Controversy Over UFO Memorial in Massachusetts Town

I stumbled upon the following Associated Press item the other day. It's dated April 14, 2018:

SHEFFIELD, Mass. (AP) — A memorial in a remote corner of Massachusetts that marks a 1969 UFO sighting has been ordered moved, but one man who experienced a close encounter is objecting. 

The 5,000-pound (2,300-kilogram) memorial in Sheffield was installed in 2015, but was moved about 30 feet (9 meters) a few weeks later when it was discovered it was on town land. 

Now, Town Administrator Rhonda LaBombard tells The Berkshire Eagle it has to be moved again because it's on a town right-of-way easement. 

That's not sitting well with Thom Reed. He was 9 when he, his mother, grandmother and brother saw what he described as a "self-contained glow" that flooded their car with an amber light. About 40 people in several surrounding towns reported the strange light.
Reed is threatening legal action.

More information on the controversy can be found on Newser:

"This isn't fair to the community," says Reed. "It's not right having nothing there." Reed is also perplexed because he and town officials joined forces to give the memorial its current position. "She chose the spot herself," he says about LaBombard. Now Reed is threatening legal action. "This has come up more than once," he says. "We're not done with the monument." He was 9 when he, his mother, grandmother, and brother saw what he described as a "self-contained glow" that flooded their car with an amber light. About 40 people in several surrounding towns reported the strange light.

Thom Reed's encounter encounter with a UFO is one of the better-documented cases in recent history. I suppose I should say "encounters" plural, and not just singular. Reed had his first encounter in 1966 when he was just six years old. Reed awoke in the middle of the night to see small glowing orbs floating through the bedroom he shared with his younger brother Matthew in an old Sheffield farm house.

Photo of Sheffield UFO monument from Mass Live. 

Those orbs disappeared after a while, but several days later something even stranger occurred: small humanoid beings appeared in the boys' room. The small humanoids brought Tom and Matthew outside into the woods and led them into a metal craft. Inside the boys were shown images on a screen, including space ships and a willow tree. 

The humanoid visitations continued after this, and eventually they got so bad the family moved to nearby Great Barrington in an effort to end them. A large willow tree stood in front of their new home, indicating that the family wouldn't easily avoid the visitors who regularly invaded their home.

The Sheffield monument commemorates a very specific encounter the Reed family had with a UFO in 1969. Reed, his brother, mother and grandmother all saw a UFO while driving near Sheffield's covered bridge. All four members of the family were taken from the car and examined by aliens in a "warehouse like facility" before being returned to the car. Many other local residents called a local radio station to report strange lights in thy sky that night, lending some additional credence to Reed's tale. (I should note that the monument was paid for by private citizens, including Reed himself.)

A drawing by Thomas Reed of what he was shown on the screen.

Reed now lives in Kentucky and most recently ran a modeling agency in Miami, but he seems keen on proving to his hometown that his UFO experience was true. In 2015 the Great Barrington Historical Society voted to include information about Reed's extraterrestrial encounters in the town museum. Historical Society director Debbie Oppermann told The Boston Globe:

“I know we’re going to get a lot of backlash. We’re going to get hammered,” she said. “But we have given it an awful lot of thought, and, based on the evidence we’ve been given, we believe this is a significant and true event.” 

The historical society believes it is the first time a “mainstream” historical society or museum in the United States has declared a UFO encounter to be historical fact. But the decision was far from unanimous; of the nine members of the historical society’s board, three were “strongly opposed” to the decision, Oppermann said, but “it passed with consensus.”

It's interesting that the society claimed it was "a significant and true event." I don't doubt that these UFO encounters were significant for the Reed family and the people of Sheffield and Great Barrington. But were these events true in a verifiable, historical way? No hard physical evidence was found that an alien craft had visited Western Massachusetts. We just have the testimony of the Reeds and of their neighbors who saw some lights in the sky. 

Thom Reed's encounter with the strange humanoids reminds me of a visionary or religious experience. It also reminds me of classic haunted house stories, where the family relocates to escaped supernatural hauntings - only to have them follow. Or maybe his story is similar to European stories about fairies, where small beings invade the home to cause mischief. Or even, since this is New England, classic witchcraft stories of hags and demons tormenting sleeping victims. 

I think those types of stories are all significant, but are they true enough to merit a large stone monument? Is Thom Reed's story true enough to merit one? I suppose ultimately the people of Sheffield will have to decide.

Fish Monsters From Newburyport: Are the Deep Ones Real?

Last week I wrote about the Frogman of Silver Lake. It's interesting to think there might be a humanoid frog creature lurking in Plymouth County, but could there also be humanoid fish people hiding in the waters off the North Shore of Massachusetts?

Most people would say no, but a few people say yes.

The legend of these particular fish people started in the fall of 1931, when the Rhode Island horror writer H.P. Lovecraft visited Newburyport, Massachusetts. These days Newburyport is an expensive and upscale coastal community, but in 1931 the city was run-down and full of crumbling old houses. The downtown was full of boarded-up businesses.

