by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
Beginning on New Year’s Eve, 1982, there was a series of sightings throughout the Hudson River Valley north of New York City by hundreds of people willing to go on the record. They reported seeing boomerang-shaped craft the size of 1, 2, and 3 football fields, that moved slowly, hovered, and turned on an axis. This is according to the first comprehensive book on the sightings, Night Siege, which was co-authored by J. Allen Hynek, Philip J. Imbrogno, and Bob Pratt, and published in 1987. One of the standout incidents in the book, covered in Chapter Eleven titled, “Close Encounter at Indian Point,” is a sighting by what are said by the authors to be security guards (they are all un-named) over the nuclear power plant on Indian Point, on the shore of the Hudson River in Buchanan, NY, just south of Peekskill, NY.
Night Siege is mainly an account of the investigation carried out by Imbrogno and a team of local field investigators with the Center for UFO Studies, of which Hynek was the director. The other investigators on the team are identified as Fred Dennis, Sheila Sabo (who is credited as “one of the silent authors” of the book), Chris Clark, and George Lesnick. Hynek is said to have flown in from Evanston, Illinois to assist. He died before the book was published, and his widow, Mimi, is thanked for reading the manuscript and making suggestions.
According to the authors, “we had just taken part in a radio talk show, “The Edge of Reality,” with host Lee Speigel, on WNBC in New York City.” Speigel gave out the team’s phone number and “The phone began to ring almost immediately.”
One caller, who said he was a New York State Power Authority police officer who worked at the Indian Point nuclear reactor complex as a security guard, reported that he and 11 other officers had had a UFO sighting while on duty on the night of July 24, 1984. According to him, a huge UFO hovered over one of the reactors for over 10 minutes. The team was excited by this because, that same night, a UFO was caught on videotape about 20 miles away by Brewster, NY, resident, Bob Pozzuoli. Witnesses in Peekskill also reported that they’d seen a UFO over Indian Point that same night.
The caller, given the name “Carl” in the book, said that he and the others saw, in the authors’ words, “something decidedly unconventional hover less than 300 feet above the exhaust tower at Reactor Number Three.” According to Carl, the shift commander was ready to give the order to shoot the object down.
According to the authors, they asked if Carl would meet with them, and Carl told them he’d need to get his supervisor’s okay. He called the next day and said they were cleared to meet with him and some of the other guards at Reactor Number Five, although no tape recorders or cameras would be allowed.
The next day, Carl called and said the meeting had been cancelled by “orders” from “state headquarters.” The team applied pressure to the plant manager by threatening to give the story to ABC News, with which they had a relationship. The manager relented, and it was agreed that they could meet the guards, but not on the grounds of the plant, and a supervisor had to be present. Under these terms, the team met twice with Carl and five other officers.
The first meeting is described as taking place on the night of September 12, in a restaurant in Peekskill, and the authors neglected to identify the location or date of the second meeting. Due to the lateness of the hour, during the first meeting, the investigators only talked in depth with Carl and two of the five others. Carl is described as talking for 45 minutes, on tape for much of it, during both meetings. According to him, he’d had a prior sighting on June 14.
Describing the June 14, sighting, Carl said he was on patrol at Reactor Number Three at around 10:15 p.m. and saw lights with a white and yellow hue coming towards him from the northeast moving southwest. He said he looked over at the next-door Con-Edison complex and saw 10 people there “looking at the same object.”
Carl called for someone to come out to where he was so he could get some confirmation and help if he needed it. Two guards came and they observed what he described as a boomerang pattern of lights that hovered for about 15 minutes. He said the lights were about 10 times brighter than the security lights and that there was a dark mass behind them that blocked the lights of a plane that passed behind it. He estimated the object as being about 300 feet across.
The object moved off towards Peekskill at around 10 mph. Carl dismissed the idea that it could have been a formation of planes because of the 25-knot winds and the intensity of the lights. He described it as turning “as if it was lying on a wheel” and that it moved with its apex leading.
Carl then described his July 24 sighting. Another guard saw it first and called out on his radio “Hey, here comes that UFO again!” Carl, another guard, and two supervisors came out and the five of them observed what Carl described as being shaped like an ice cream cone. There was a semi-circle of lights changing from yellow to white and a red, blinking light “pretty far back.
The object blocked out the stars behind it and appeared to have “a solid body about the size of three football fields.” It moved about 5-10 mph and took about five minutes to pass over them. Carl said they “were in awe of it.” According to him, an order had been given to “get ready to shoot it down” and they “had shotguns and were waiting for the final word to fire on it.”
Another officer described observing the object on a security monitor and said that he had to pan the camera almost 180º to cover the entire object from front to back, and another added that, “There was this series of lights in the shape of a boomerang, and behind it was this dark structure, and there were these two things on the bottom that looked like hollow spheres of some sort.”
According to the authors, their notes from the two meetings contained additional information. They report that the plant’s security system and the computer controlling security and communications shut down during the sighting, that they guards were told to forget about the sighting, and that there was a security “shakeup” after a visit from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The authors tried to get more information from the plant management to no avail. According to them, however, Gerry Culliton, a reporter for the Mt. Kisco, NY, radio station, WVIP, did manage to get an acknowledgement from Carl Patrick, of the plant’s information office, that there were sightings, but Patrick added that four Cessna pilots had been arrested after an investigation by the New York State Police. According to the authors, there were no arrest records to back this up.
The story hit the papers with an article by Jon Craig published on January 12, 1985, in both the Nyack, NY, Rockland Journal-News (page 9 of the pdf) and the White Plains, NY, Reporter Dispatch (page 5 of the pdf) headlined “Nuke Plant Guards Report Hovering UFOs” in the News, and “UFOs: Did Aliens Buzz Indian Point Plant?” in the Dispatch.
Imbrogno is the main source, but Craig interviewed several people. Patrick confirmed there was an incident but added, it’s a six-month-old story.” Craig got a second-hand witness, Larry Rossbach, “a resident inspector with the NRC,” to go on the record saying he heard guards talking about the incident the next day who said they saw the object.
As for the shotguns, Craig quotes John Branciforte, a power authority security commander saying, “We just don’t do things like that.”
At the time, many papers covering the Hudson Valley sightings were including the explanation that pranksters flying Cessna-152s were responsible and that was the opinion of two New York State Police officers, Patrick and Kenneth V. Spiro. According to Patrick, in spite of the Night Siege authors’ insistence to the contrary, he didn’t “know . . . of any regulations that restrict the airspace around Indian Point.”
Craig credits Culliton with breaking the story on the radio that week and then closes with quotes from Joan Holt of the New York Public Interest Research Group. The group was opposed to nuclear power and Holt said, “That’s a new angle I never thought about. The risk of UFOs.” She said the incident brought up the concern of how to, in Craig’s words, “secure the plant from pranksters” and wondered if the lack of an official statement for six months meant that the incident was taken too lightly or too seriously. Holt added, “We have enough known dangers at Indian Point without having unknown dangers.”
Thanks to Linda Zimmermann for her thoughts. She has researched Hudson Valley UFO sightings extensively and written multiple books on the subject.