In the mid-eighties, the Hudson River Valley in New York was the home to a host of UFO incidents that fascinated and terrified local residents. Thousands of onlookers filed reports, traffic stood at a standstill, and everyone from police officers to computer engineers were brought face to face with extraterrestrial spacecrafts.
The Sightings
The flurry of reports started with Dennis Sant, a regular businessman, father, and husband. In March of 1983, he saw a strange sight. The “very large object” hung in the sky over his home staying perfectly silent. The structure, Sant claimed, was dark gray and metallic with bright lights. His fearful thoughts of an alien abduction weren’t isolated, as nearby traffic also stopped to view the mysterious craft overhead.
A week later, many more incidents were reported. A New Castle Police Office was on patrol in the middle of the night when he encountered a craft of the same nature. Large, silent, and with bright lights, the spacecraft hung over him, intriguing him. Down the road, 10 miles away, another craft was spotted by a local, accompanied by radio static and accounts of a triangular shaped ship as large as a football field. Throughout the night, phones rang off the hook at the police station as citizens called in to report the spacecraft across the Hudson River Valley.
Deception by Planes
As word spread about the sightings, the UFO mystery took a turn thanks to air traffic control specialist Anthony Capaldi. Capaldi observed a formation of objects that seemed strange, and tried to settled the controversy by explaining that from a higher vantage point (like an air traffic control tower), onlookers could see that the lights were small aircraft flying closely together. He went on to say that locals would’ve been able to distinguish the planes from a closer distance because of the sound of their engines. However, many witnesses and UFO experts disagreed with the overarching explanation.
Expert & Eyewitness Opinions
While agreeing that later reports were most likely hoaxes, original eyewitnesses and UFO experts stuck to their stories, noting that there was an obvious change in the details of the UFO crafts seen in the sky once the aircraft started faking the appearances. Photographic experts reviewed a home video of one sighting and concurred that there was no possible way the object was individual planes, but one rigid object. Hundreds of witnesses also saw the UFOs during the first incidents with similar reports, but later when the airplanes were seen, dozens identified the crafts as airplanes, not UFOs.
Reports leave us guessing, but either way you look at it, evidence points to the possibility that something strange occurred over New York that is unexplained and unidentified, even if planes did create a thinly veiled hoax later on.