The Exeter Incident

September 1965. Seacoast New Hampshire, with Pease Air Force Base nearby at Portsmouth. In the early hours of Friday, September 3, Norman Muscarello, 18, was hitchhiking home to Exeter from his girlfriend's house in Amesbury, Massachusetts. His road was Route 150, through Kensington.

First he saw "pulsating lights coming from the north, heading in a southwesterly direction." Then, in his words, "It came up on me all of a sudden." He could not make out a silhouette at all. When it passed over a house, "the whole side of this house… seemed to turn out like a blood red." There was absolutely no sound. Only the horses in Dining's field, "raising holy hell, kicking the barn."

He froze on its second pass. Then he ran, fell into a ditch, and flagged down a car to the Exeter police station. Night desk officer Reginald "Scratch" Toland took the report and sent Patrolman Eugene Bertrand out.

In the field, Bertrand shone his flashlight across the dark. A huge dark object with red flashing lights rose up over the trees. "I could see five bright red lights in a straight row," he said. "It seemed to tilt and come right at us." He dropped to one knee and drew his service revolver. He did not shoot. There was no noise and no heat. Horses kicked in their stalls. Dogs howled. The two of them watched it for at least ten minutes.

Patrolman David Hunt arrived within minutes. He saw it move off to the tree line and make right-angle turns. It "sort of floated down like a failing leaf." Then, as Bertrand put it, "it just darted away over those trees toward Hampton."

Maj. David Griffin of Pease AFB told Blue Book he had been unable to arrive at a probable cause. The Pentagon's first public answer was stars and planets twinkling in a temperature inversion. Project Blue Book, under Maj. Hector Quintanilla, then pointed to Operation Big Blast, an exercise with five B-47-type aircraft in the area.

The officers pushed back. Their letter of December 2, 1965, said the sighting came roughly an hour after Big Blast ended, and that the object was silent. Bertrand had served four years in the Air Force, including work on refueling operations. Early in 1966, Lt. Col. John P. Spaulding wrote to the officers: "we have been unable to identify the object you observed." According to NICAP, investigator Raymond E. Fowler's report was entered into the Congressional Record at the House Armed Services Committee hearing on UFOs on April 5, 1966. J. Allen Hynek later called the case "a showcase illustration of Blue Book negligence."

In 2011, Skeptical Inquirer published James McGaha and Joe Nickell's case for a KC-97 tanker. McGaha, a retired USAF major, said he recognized the light pattern "one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one" from the tanker's underside lights. He argued that a refueling boom could flutter in the air and cause the swaying. Critics answered that Bertrand, who had worked on tankers, would have known one. They pointed to the silence, the treetop height and the animals.

John G. Fuller interviewed more than 60 witnesses that autumn. His 1966 book, Incident at Exeter, made the New York Times bestseller list. Muscarello kept to his account until he died in April 2003. "I know what I saw," he said in 1980, "and it wasn't from this world." The case is still carried as unidentified.