Back to this again. I am a bit fixated and this is a bit of a retread from what I said earlier.
@Dean got me flipping through
Night Siege again for the first time in many years.
@humanoidlord thinks that in addition to the small planes there had to have been a real object involved and I don't like to just dismiss things out of hand. He's probably right about something else being involved but I don't think it's extraterrestrial vehicles.
Night Siege is responsible to popularizing all this and regardless of my opinions about it it is true that once something gets noticed then the
War of the Worlds mentality is responsible for adding to the story.
Chapter 1 reports Jim Cooke's October 1983 low level sighting in Croton Falls and knowing the geography I remember seeing in the newspaper archives a report from August 1976 in the nearby Mahopac area. I realize it is several years earlier but does serve to show that reporting UFOs in the area and them making the local paper wasn't unheard of:
Mahopac, Lake Carmel, Kent, Croton Falls - all relatively near one another.
The other day in this thread I posted an article from November 1983 over Rhinebeck
It was identified as a large plane that left its landing lights on. Rhinebeck is located much further north than the majority of the sightings, but in aircraft terms still right in the area.
So when I continued reading Chapter 1 I started to think about the terrain involved. It's extremely hilly around here and a short ride can change elevation by several hundred feet. The roads are often twisty and the field of view can be limited. The Taconic State Parkway runs north-south and is like that. It's a stone bitch in bad weather. I84 runs east-west and is a much better road with fewer hills and turns, but it isn't like driving through other states where you can see for miles and miles ahead of you either.
In Chapter 1 it talks about New Year's Eve sightings in Kent and Lake Carmel. OK. They are at the top of a 900' plateau that runs into Putnam County. I agree that no matter how badly you might want to perpetrate a hoax it's highly unlikely to be doing it at that time of year in very cold weather. When you leave Carmel/Kent and head west on I84 in only a couple of miles you go down a long sweeping hill into the river valley and for a short time can see for many miles - specifically you can get a decent view towards Stewart ANG base. And that thought is what prompted this post.
105th Airlift Wing - Wikipedia
The heavy airlift wing arrived at Stewart ANG in May 1983 and started flying those massive C-5 in October 1985. They didn't just show up unannounced - large aircraft had always used that facility and been in the area to some degree. Big Cold War Era runway.
Right around the time all this occurred in addition to the known hoaxers there was suddenly a great increase in the numbers of large aircraft, and after the Fall of '85
very large aircraft
we weren't used to seeing, in the sky in the area. I have seen them with their landing lights on on a dark night, in all weather conditions, at all times of the year.
You can't always tell what the hell you are looking at even if you are used to them. When I thought about that and the geography involved I can understand how things appear motionless, have weird and startling lights, and how many people could be easily convinced that some high strange event was happening. Because to them -
it was. Later on in Gulf 1 and 2 the amount of heavy lift traffic around here increased dramatically, and does every time there is some military involvement - which is unfortunately all too frequent. Point is, I bet I've seen the big triangle or whatever the hell it is, doing just about everything described whether it was deliberately hoaxed or misidentification.
So again I've vented my spleen on the topic. So no, it doesn't explain Jim Cooke's lake-probing UFO - and of course accounts like that and the Indian Point ninsense are what True Belief latches on to. . But weird lights moving strangely or even appearing to be very close and hovering and then disappearing, yup, I can see that. I'd
love to think it was a real inexplicable wave but I can't.