Wanaque Reservoir Sightings

The Wanaque Reservoir lies in Passaic County, New Jersey, behind the Raymond Dam. It is 6.6 miles long. In January 1966 its surface was ice.

January 11, 1966. Around 6:20 pm, Patrolman Joseph Cisco of the Wanaque police answered a call about a glowing light, possibly a fire. Cisco pulled into a sandpit near the dam. "There was a light that looked bigger than any of the stars, about the size of a softball or volleyball. It was a pulsating, white, stationary light changing to red."

Soon Mayor Harry T. Wolfe, councilmen and police stood on top of the dam for about 30 minutes in the freezing cold. The mayor's son Billy, 14, said it never flickered. It went from white to red to green and back to white. Councilman Warren Hagstrom put it simply. "We thought it was a helicopter, but we didn't hear a motor."

Sgt David Sisco and reservoir guard Charles Theodora saw a cylinder rock back and forth, then shoot straight up. Civil Defense director Bentley Spencer saw a big ball of light swinging like a pendulum. NICAP logged a bright, egg-shaped object at low altitude, seen for more than an hour. The next morning, a 1967 account says, a circular hole was found melted in the ice.

The lights returned. On the night of October 10, police took more than 150 calls. Sgt Ben Thompson of the Reservoir Police watched a brilliant object zig-zag in sharp, squared-off turns. "It went straight over my head, stopped in mid-air and backed right up." It looked, Thompson said, "as big as a parachute." Writer Lloyd Mallan, who dates the encounter to October 11, recorded Thompson describing water rising toward the object and settling once it left. About 15 minutes later, Thompson counted seven helicopters and ten or twelve jets circling. No agency admitted sending them.

On October 15, Reservoir Police Chief John Casazza watched an elliptical object cast a funnel-shaped beam across the water. "It was absolutely silent," Casazza said. The next night, more than 400 people reported flying objects.

Stewart AFB first suggested a helicopter carrying a big strobe light, then retracted it. McGuire AFB offered a weather balloon, also retracted. The Pentagon settled on a rare alignment of Venus and Jupiter. Patrolman Jack Wardlaw said the Army called it marsh gas. "I know a strange light when I see one." At the Pentagon, Lt Col George P. Freeman of Project Blue Book said no report had ever arrived. Many witnesses never filed one. "They tell you what you saw," Thompson said.

Later, Freeman was quoted in the APRO Bulletin saying that men in Air Force uniforms had been silencing witnesses, and that these men were not connected with the Air Force. Researcher Anthony Bragalia ties this to a Wanaque meeting where a uniformed man told witnesses they "hadn't seen anything."

In 1967, researcher August C. Roberts supplied pictures of a beam of light on behalf of an anonymous photographer. In 2017 Bragalia named Claude Coutant, a worker at a rubber mill in Butler. V.J. Ballester Olmos countered that the prints were copies of earlier prints and that the probable author was Roberts, whose reliability is in question. No original negatives are known.

A 1979 study by Vestigia proposed earthquake lights from the Ramapo Fault. Casazza and newspaper editor Howard Ball both denied the ice hole existed. Yet the witness list still holds patrolmen, councilmen, a mayor and a Mother Superior. Casazza summed it up. "We just didn't know what we were watching. We still don't know."