, or maybe it was something else entirely. It truly was unidentified.

People have been seeing strange lights in the night sky since history began. In the past they might have been explained as gods, angels, ghosts, or special omens. Astronomy can now explain most of the things we see in the sky, but every now and then something still manages to slip through the cracks of rationality to remind us of the great mysteries that lurk out in the universe.

A UFO Sighting in Malden: Reality, Daimons and Hoaxes

Did a UFO land outside Boston earlier this month?

According to MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network), a Malden resident reported seeing something strange the evening of December 10 in the skies over either Malden or Revere. (The two towns are adjacent so I understand how it could be hard to tell where it was.)

The witness was out walking around 11:00 pm when he saw something unusual flying above him. The object was described simply as "an odd light" which hovered and then landed on the ground. After it landed the witness saw a red light shining through the trees but was unable to make his way to it.

It was dark and too far away to see it, but I swore I saw a red light on the ground. So I tried to get closer to it, but the only way was through a forest and it could have been miles away. I was unarmed and had no flashlight so I did not proceed, but I am in the morning. Waited to see if it would go back up for a few minutes. It didn’t and I went home.

I have a lot of friends who live in Malden and have been there innumerable times, so I definitely find this story interesting. The town is densely settled but also has a lot of forested land. In particular I'm thinking of the the Middlesex Fells, a 2,500 acre park that is partially located in Malden. It has lots of rocky hills, woods, lakes and even some open fields that might be large enough for a UFO to land in. It's also a great place to hike!

A photo from Woonsocket, Rhode Island taken in 1967. Real or fake? From this great site.

I have two initial and immediate reactions whenever someone claims to have seen a UFO.

First, I ask myself, "Did they really see something mundane and mistakenly think it was some kind of weird flying craft?" Maybe it was a plane, or a meteor, or a satellite. The MUFON website itself notes: "Please remember that most UFO sightings can be explained as something natural or man-made." The witness in this case claims that it was definitely not an airplane or helicopter. They are familiar with those because a relative was in the Air Force. Interestingly, when the witness tried to take a photo with their iPhone it immediately lost all power. Hmmm. I don't think your standard 747 makes phones shut down...

Second, I ask myself, "Is this person playing a hoax?", which might be the case here. I'm not sure what an anonymous hoaxer gains by posting something to an online UFO site, but there are plenty of hoaxes online. The details in this report are a little hazy which does make me a little suspicious. For example, where was the witness when they saw the UFO? How could they see the light on the ground if it was miles away and in the woods?

After I have those two immediate reactions I will sometimes think about this passage in Patrick Harpur's 1994 book Daimonic Reality:

Charges of fakery, lies and hoaxing are leveled at all paranormal phenomena. ... It is nowhere more true than in UFOlogy, where debates run for decades about whether "contactees" really contacted aliens or whether they were lying. I suspect that, reality being what it is, the they themselves don't know half the time. In other words, I prefer to see hoaxing as a daimonic quality inherent in, and continuous with, anomalous events - which are neither "genuine" nor "fake" but, in a deeper sense, both. 

Oooooh! That's a philosophically shifty paragraph if there ever was one. I tend to think of things as being either real or fake. Were there really weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Do vaccines really cause autism? Is the Earth really round? We should be able to determine what's true or false.

The key word in Harpur's argument is "daimonic," which refers to the daimones, minor spirits in ancient Greek mythology who filled the world. The singular form is daimon, which the English word "demon" is derived from. The daimons weren't necessarily evil, though. Some were good, some were bad, and a lot them were just tricky. They could bring dreams to people who were sleeping, or visions to those who were awake.


Harpur claims that although we think of these daimons as purely mythological (if we think of them at all), they are still here, but rather than flying around in the material world they are now lurking in our psyche waiting to play tricks. He quotes Jung to support his argument:

There are no conclusive arguments against the hypothesis that these archetypal figures are endowed with personality at the outset and are not just secondary personalizations. In so far as the archetypes do not represent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as DAIMONES, as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and are not "figments of the imagination", as rationalists would have us believe.

Harpur further claims that these daimons want our attention, but since we ignore them they tend to show up as weird anomalous phenomena like Bigfoot, ghosts, spectral animals, and of course UFOs.

