The Beverly High School Encounter, Massachusetts (1966)

Spring 1966. Massachusetts was in the middle of a wave of sightings. NICAP logged 26 Massachusetts reports that April, 22 of them classed as "unknowns". Beverly, Massachusetts, sits on the North Shore, north-east of Boston. Behind Beverly High School lies an athletic field.

Friday, April 22, 1966. About 9:00 p.m., Nancy Modugno was 11 years old and looking from her bedroom window. She saw "an amazing object about the size of an automobile, brightly lit with flashing blue, green, red and white lights." It was only forty feet away. During the sighting, the family television lost its picture, and her father adjusted the set and ordered her back to bed. Nancy became hysterical.

Her mother, Claire, went to the field with two friends, Barbara Smith and Brenda Maria. They saw three oval objects with bright flashing lights, circling and halting in the sky. Brenda waved her arms. The object immediately stopped circling. Then it moved across the field towards the women.

"It started to come towards us," Barbara Smith said. "I started to run." Brenda called, "Look up! It is directly over us!"

The object hung 20 to 30 feet above her. It made no sound. "The object appeared larger and larger as it came closer," Brenda said. "The lights appeared to be all around and turning."

Barbara saw something round, "like the bottom of a plate. It was solid, grayish white." The object tilted on edge and returned to a position about 50 feet over the high school. Then it receded into the sky. It looked like a star.

Officers Bossie and Mahan of the Beverly Police arrived, jokingly asked the group, "Where's the airplane?" and laughed when shown the star-like light. Then the disc turned bright red and dropped to a position directly over the school building, where Mahan saw "a large plate hovering over the school." One officer described a shape like a half dollar, with three lights, red, green and blue, in indentations at the rear, while Bossie said, "It hovered and then began gliding." The two officers were visibly shaken. One said it was neither an airplane nor helicopter, but he did not know what it was, and then it took off at a "normal speed," staying the same height in the sky.

Raymond E. Fowler chaired NICAP's Massachusetts Subcommittee. He interviewed the witnesses and collected signed statements. He found them "mature and sincere" and "not seeking publicity". His report went to the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado. Investigators Roy Craig and Norman Levine filed it as Case 6.

The Condon Committee pointed to Jupiter, which shone at magnitude -1.6, 20 to 30 degrees above the horizon and 23 degrees north of west. Scintillation would explain the changing colours, and autokinesis would explain the apparent motion. The close pass over the women was left unexplained. Fowler went back to the witnesses and found that the line of sight to Jupiter and the line of sight to the object differed by about 50 degrees. Craig himself wrote that the 1966 incident at Beverly "would fit no other explanation if the testimony of witnesses is taken at full face value."

On 29 July 1968, James E. McDonald described the case to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. In France, GEPAN discussed how Condon handled it. Jacques Vallée listed it as entry 763 in his Magonia catalogue. CUFOS files it as a close encounter of the second kind. Fowler told the full story in his 1974 book UFOs: Interplanetary Visitors.