Hudson Valley UFO sightings

[Todd Feinman]

Terra, have you seen this archive?

Old Encounters

I'll post some old articles here now and again! This one is from 1906, at height of "Airship" wave. One seen during day:

alienexpanse.com

Take a look. You can find others who have had similar experiences. It's interesting and a comfort too, after seeing something so strange.

 

[Terra]

I’m telling you it was so odd. I have tried and tried and tried even come close to replicate it or describe it.

Have you ever had the feeling that you were being watched? How you just KNOW you are being watched? Magnify THAT a million times. Seriously. And a crazy as THIS sounds, it kind of felt like time slowed down then sped up. I remember the black guy SO clearly, and I say his race because there were few black people up there at the time. It just stood out, but he was crying and scared shitless but at the same time I could feel something “read” my DNA - in each and every single cell simultaneously.And it was in a good way, because it felt like was nurturing or healing. As I said I wasn’t on anything or drinking. Stone cold sober.

 

[Terra]

Terra, have you seen this archive?

Old Encounters

I'll post some old articles here now and again! This one is from 1906, at height of "Airship" wave. One seen during day:

alienexpanse.com

Take a look. You can find others who have had similar experiences. It's interesting and a comfort too, after seeing something so strange.

I haven’t, but THANK YOU! I certainly will!

 

[pigfarmer]

Back in 85 they had C-5s and I thing only a handful.

What we saw was not an aircraft. It moved WAY too fast. I later became an aircraft mechanic in the USAF and never came across any aircraft with that pattern.

Later, especially in the Pine Bush/Circleville area people filmed what they thought were UFOs but what they filmed was American and Delta MD-88s flying into Stewart.

I have wondered about this and my other incident my entire life. It wasn’t what I saw but what I, and the small crowd around me felt. It was like being scanned to the bone. It was very invasive, but I didn’t feel violated. It was very strange.

I really hope the article is found. If I didn’t live 1500 miles away, I would certainly be at the Thrall Library in Middletown searching. That’s the main library in the area or was at the time.

An aircraft mechanic that actually identify what they see is the sort of report that interests me. Perpetuating old stories for media consumption in the guise of 'ufology' or some nonsense does not which is why I started this thread. I have no doubt you witnessed something really weird and that's why I want to find the article.

I may be able to view the contents of THR on microfilm at my local library just by asking, which I will. If you drill back in this old thread I went through the Poughkeepsie Journal archives and found references to residents being startled by unusual aircraft when they first moved that heavy lift command into Newburgh back in the early 80s. They were causing a fuss before the UFO flap which I think is an important but overlooked little factoid.

I am in Dutchess county, right across the river and I've been here my whole life in various parts of it. I was in Poughkeepsie when I saw the planes I described. They came from three small airfields in the area, Sky Acres and Stormville. The other is now the Mid Hudson Regional Airport that I am two miles from. The facilities manager there now is an acquaintance who was there then and remembers some of the guys that did it. Between that and SWF in Newburgh I see my fair share of planes at all hours which is what has prompted a lot of what I've written here. Phil Imbogno knew what was going on and IIRC he had some confrontation with them out at the Stormville at the time.

I don't think those small planes account for all reports at all. But between the relatively new presence of large military aircraft in the area plus a small plane hoax plus a genuine bullshit artist fanning the flames plus the human tendency to pile on it makes for a convincing recipe for a long term myth. It means that anyone who may have seen something truly extraordinary will have to live in the shadow of all that.

Yes they were C5s back then and prior to that it was some other large transport. C-141 maybe? IDK. By 1990 they had more than a few C5s and you could drive past rows of them on 17K with those huge tails sticking up that are impossible to miss. I did a lot of work in Newburgh and on that base. It's isn't homogeneous, the ANG is part of it, West Point had hangars there for helicopters, there was some sort of '99th regimental support command' I used to go to a lot - logistics or something. Then there's the commercial airport and the commercial air shipping like FedEx. I did a lot of work for FedEx over there.

On a service call to the ANG part of it one day my buddy and I were treated to a C5 tour by one of their maintainers and we got to crawl through the whole thing. Very, very interesting and definitely not the tour you get at a show. Those guys were cool.

 

[pigfarmer]

@Terra I am just a schmuck looking through newspapers because I have an interest in this. I am not an self styled 'investigator' or any of that.