Sometimes they show up on their own, but sometimes the daimons will unconsciously urge people to imitate them or pretend they have seen them. They get humans to do their work for them. So that guy who dresses up like Bigfoot to tromp around the woods may have been inspired to do it by the daimons. That UFO hoaxer who posts a fake sighting online might have been inspired by these tricky spirits as well. A good hoax serves the daimons' purpose: to remind us that not everything is rational and that weird things still lurk out there in the darkness.

You may not buy Harpur's theory, but I find it interesting. It's exciting to think that strange entities are still out there in the world, either hiding in our psyches or in the woods in a Massachusetts town with two subway stations.

PS - It seems like there are a lot of UFO sightings in New England during the winter. Does anyone know if that is true? Is it just because it gets darker so much earlier? Please share your thoughts on this subject if you have any. 

Recent UFO Sightings in New Hampshire

It's easy for me to get lost in New England's old weird folklore. Every now and then I need to stick my head up from the old books and look at what's happening now - New England's new weird folklore.

A lot of people use the word paranormal when they are talking about strange modern phenomena. 'Paranormal' sounds more scientific than 'folklore,' and I suppose it suits the technological era that we live in. But I don't think it's dismissive to lump modern paranormal phenomena with older folklore. Both terms refer to the same thing: weird activity or stories that don't comfortably fit in other more reputable categories like history, science, or religion.

Anyway, regardless of terminology, on December 1, 2014 someone stopped at a traffic light in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and saw a UFO. They didn't see a metallic spaceship or anything of that sort, but instead some mysterious lights in the sky. Shining through the cloud cover they could see a large white circle of lights. Sometimes the lights had a bluish tinge, sometimes pinkish, but mostly they remained white.

There was an additional light that rotated around the circle of lights, but the circle itself stayed stationary.

It stayed in the same place with the bigger light just rotating around the circle of stationary light. I kept trying to see if there was a craft there, but could not make out any shape of a craft as this was just above the cloud cover. My first thought is that whoever it was must have thought they were hiding above the cloud, but the lights were clearly visible.

When the traffic light turned green the witness drive forward and pulled off the road, but when he looked back up the UFO had disappeared.

Carl Jung in 1910 (from Wikipedia)

It's a cool sighting! I don't know what UFOs are, but people have been seeing them for centuries. There are many theories about what they are, but the psychiatrist Carl Jung might be able to shed light (forgive the pun) on this particular incident. Jung claimed there were similarities between UFOs and the many circular holy symbols in world religions. For example, he drew connections between saints' halos, Hindu and Buddhist mandalas, the wheel seen by the prophet Ezekiel, and modern UFOs. Jung claimed all of these were mystical experiences, and that circular shapes symbolized spiritual wholeness.

I like that theory, but what would he say about the large number of triangular UFOs seen in New Hampshire? Mark Podell, an investigator with MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), investigates 5 - 10 New Hampshire UFO sightings each month. Many people see circular UFOs, but many others see triangular lights in the sky. If you want to see one yourself, you might want to visit Franconia Notch at night. Podell says that's where 80% of the reports come from. I've been up there many times myself, and it is very, very dark at night. It's probably a good place to witness strange phenomena.

You can hear more from Mark Podell, and see a video of a possible UFO seen in Derry, in the video below.


I found the information about the UFO in Portsmouth from the MUFON website, which is always interesting.

Another Mystery in the Bridgewater Triangle: A Giant Flying Egg?

Down in southeastern Massachusetts there's a 200-square mile area called the "Bridgewater Triangle." The term was popularized by Loren Coleman, a Maine resident and famous cryptozoologist.

In his book Mysterious America, Coleman writes

The Hockomock Swamp area claims its own share of strange occurrences. Because of its long history of evil, bedeviled, and ominous occurrences, residents have recognized this area of the state for its strange and often sinister character and have, over the years, dubbed it "The Bridgewater Triangle." This Hockomock Swamp region covers an area of approximately 200 square miles and includes the towns of Abington, Freetown, and Rehoboth at the angles of the triangle, and Brockton, Taunton, the Bridgewaters, Raynham, Mansfield, Norton, and Easton within the triangle. 

My friend Ed grew up in Taunton, and said he was always warned not to pick berries in the Hockomock Swamp. Was it just because his parents were afraid he'd get lost in some quicksand, or perhaps something else? A couple years ago Tony and I went down to Raynham for a birthday party Ed organized. We drove through the swamp to get there, and I remember noticing the road was particularly dark, and that wisps of mist drifted across it. It was a little creepy.

