The Glassboro Landing Site

Glassboro, New Jersey. Labor Day weekend, 1964. Off Fish Pond Road, about 1.2 miles east of Route 47, a sandy clearing sat in oak woods near a small fishing lake. The land belonged to Frank Sergi. That April, a landing reported at Socorro, New Mexico, had left marks in the ground. Glassboro would soon be measured against it.

Friday, September 4. Dusk. Two well-dressed young men approached two brothers, aged 8 and 11, who were fishing at the lake. One said he had seen a luminous red object landing. They led the boys to a set of holes in the woods and left. One of the men was barefoot.

The boys showed their father. He called the police. Other reports followed. Mrs. Freda DuFala had seen "a red glowing 'moon' in that area" that same evening. A Mrs. Trautz reported a sighting on the 5th. Two girls reported one on the 7th.

David Halperin was 16 when he measured the site on September 12. The central crater was conical, "nearly 20 inches deep, 28 inches wide at the top and about 10 inches across at the bottom." Its sides were "smooth, hard-surfaced, scorched black." Three "tripod holes" formed a rough triangle around it. A small sassafras tree was partly uprooted, its leaves facing the crater wilted and browned "as if by intense heat." About 4,000 visitors trampled the ground in the first week.

Glassboro police measured the site and collected metal fragments and fused sand. McGuire AFB sent samples to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where they were identified as fused sand and "tinfoil folded up." NICAP investigator John Pagano filed a "highly positive" report. The Frankford High School Science Research Club found negative nitrate tests and podmarks pressed down rather than dug. Tree expert Alphonse Zulli noted leaves charred about 40 feet up.

On September 30, 1964, Project Blue Book gave its opinion. The hole was "crudely dug." Nitrate showed gunpowder. The metal was tinfoil. The record card reads HOAX.

January 1965. Michael Hallowich, a Glassboro State College student, admitted making the site with one or two friends. He had tried to sell the story under a false name to a local weekly. They had "dug a crater, then punched out three 'tripod' holes and above these broke off the branches of a tree." Charged as a disorderly person and with issuing a false alarm, he pleaded guilty and paid $10 in court costs.

Halperin "didn't believe a word of his confession," and in 1965 he defended the landing in public. Years later he wrote that it "took a few years before I was able to get over my rage…enough to recognize that he was right." In 2017 he used Glassboro to show how memory telescopes separate events, and applied the idea to Roswell.

Michael Swords never accepted the confession. No radioactivity was ever measured, and the force needed to damage the tree did not fit a small dig-and-burn hoax. Swords wrote that Hallowich's account did not match the facts. In 1974, psychiatrist Berthold Schwarz told a MUFON symposium about the boys' father, Ward Campbell, and his account of tall, blond "Nordic" men walking barefoot over gravel and broken glass. NICAP's chronology is blunt all the same: "there was no sighting of a UFO in this case."