Since I can do this from the comfort of my jammies I signed up for a month of newspaper.com access which includes the Poughkeepsie Journal archive. It's collection is available online where the THR is not.

Yes I can verify that Huey Lewis and the News played at the Orange County Fairgrounds on Thursday July 18 2024. Not just a top 5 Google hit like last time, here it is. Since that was spot on I expect to find the articles mentioned if I can locate a copy of THR.



The PoJo was sort of the area newspaper reference for a long time. More people over here, Orange County was always more sparsely populated. They would cover that area if something was going on.

This from March 1 1985. As I said, we knew about this at the time and were talking about it. I know low flying aircraft caused some stir and then those hoaxers started in.



I signed on for Newspaper.com access, which included PoJo and a few years of THR just not the ones in question. I spent less than an hour searching so this isn't exactly exhaustive but I am not finding references to UFOs.

What I do see is that they carried the local TV listings and UFOs were a popular topic at the time.

 

[Todd Feinman]

Glad to hear you signed up with newspapers.com! Great stuff. Lots of UFOs in there. Let us know what you find!

 

[pigfarmer]

Apparently it's an OCR search - it'll pull up images that look like a search term so there's still a lot of manual filtering. All the hits I'm getting are from Dutchess County as they are archived online and the Orange County papers are not from the 1980s.

I used 'UFO' as a search term one year at a time. 1980-82 didn't turn up much.

People calling the police to report a UFO is what generates the article. First mention I found was March 4 1983. Turns out to be first mention of the small plane hoax

After that it wasn't again until November 28 1983. Some time in the summer of 1983 or 84 is when I saw them and the description in this article fits perfectly. I heard the engines.



November 16 1983 is the first mention of reports of lights in the sky that the State Police described as a 'large airplane that had left its landing lights on'. I've seen this and yes, absolutely it can looked damned weird at times and be quite surprising.




It isn't a coincidence the area just had new neighbors move in.

The 105th Airlift Wing

"USAF and the Air National Guard approved a unit relocation to Stewart International Airport, Newburgh, New York. This move took advantage of the excellent airfield facilities at Stewart, which was an active Air Force Base through 1969. The move, initiated during 1982, was completed by the last quarter of 1983."

 

[Creepy Green Light]

I may have to actually go to a library to get that TH Record for 1985. I don't mind doing that but it'll be a bit before I get there.

The formation of the planes was exactly what I saw and what I spoke to a state trooper about the next day. It took me a minute after being startled but I did recognize what I was looking at plus I could hear a very faint drone of what was obviously engines. Not a Brian Dunning fan but that article is spot on: we all knew what we were looking at and so did the air traffic controllers at two airports.

The shocking stories are the ones that have survived outside the area - you start talking about that here and you'll get funny looks outside the Pine bush UFO festival. I attribute them to the guaranteed 'add ons' that arrive as witnesses to car accidents, etc. If most other people saw the car run over a horse then they probably won't take the guy claiming it was a zebra too seriously. I liken it to clowns. Put on a scary clown outfit and hang around on a dark street corner long enough to be noticed and suddenly everyone's seeing evil clowns and posting about it online.

I am not a pilot but know that aircraft have lots of lights on them. Airplane Lights: What Each Light Does (Red/Green, Strobe, Beacon) - Pilot Institute
It is absolutely possible to see something huge and slow moving with bright white lights on it that could even be boomerang shaped. We paid for them - they are C17s. You don't always see the red/green combo right away or hear it. I recall looking up once while on a dark lonely road and looked up to see what looked like an oil refinery. Pipes or some mechanical crap just hanging up there with soft lighting. I think it had it's landing gear down - they practice all sorts of approaches and SWF is only a couple of minutes away by air.

Pine Bush and the perpetuation of these reports reminds me of Gettysburg. I remember going there as a kid and much later as an adult and the topic naturally was the Civil War and the epic battle that was fought there. Now it's all about ghost hunting because of that one stupid TV program. Well OK, it's fun and brings in much needed tourism dollars but don't for a second start believing what the shop owners are telling you. They have a motive for keeping the stories going just like those recycling old UFO reports do.

