What happened
In the small hours of 3 September 1965, 18-year-old Norman Muscarello was walking home along Route 150 in Kensington when, he said, a silent object with a row of brilliant pulsing red lights drifted toward him over a field, bathing two farmhouses in red light. He dived into a ditch, then flagged a car and arrived at the Exeter police station badly shaken. Patrolman Eugene Bertrand, who earlier that night had calmed a motorist claiming a red-lit object had followed her car, drove him back to the field. As horses in a nearby corral began kicking and neighing, both men said a huge dark shape rose from behind the trees, its lights flashing in a set sequence, rocking and swinging as it came toward them. Bertrand drew his revolver, then thought better of it. Patrolman David Hunt arrived and watched it too before it slid away over the trees. All three filed written reports, and journalist John G. Fuller's Incident at Exeter made the case a 1966 bestseller.
The original account
Since we have been unable at this time to identify a specific aircraft as the cause of the sighting, the case is regarded for statistical purposes as unidentified. There was no indication that the object presented any evidence whatsoever of scientific or technical development beyond the present state-of-the-art.
U.S. Air Force reply in the Project Blue Book case file, Exeter, New Hampshire, September 1965 (public domain; transcribed from scan)
The official explanation
The Pentagon first told reporters the men had seen twinkling stars and planets distorted by a temperature inversion; Blue Book then attributed the lights to aircraft from Operation Big Blast, a SAC/NORAD training exercise. After the patrolmen pointed out the sighting came after the exercise ended, the Air Force wrote in January 1966 that it could not identify the object. In 2011 skeptics James McGaha and Joe Nickell argued in Skeptical Inquirer that the lights matched the underbelly signal lamps of a KC-97 refuelling tanker from nearby Pease AFB, with its fluttering refuelling boom explaining the rocking motion.
The anomalous case
Two trained police officers and a teenager watched the object together at close range for several minutes and filed separate written reports that same night. Pease AFB's own investigating officer, Major David Griffin, wrote to Blue Book that he could find no probable cause and judged the witnesses stable and reliable, especially the patrolmen. Hunt told Fuller he heard a B-47 pass overhead afterwards and said there was no comparison between the two. The Air Force's own sequence of explanations, from stars to an exercise that had already ended, collapsed under the officers' rebuttal, and it ultimately conceded in writing that the object was unidentified. The witnesses described silence, no wings, and red light strong enough to colour two houses, and the area had produced a run of similar reports in the preceding weeks.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Project Blue Book file: Exeter, New Hampshire, September 1965 official, archive.org
Sources
- Exeter incident Wikipedia
- Project Blue Book case file, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1965 U.S. Air Force via Internet Archive
- 'Exeter Incident' Solved! A Classic UFO Case, Forty-Five Years 'Cold' Skeptical Inquirer
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.