The North Hudson Park Landing (George O'Barski), 1975

George O'Barski co-owned a small liquor store in Chelsea, Manhattan, with Bill Burns. Across the street was the studio of Budd Hopkins. O'Barski's drive home took him through North Hudson Park in North Bergen, New Jersey, beside the Stonehenge apartment tower. Sunday, January 12, 1975. Early morning. Accounts place what happened next between about 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.

Static filled his radio. The music was drowned out. A dark, round object with vertical, brilliantly lit windows was moving in the same direction as his car, giving off a low hum like a refrigerator starting up. It was about 30 feet in diameter. Flat on the bottom. Vertical sides. A domed top. It entered a playing field and hovered a few feet off the ground, moving "as though there was a giant magnet attracting it."

A panel opened between two windows. A ladder emerged. Down came eight to twelve small figures, 3 to 4 feet tall, in hooded, one-piece light-colored garments. They looked like kids in snowsuits. They came down "like kids coming down a fire escape. Fast. No wasted motion."

Each carried a spoon-like tool and a little bag with a handle. They dug, spooning the dirt into their bags. Then they climbed back aboard, and the craft lifted and climbed rapidly away. It was over in under four minutes. The next morning O'Barski found about 15 little holes in the ground, several inches deep.

Bill Pawlowski was the night doorman at the Stonehenge. He saw a horizontal row of 10 to 15 lights about 10 feet above the ground in the park. They were too bright to look at directly, with a dark mass in the centre. At about the same time, the building's plate-glass lobby window shattered. There was an indentation on the outer glass. No projectile was ever found. Pawlowski phoned the police.

In November 1975, O'Barski told his story to Hopkins. Hopkins investigated with Ted Bloecher, then New York State director of MUFON, and Jerry Stoehrer of MUFON. They interviewed witnesses, took soil samples and traced Pawlowski, who no longer worked at the Stonehenge. Geneva Hagen later wrote that his account "backed up O'Barski's in every detail, although there had been no communication between the two men." Bloecher wrote up "The Stonehenge Incidents" for the 1976 conference of the Center for UFO Studies.

Their conclusion: a genuine close encounter of the third kind. Hopkins described O'Barski as a non-drinker of "unmistakable integrity." Later he noticed a nagging time problem between closing time and O'Barski's arrival home, and suspected missing time.

There was no federal inquiry. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969. O'Barski's own first thought was a new type of aircraft being tested by the government. Yet he wondered why, if it were the CIA, they would not simply send for soil samples through conventional means. One uncited website has floated a hoax, construction lights or a helicopter. No investigator has shown the case to be a hoax.

Hopkins published the case in The Village Voice on March 1, 1976, as "Sane citizen sees UFO in New Jersey." Letters from other witnesses followed. The encounter opens his 1981 book Missing Time. The park stayed strange: a second sighting in January 1976, a helmeted figure bending to take ground samples that February, and a midnight séance in March that drew more than 500 people. North Bergen still holds library talks on its UFOs. As for O'Barski: "Even if Congress passed a law requiring it, you couldn't get me into that place at night."