The Hudson Valley UFO Wave (The Westchester Boomerang)

The Hudson Valley north of New York City is a landscape of commuter towns, parkways and small airfields. Between 1982 and 1986 its night sky produced thousands of reports. They came from Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess counties, and later from Connecticut. Most clustered along Interstate 84 and the Taconic State Parkway.

December 31, 1982. Shortly before midnight, a retired New York City police officer saw a V-shaped group of very bright lights south of his home. It was "about the size of a football field," with "red, blue and green lights, and a bright white light beamed down from its center."

Then came March 24, 1983. More than 300 reports in a single night, from Brewster, Yorktown and the Taconic State Parkway at New Castle. Witnesses described a "huge shape outlined by bright white lights, moving too slowly and too smoothly." On the parkway, a crowd watched something "like a giant floating city" drift by at "a mere 3-5 mph."

"It approached my vehicle and it stopped and it seemed to hover," recalled Officer Andi Sadoff of the New Castle Police. "It was absolutely silent." Ed Burns, an IBM computer engineer, was on the Taconic when the radio filled with static. Then came the craft. Its back "had to be as large as a football field." In Brewster, Dennis Sant followed it around to the backyard. "It looked like a city of lights."

Summer 1984. The lights reached the Indian Point nuclear plant at Buchanan. On June 14 and July 24, security guards reported an object "100 feet long and 300 yards above the plant" that "looked like helicopters in a V-formation." Investigator Philip Imbrogno later described a 900-foot UFO hovering for 15 minutes. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it had "no documentation of the sighting."

That same summer in Brewster, Bob and Lori Pozzuoli turned a home video camera on the sky. Their tape shows lights rotating counter-clockwise. They heard no sound.

Sgt. Kenneth V. Spiro of the New York State Police followed the lights to Stormville Airport. "It was a group of light planes. They fly in formation." According to Spiro, the undersides were painted black and the planes were rigged with bright lights that could change colour. Air traffic controller Tony Capaldi spoke of "upwards of seven to ten aircraft that fly around in formation." Five or six pilots in Cessna 152s, sometimes "6 inches between wingtips," called themselves "the Martians." They switched their lights off at the same moment. The "object" vanished.

Not everyone accepted the planes. J. Allen Hynek called the case "absolutely weird. There's no logical explanation for it." Imbrogno insisted the UFO "was surely seen before these hoaxster pilots began their night flights." Peter Gersten of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy agreed some reports were planes, but "not all." One pilot noted that ultralights "would have likely sounded like a sea of lawnmowers." Witnesses spoke of silence, hovering and near-vertical climbs.

Sceptics answered back. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid argued the planes "looked the same, behaved the same," and pointed to "human perceptual errors and confirmation bias and selective memory." In 2011, Imbrogno's claimed MIT degrees and Special Forces service could not be verified, which cast doubt on his own reporting.

Night Siege, by Hynek, Imbrogno and Bob Pratt, appeared in 1987, after Hynek's death. HBO, Unsolved Mysteries and later documentaries returned to the story. On May 26, 1987, over 200 calls reached police around Newtown and Danbury, Connecticut. The Westchester Boomerang is still argued over today.