UFOs - Leslie Kean [82]
The Hudson Valley UFOs, like those in Belgium, did not exhibit any aggressive or hostile behavior. In fact, in similar fashion, the less intimidated witnesses reported flashing their car lights at the objects and receiving flashes in return. And this wave, too, featured simultaneous sightings by police officers—in Danbury, Connecticut, police initially joked about calls from witnesses, before being rudely awakened, which was exactly how the Belgian police initially responded. Later, twelve officers from this department alone had their own sightings.1 Pathways could be determined due to the volume of reports from varying locations within short time periods, and route maps were constructed just as they would later be in Belgium. Similarly, some nighttime photos and videos were taken in New York and analyzed by various laboratories, although not as extensively, nor were the images as powerful, as the Petit-Rechain photo of 1990.
An artist’s copy of drawings made by independent witnesses in different parts of New York and Connecticut in 1983 and 1984, which have been reduced and sized to fit the same scale. Collection of Phil Imbrogno
Although the Hudson Valley residents reported mainly delta- or V-shaped objects and the Belgians saw mostly triangular ones, in reading the many witness accounts of both events, the similar behaviors of the crafts are striking. The bizarre and highly unusual “red light ball” phenomenon reported by the four Belgian policemen made an appearance in upstate New York as well. During the first, dramatic night of the Belgian wave in 1989, two pairs of policemen in different locations watched the red light ball shoot out on a beam from a hovering craft, which was then drawn back into the UFO—a rare detail observed at very close range. Heinrich Nicoll, one of the policemen who witnessed this spectacle, interpreted it to be a probe of some sort. In an interview, he said, “The ball kept leaving and coming back, as if the ball were trying to measure something.”2
During the Hudson Valley wave, David Athens, chief of the New Fairfield Fire Department in Connecticut, was standing outside talking with a police officer in July 1984 when both saw a row of lights in a circular pattern. “I would say it was something man-made except that two of the red lights dropped down from the group and went in a different direction behind the mountains. One came back and the other didn’t,” Athens reported.3
Jim Cooke, a biomedical engineer, was shocked to see a triangular object hovering no more than fifteen feet above the water of the Croton Falls Reservoir late one October night in 1983 while driving home. He got out of his car and watched from the edge of the water. “Something came from the underside of the object, a red beam of light or something solid that was glowing red—I really don’t know what. But it seemed to be probing the water,”4 he said. According to Cooke, the object moved slowly over the reservoir, and at each stop the “red probe” interacted with the water, and was then retracted. Like the Belgian craft displaying essentially the same thing, this one was triangular. Heinrich Nicoll’s description was remarkably similar to Cooke’s. He also witnessed the phenomenon over a body of water, which he, too, interpreted to be a probe of some sort. We may never know the purpose of this strange red offshoot of the UFO, but this suggests that very similar objects may have visited both locations in the 1980s.
Despite the intriguing similarities, there was a major difference between these events in upstate New York and those in Belgium—not in the details of what actually happened, but in the way these extraordinary close encounters, repeated year after year, were handled by the authorities—those in charge of protecting citizens and monitoring unregistered air incursions over populated areas.
We must remember that the 1989–90 UFO wave in Belgium was handled rationally, openly, and responsibly by the government. The Belgian Air Force was called into action immediately, and other agencies,