Residents of the Bridgewater Triangle have encountered a wide variety of strange creatures, including gigantic birds, mysterious black dogs, enormous snakes, and of course Bigfoot. The area is also host to many different ghosts, including those who haunt Anawan Rock and the maniacal red-headed hitchhiker of Route 44.

Paranormal phenomena tend to cluster together, so naturally a lot of UFOs have been seen in the Bridgewater Triangle. Mysterious flying objects have been seen since at least 1908, and my friend Ed's parents told him they had once seen something strange in the sky.


The most recent UFO was seen just last week, on April 12. A resident of Rehoboth and their daughter were outside raking leaves during the day when they saw something overhead: a gigantic, flying egg.

"It was an egg-shaped object, white in color. Not sure if it was glowing or if reflecting, but it was definitely white. It seemed to slow a little before slightly curving its course and staying straight after doing so, ascending upward and then not visible anymore."

Is an egg-shaped UFO "evil, bedeviled, and ominous," like some of the other Bridgewater phenomena? I suppose maybe it could be ominous, but it definitely doesn't seem evil or bedeviled. Mostly, it just sounds puzzling and kind of cool, and also seasonally appropriate. After all, what better time to see a giant flying egg than the week before Easter!

I got my information about the UFO from this report by Roger Marsh, who writes about UFOs for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. 

UFO Statistics, Mountain Lions, and Colonial New Year in the News

Here are a few folkloric things that have been in the media recently. I write a lot about the past, but strange things are still alive and well in New England!

UFO Statistics for 2013

MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, has released their data on the number of UFO sightings in the year 2013. You'll be happy to know that although New England is a small region we still reported a sizeable number of strange things in the sky. Here are the number of UFO sightings by state:

Maine: 51
New Hampshire: 42
Vermont: 25
Massachusetts: 106
Rhode Island: 21
Connecticut: 73

It all adds up to a grand total of 318 UFOs seen here last year. The numbers from states like California, Texas and Florida are much higher, but on a per person basis New England fares really well. Maine and Vermont have some of the highest number of sightings per person in the United States. Spherical objects were the most commonly reported in New England, except in New Hampshire where people reported more star-shaped UFOs. This infographic from OuterPlaces explains it all:

I love reading about UFOs, but don't really have a firm opinion about what they are. Extraterrestrial craft? Ancient gods or fairies in a new disguise? Omens of the End Times? Manifestations of the collective unconscious? Any of those sound interesting to me. UFOs are still fascinating even if many of the sightings are hoaxes or misinterpretations. After all, what does it mean that we are willing to believe there just might someone (or something) out there in the universe?

Giant Cat Seen (or Not?) in Winchester, MA

On a more terrestrial note a large cat-like animal, possibly a mountain lion, was seen in Winchester, Massachusetts in late February and again in March.

No mountain lions have been confirmed in Massachusetts for more than 150 years, and Winchester, an upscale suburb only eight miles from Boston, seems like an unlikely spot for such a large predator to appear. However, a mountain lion was killed by a car in Millford, Connecticut in 2011. That animal had been tagged earlier in its life by biologists in South Dakota, so I suppose its not impossible for a mountain lion to make its way to Massachusetts.

The animal left tracks, and police sent them to wildlife experts for analysis. I don't know if the citizens of Winchester were excited or terrified when the police posted on their website that the tracks had been confirmed as mountain lion tracks. Yes, that's right, a mountain lion was stalking around Winchester.

And then things got murky. The wildlife experts claimed they had never said the tracks were from a mountain lion. Instead, they believed the tracks were from a large dog or maybe a coyote. Winchester police are sticking with their story, though.

So, just like with UFO sightings, there's no good resolution. Is that light in the sky the planet Venus or a spaceship? Did people see a large coyote or was it a mountain lion? For the moment we have to be comfortable with uncertainty (and lock up the pets if you live in Winchester).

Colonial New Year

For many years, the American colonies celebrated New Year's on March 25 rather than January 1. Although most of Europe had upgraded to the Gregorian calendar, England and her colonies refused to follow a Papish innovation (even though it was correct) and continued using the older and inaccurate Julian calendar. The Boston Globe has a nice article about how the change was finally made.