Northeast Blackout UFO Sightings, Clay Substation and Syracuse (1965)

Tuesday, 9 November 1965. At about 5:16 p.m., a failure began near the Niagara border. By about 5:27 p.m. it had reached New York City. As many as 36 million people in the Northeast and Ontario lost power, some for up to 13 hours. Early reports pointed to one place. Niagara Mohawk's remote-controlled substation in Clay, about 10 miles north of Syracuse.

Weldon Ross, a private pilot and flight instructor, was approaching Hancock Field with his student, James Brooking. Over the substation's twin 345,000-volt towers, he saw "a huge red ball of brilliant intensity about 100 feet in diameter." It hovered above the power lines. Then it began ascending. About a minute later, the lights went out. His student confirmed it. Robert C. Walsh, Syracuse's Deputy Aviation Commissioner, was at Hancock Field. He reported two identical circular balls of light, rising at moderate speed. "It appeared to be one hundred feet in the air and fifty feet in diameter."

West of the city, in Camillus, a housewife and her three children watched a "huge dome-shaped" fireball near a local substation for about five minutes. "As it rose over the moon and moved forward, the lights began to dim." Jerk Magazine later told the story of a housewife, Eloise Boshers, whose account closely matches. She described "a gigantic red fireball, lit from the inside and much larger than the sun." Her son Dewey recalled that "as it got smaller, all the lights went out all along the east coast."

In Syracuse, William Stillwell, sexton at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, watched through a 117-power telescope for about two hours. "The center was rotating, around and around and around." Near Niagara Falls, witnesses described a huge, glowing object hovering over the power station. At Tidioute, Pennsylvania, commercial pilots Jerry Whitaker and George Croninger reported two shiny disc-shaped objects about 45 minutes before the blackout. Over Manhattan, a Time photographer captured a peculiar glow in the sky.

The Federal Power Commission traced the failure to a backup relay at Sir Adam Beck Hydroelectric Station No. 2, in Queenston, Ontario. It tripped at 5:16 p.m. The failure then cascaded east. According to John G. Fuller, repairmen sent to Clay found no mechanical fault.

29 July 1968. James E. McDonald of the University of Arizona spoke to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. FPC officials, he said, "admitted they had the Syracuse and Niagara Falls reports," but would not discuss the UFO possibility. "There is no one looking at this relation between UFO's and outages." Jerk Magazine later found no Project Blue Book entry for the Syracuse sightings.

Donald Keyhoe claimed Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson persuaded both governments to suppress the UFO explanation. McDonald proposed that magnetic fields from UFOs could induce surges in transmission lines. Engineers read it differently. The relay, the standard account goes, was set too low. Larry Robinson, who built power-monitoring systems for Indiana University, argued it tripped on reactive power. The red ball at Clay, he said, was "probably an electric arc from the 248 MV power lines to a tree," a result of the outage, not its cause. A bright full moon was up that night. Even Dewey Boshers-Ross doubted it was a UFO.

John G. Fuller brought the Clay sighting into Incident at Exeter in 1966. When McDonald addressed Congress, he called the blackout "the famous one." To him it was "a puzzling and slightly disturbing coincidence."