Things were so bad that some locals jokingly called Newburyport the "City of the Dead." It sounds like a grim place, but Lovecraft of course loved it and used his visit as inspiration for one of his most famous stories, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" tells how a young man from the Midwest comes to Massachusetts to research his family's genealogy. His search leads him to Innsmouth, a depressed and decaying coastal town. Most of the town's businesses are shut down, and many houses are boarded up (but still seem to be occupied). Some people in Innsmouth also share the same strange physical deformities: receding foreheads, bulging eyes, and creased necks. To make things even creepier, Innsmouth's churches have been closed and replaced by a Masonic-style cult called the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

A priest of the (fictional) Esoteric Order of Dagon from Propnomicon.

The young man encounters an elderly drunkard who tells him about Innsmouth's unusual history.  Innsmouth was once a prosperous fishing and mill town, but overfishing and bad economic times led to hardship for Innsmouth's citizens. As the town's leaders debated what to do, a sea captain named Obed Marsh proposed an unusual solution.

While Captain Marsh was sailing in the South Seas he learned about a group of aquatic humanoids called the Deep Ones. In return for the occasional human sacrifice, the Deep Ones provided local South Seas islanders with gold and bountiful catches of fish. Well, they actually wanted more than just sacrifices. The Deep Ones also liked to mate with attractive islanders. The hybrid offspring of these unusual couplings were born looking human, but as they aged they slowly turned into Deep Ones themselves.

Perhaps, Captain Marsh suggested, the people of Innsmouth could strike a similar bargain with the Deep Ones, who quite conveniently had a large underwater city just off the coast of Innsmouth? The citizens of Innsmouth were at first repulsed by the idea, but many of them changed their minds after seeing the gold Captain Marsh brought back from the South Seas - and after learning that their hybrid offspring would be immortal, like the Deep Ones themselves. Those citizens who didn't support Captain Marsh became the first human sacrifices...

That would have been a great town meeting to attend, wouldn't it? "My plan to revitalize the downtown business district stands on two pillars: human sacrifice and sex with scary fish people." I won't rehash the rest of the story, but it involves an encounter with a horde of hideous monsters, a daring escape, and a surprise twist ending.

A human/Deep One hybrid from Propnomicon.

"The Shadow of Innsmouth" is of course fiction. Lovecraft wrote horror stories, not history. But a few readers have always wondered if there was some kernel of truth behind what he wrote. When Lovecraft was alive his friend William Lumley told Lovecraft that he thought his stories were accounts of actual occult events. Lovecraft laughed it off. A woman also wrote to Lovecraft and said she was the descendant of a Salem witch. If Lovecraft would share his magical secrets she would share hers. Lovecraft thought he was nuts.

Despite Lovecraft's lifelong denial that his stories were anything but fiction, many practicing occultists have believed otherwise. This trend only accelerated after his death in 1937, and multiple books have been written that allegedly contain the secrets of "true" Lovecraftian magic. Several claim to be authentic versions of the Necronomicon, the terrible tome of blasphemous knowledge he created for his stories.

The British occultist Kenneth Grant (b.1924 - d. 2011) believed quite strongly that Lovecraft had tapped into a source of authentic magical power through his fiction. Grant claimed that Lovecraft accessed true occult knowledge - and supernatural entities - while dreaming and unknowingly incorporated them into his fiction.

Based on this supposition, Grant conducted many Lovecraftian rituals during his life, and several of them involved the Deep Ones. During one, a priestess in Grant's occult lodge descended into a tank of water where the Deep Ones materialized and attacked her. Another of his priestesses died when the plane she was on crashed over the ocean. Grant speculated that the Deep Ones were responsible.

It all may sound crazy to you (or perhaps not!), but Grant is not alone in trying to summon the Deep Ones through magic rituals. Here in the U.S., Episcopal-priest-turned-occultist Michael Bertiaux claims to have successfully summoned the aquatic humanoids in an isolated Midwestern lake (possibly Devil's Lake in Wisconsin). Sadly, Bertiaux hasn't offered up a detailed descriptions of how he did it, but perhaps that's a blessing. Do we really want our lakes infested with amorous fish monsters?

If you have encountered the Deep Ones please let me know. I don't think anyone has yet reported seeing them near Newburyport, but I suppose if people keep summoning them it's only a matter of time before they pop up on some Plum Island beach. The borders between fact, fiction and the occult are always blurry, particularly here in New England.

*****

My sources for this week's post include The Necromicon Files (2003) by Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III, and my own book, Legends and Lore of the North Shore (2014). Thanks also to the reader who used the word "Lovecraftian" in their comment last week, which inspired me to write this post.

By the way, I filmed a segment for the Travel Channel's show Mysteries at the Museum last summer about the Melonheads, and it should be airing this Thursday, April 14 at 9:00 pm. I hope you are able to tune in!