Berkshire UFO Incident (Labor Day 1969)

The Berkshires had seen strange lights before. Historian Joe Durwin traced a peak of sightings in the region between 1965 and 1967. Thom Reed of Sheffield recalls glowing orbs in the boys' bedroom in 1966. He also recalls a visit aboard a craft, where he was told he was there for "important biological research."

Labor Day. September 1, 1969. Evening. Nancy Reed was driving home from the family diner, with Thom's grandmother in the front seat and her sons Thom and Matthew along. Near the Old Covered Bridge over the Housatonic River, Thom saw "an amber glow on both sides of the dirt road." "It rose up a little bit." Then a large white sphere lifted very slowly off the water, two to three storeys high. Rods of light shot into the water from its sides.

Next came the craft. Pewter with gold colours. About 100 yards in length. The car stalled. "Everything got really calm," Reed said. "It was just like a dead silence."

Reed remembers a hangar larger than a football field. He lay on a table as apparatus came over his body. The figures had "a thin body maybe four or five feet tall," like "an ant, with some human features." The family came to in the car more than a mile away. His grandmother, who never drove, was at the wheel. Estimates of the missing time run from two to three hours.

At Lake Mansfield in Great Barrington, Melanie Kirchdorfer's father backed the family car into the parking lot. A very bright light engulfed it. She saw "a huge craft, rising out of the water," about the size of a football field. On board she could not move. Other children began to disappear, one by one. She woke barefoot on the beach.

Tom Warner, 10, was playing with neighbours. A voice in his head said "you have to go home." Then a bluish white light caught him in a beam, mid-run. Inside, he heard screams and saw a girl crouched in a corner in sheer terror. He believes it was Melanie. She does not remember him. Jane Green, then 42, pulled over with other drivers. A craft hovered at eye level, completely silent. Then it darted away over the mountains.

No written record from 1969 has ever been found. The earliest is a MUFON report filed in April 2010. In February 2015 the Great Barrington Historical Society board voted 6 to 3 to call the event "historically significant and true." A citation from Governor Charlie Baker's office followed that November. It was later said to have been issued in error. On August 26, 2015, a 5,000-lb granite monument was dedicated near the covered bridge. Sheffield town crews hauled it away on June 4, 2019.

No photograph, film or radar record has ever surfaced. The Berkshire Eagle's Labor Day coverage never mentioned a UFO. The police blotter logged one call, about beer cans. No tapes survive from radio station WSBS. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid proposed a bandwagon effect built around Reed's story. Benjamin Radford, in the Skeptical Inquirer, argued the shared account may have formed "nearly fifty years later in 2018," pointing to recovered memories. Nick Pope countered that if the figure of 250 witnesses is accurate, the case sits "right up there."

Reed now calls "abduction" "cornball terminology." He says people working with the government removed his family from the car. He still insists they also met "an off-world presence." Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries took the case worldwide in 2020, followed by a Yes Theory video and BBC's Uncanny. A small metal marker went up in 2020.