On September 3, 1965, Exeter Police Officer “Scratch” Toland had just received claims of a UAP from a payphone at Hampton Beach and an anonymous Raymond caller when the agitated Norman Muscarello burst into the Exeter police department at 3 a.m. He was shaken over the sighting of a large white and glowing 80-90 foot-long UAP hovering over a Rt. 150 Kensington field.
Patrolman Eugene Bertrand drove the teenager back to the site and Officer Toland later reported to Fuller what happened when Bertrand frantically radioed in: “Reaction? There’s no word for it. He was hollering. I never heard him holler that way before or since. ‘I see it! I see it!’ he was hollering.”
Bertrand was an Air Force veteran of the Korean War with air-to-air refueling experience on KC-97 tankers. This craft was no B-47 out of Pease Air Force Base.
Patrolman Dave Hunt, driving the other Exeter police cruiser, heard the radio exchange and joined Muscarello and Bertrand at the edge of the Kingston field just as the craft lifted off. “I could see that fluttering movement,” Hunt later told Fuller. “It was going left to right between the tops of the trees.”
Things got curiouser and curiouser when the patrolmen brought Muscarello to his mother’s house in Exeter in the wee hours. The now-late Vietnam veteran told an audience at Exeter High School in 1980, “[Air Force] Major Donald Kehoe was erratic, telling me to shut up, don’t say anything. If you want to make any statements, make them with me.”
Another highly-credible source of a later area sighting was local resident Virginia Hale, a reporter for the Haverhill Gazette and a stringer for UPI. As Fuller reports her testimony: “Well, when it came back toward me, it was going too fast for anything that I know. That’s for sure. And in the pattern it was coming, none of the planes around here would use that pattern…I would say a B-47 would be half as big.”
The late summer and fall of 1965 had reported UAP sightings literally across the globe from Chile to China, Antarctica to the Azores, and in dozens of communities in the United States. As the Ghostbusters termed it, it was Spook Central. The sightings made the front page of the New York Times. The staid Christian Science Monitor led an editorial with, “Flying saucers sighted early this month over Texas may give scientists something to think about for a long time…It makes the clearest case yet for a thorough look at the saucer mystery.”
Fuller picked Exeter as representative of the then well-chronicled and well-documented sightings.
An aside funny is that one viewing hot spot was Beaver Falls, PA, the hometown of one Broadway Joe Namath. This may explain why Namath’s New York Jets never won a game after Super Bowl III. Had he made a pact with the Neptunians?
The Air Force reported in 1965 that of the 9,127 reported UFO sightings since Corona in 1947, a whopping 667 remained unexplained. They didn’t disclose that many of the unexplained sightings came from technical, expert or pilot sources.
Why was our government doing all it could to discredit UAP sightings? The simple answer is fear of THE COMMIES. In these Cold War post-Sputnik days the Pentagon was shaken to its foundation, nervously hyper-vigilant over Russia or China developing far-superior technology. Project 1794 was a plan for the United States to build a flying saucer! An idea floated around and made possible by Operation Paperclip, the importation to the United States of Nazi scientists just after the end of World War II, was to convert German V-2 rockets into satellites. Wehner von Braun was the brain behind the construction and launches of the V-2 (“Vengeance Weapon”), from Pennemunde, Germany, and later Poland, that targeted England. The V-2 eventually achieved an altitude of 109 miles, making it the first missile to penetrate space. The existence of the V-2 came at the terrible cost of 10,000 forced-laborers worked to death at Pennemunde alone. We knew that von Braun knew of the cruel deaths but overriding his culpability was the hard and fast goal of maintaining the lead in nuclear weapons, missiles and potential flying saucers between us and the Russkies. They had their own hands on V-2 rocket spoils of war and they also had nuclear spies within the Manhattan Project. (Cue up Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 cold war masterpiece Dr. Strangelove and its Peter Sellers and George C. Scott’s delightful dialogue: “There’s no fighting in the War Room!”).
The Air Force explanations for Incident at Exeter were ludicrous. It claimed witnesses were watching Operation Big Blast from Pease Air Force Base. The several B-47 bombers in the manuever were on the ground an hour before Muscarello’s initial sighting; The witnesses were watching the white lights bordering the flying billboard ads of Boston’s Sky-Lite Advertising Agency. Sky-Lite never had ads or anything else airborne after 11 p.m.; It was the Pease Air Force Base runway strobe lights. A week after the Exeter incident, an officer from Pease gathered a dozen UAP claimants to Kensington at night. Oila! The runway lights were then turned on. Claimants laughed. The lights were not visible; It was mass hysteria, though hysteria was to be avoided at all costs if the unknown craft were the work of THE COMMIES.
Fuller is meticulous in the book. There were undeniable smilarities to both the reported national and international 1965 sightings:
1. The spacecraft were large and noiseless, cigar-shaped, lit brightly in white, often with red lights on the tips. They were wingless and moved in turn-on-a-dime fashion.
2. Police and military reports did not differ substantially from the claims of citizens.
3. Across the country and around the globe, clusters of sightings came at or near high-tension power lines. Old fogies among us remember the evening of November 9, 1965, the night the lights went out in the Northeast Power Grid. 36 million people across 80,000 square miles of the Eastern Seaboard were without power for hours. The blackout has never been adequately explained. The official line has been the outage was the result of a malfunction at a remote-controlled Niagara Mohawk substation in Clay, New York, ten miles north of Syracuse. Just before the moment of the blackout, private pilot and instructor Weldon Ross, the events confirmed by his student pilot, was approaching Hancock Field in Syracuse for a landing. He reported “a huge red ball of brilliant intensity about 100 feet in diameter” over the Clay substation’s twin 345,000 volt towers.
Fuller reports company repairmen went to the substation and found…nothing wrong.
You can reach John Angelo at timelywriter@hotmail.com