I believe the famous Exeter, NH sighting ended up being an Air Force plane from Pease AFB. And my personal favorite that I held onto since 1979 thinking it was a real flying saucer was the Lt. Col. Coyne U.S. Army helicopter case - which now appears to have been a inflight refueling blunder at night time over Ohio.

 

[Creepy Green Light]

Apparently it's an OCR search - it'll pull up images that look like a search term so there's still a lot of manual filtering. All the hits I'm getting are from Dutchess County as they are archived online and the Orange County papers are not from the 1980s.

I used 'UFO' as a search term one year at a time. 1980-82 didn't turn up much.

People calling the police to report a UFO is what generates the article. First mention I found was March 4 1983. Turns out to be first mention of the small plane hoax
View attachment 19956
After that it wasn't again until November 28 1983. Some time in the summer of 1983 or 84 is when I saw them and the description in this article fits perfectly. I heard the engines.
View attachment 19957


November 16 1983 is the first mention of reports of lights in the sky that the State Police described as a 'large airplane that had left its landing lights on'. I've seen this and yes, absolutely it can looked damned weird at times and be quite surprising.

View attachment 19958


It isn't a coincidence the area just had new neighbors move in.

The 105th Airlift Wing

"USAF and the Air National Guard approved a unit relocation to Stewart International Airport, Newburgh, New York. This move took advantage of the excellent airfield facilities at Stewart, which was an active Air Force Base through 1969. The move, initiated during 1982, was completed by the last quarter of 1983."

Very interesting & thanks for sharing. I think I mentioned that I used to live in Bloomingberg & commuted to Ellenville every day for work. I also remember the one airstrip on the side of the road (south of Ellenville I think) - I forget if it was paved or just grass but one of the guys I worked with mentioned that a lot of ultralights fly in/out of that field.

 

[Terra]

The 105th came to Stewart with 2 C-5s. Where we would see all of the lined up planes on 17K (thanks for that memory) is the MILITARY side. It houses a Marine C-130 unit that had full time Marines.

When the C-5s first came to Stewart they had 1 hangar on what is now the CIVILIAN side. The civilian side is where the USAF active duty base was.

By 1995-98 the 105th had 13 C-5s and became a full air wing. At that time the only civilian aircraft that were scheduled in and out were Delta and AA MD-88s and 737s. They built a Citation maintenance spot there too.

During that time there was A FedEx plane that crash landed and was - for years - in a wrapper over by the tower.

I say this because back then - THE landing light pattern on the MD-88s were always being reported as UFOs on the local “cable 6” news. You could clearly see what they were if you knew their pattern AND all aircraft are required to have their landing lights on under a certain altitude.

There were a lot of different aircraft buzzing around the Hudson Valley in the mid-90s, but not so much in the 80s. We had Orange County Airport and Randall Field.

A lot of the sightings that I heard of back in the 90s was mostly out in Pine Bush, which is North of Stewart.

In the 80s and 90s Stewart had 1 instrument approach which would bring instrument traffic out towards west over Middletown and Port Jervis. It brings aircraft east.

Where I was standing in the 80s IS a few miles off of that approach, but the craft was SO low and slow, then moved vertically QUICK several hundred feet then zipped away. It did NOT behave as any aircraft in the day did.

I write all this for perspective. It wasn’t until the early to mid 90s did the air traffic REALLY pick up. It’s easy to blame everything on aircraft and I’m sure people report them. But In the 80s there was minimal to no large air traffic. The only aircraft I remember flying around back then was the planes that brought the Iran hostages back. No traffic going into or out of Newark or the metro area - nothing. It was much harder for cops to say “it’s just a plane” back then.

I have obsessed over this incident a lot in my life. I don’t know what it was, but I know what it was NOT-and that is an aircraft. And more than just I saw it.

I hope you find the article. Seriously. I know it was in that paper and I distinctly remember it being in the “around the region” section on page 7 or 8, because I lost my shit when I read it and called people that went to the diner with us.

I personally appreciate what you are doing!

 

[Todd Feinman]

UFOs are tricky. They can mingle with air traffic, show themselves to one group of people and be unobserved by those nearby. They can choreograph things in such a way that they can make contact and be gone in an instant. Strange synchronicities or coincidences can be involved. They are always ten steps ahead.

TROVE is another good place to look. Tons of UFOs in there, Australian, but with many syndicated stories too:

Trove

Australia’s free online research portal. Trove is a collaboration between the National Library of Australia and hundreds of Partner organisations around Australia.

trove.nla.gov.au

 

[pigfarmer]

I grew up in Hyde Park which is in northern Dutchess. True, in the early 80s there was far less air traffic which is exactly why I was posting articles of 'large aircraft with landing lights' and so forth. There was regular air traffic but definitely not that sort of thing which is why it generated UFO reports. I've heard anecdotes and seen them myself but I was looking for a newspaper article - and found several.

Same for the damned small planes. They absolutely were causing UFO reports in the area at the time. Stanton Friedman lectured in the area in 1983 and something called 'CUFOS' (no I don't know if it's that one) was selling 'authentic UFO pictures' to raise money at a local mall. As I recall interest in the topic then was about as popular as now minus the internet.

In the 2000s an advertising blimp caused a fuss in Florida, NY for a while and about that time a group of stupid kids launched road flares tied to balloons and had Orange and Bergen counties flipping out. They caught and fined them - eventually - but not before the chicken coop got all stirred up.

I believe you saw something weird and don't doubt it but real reports are like panning for gold - you have to toss away a lot of crapola.

I've lived here my whole life with an interest and am just trying to share what I have literally seen and experienced, and share some newspaper articles to back up what I am saying. It'll be a week or two before I get over the library but I will get there.

 

[pigfarmer]

January 13 1983


November 9 1983

Yeah, I know. He wasn't a physicist, he was an engineer.

 

[pigfarmer]

I wondered why those nitwits would do that with the small planes.

My guess is that they saw the stir the occasional military aircraft caused and just piled on.

 

[Todd Feinman]

I wondered why those nitwits would do that with the small planes.

My guess is that they saw the stir the occasional military aircraft caused and just piled on.

Hoaxers really piss me off, the bastards.

 

[pigfarmer]

Hoaxers really piss me off, the bastards.

Agreed - and it makes it that much harder on those like you who see something really odd. I'd love to see something truly weird.

 

[Todd Feinman]

Agreed - and it makes it that much harder on those like you who see something really odd. I'd love to see something truly weird.

Yeah, it discredits experiencers and is fodder for skeptics. As time goes on, I feel bad that others can't see UFOs for themselves. Life is so short and such an experience is life changing; it gives one a different perspective and it's good to personally know that there are amazing things out there, and that we aren't alone. At the same time it alienates one from others in a peculiar way.

 

[Todd Feinman]

It's strange. Overall, I am happy I got to have the experiences. But I am still weirded out by them. I am fascinated by them, but also want to not think about them too much. Some folks have had much closer encounters than myself; and it really affects them, as in Terra's case.

 

[Terra]

I never understood the hoaxers. And they irk me too. It just makes people who have seen something want to keep their mouths shut.

My incident was certainly a double edged sword. With me, I was, and am, more baffled by the feeling that I got. I ended up in a career chasing a reason or at least an explanation for it. Unfortunately, after living my life centered around trying to figure it out, I am no closer to an answer than I was back then, and life isn’t getting shorter. I ultimately live in an area where there are few lights to distract the sky, as I spend every spare moment looking at the sky in some way. My only ray of hope - and now that I know it was 1985, so 41 years, the only hopeful thread I have was the subjective feeling of being simultaneously violated yet nurtured and cared for at the same time. Not the violated part but the nurtured part. SOMETHING did not want me to fear it. At all. Other than that I look back and literally every big move I made in life was chasing the how and why of that meeting or encounter or whatever it was. Writing this and re-reading that, I guess if I chased the “what”, things would have been simpler. After all the chasing, all I ended up with is a skewed view on life itself.

Seeing that Dutchess Mall advert brought back some memories! That’s where us foreigners on the other side of the river would go when we cut out of school. Middletown had the Orange Plaza, but someone’s parent would always narc on you if they saw you. That mall and the Poughkeepsie mall were the spots for my group of friends. I think if I went back now my heart would be broken. It used to be a lot of fun though!

 

[pigfarmer]

I think if I went back now my heart would be broken

Probably. The Dutchess Mall fell to the bulldozer and is a Home Depot now. So did the South Hills Mall up the road a bit.

I only know of one CUFOS and that was Hynek's organization, wasn't it?