What happened
From New Year's Eve 1982 and through the next two years, people across the commuter towns north of New York City reported a vast, quiet shape gliding low over highways and reservoirs: usually a V or boomerang outlined in brilliant white, red and green lights, often described as the size of a football field, able to hang motionless and then drift or shoot away. By late March 1983 a Port Chester paper was running front-page coverage, quoting an on-duty officer, Kevin Soravilla, whose department had taken more than 100 calls and who said he watched the object stop in mid-air and turn. A driver on Interstate 84 described a gigantic triangle of lights hovering over a field. In July 1984 a Brewster resident videotaped a circle of rotating lights, and Center for UFO Studies investigator Philip Imbrogno said guards at the Indian Point nuclear plant reported a huge object hovering over the reactors that summer. J. Allen Hynek spoke to local reporters about the sightings, and the flap later became the subject of books.
The official explanation
A Troop K state trooper followed the lights to Stormville Airport in Dutchess County, and Sgt. Kenneth Spiro told reporters it was a group of five or six light planes flying in tight formation at night with bright, colour-changing lights, whose pilots were amused by the reports. Pilots interviewed by local papers described practising V formations with beacons, and Discover magazine reported the group called itself 'the Martians' and switched lights off together to make the 'craft' vanish. The New York Power Authority and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said they had no record of the Indian Point sighting, and a plant security official doubted the story of guards arming themselves.
The anomalous case
Many witnesses insisted that what they saw was not a group of small planes: they described a single rigid structure, silent at low altitude, that could hover in place for long periods and then move off at speed, behaviour light aircraft cannot match. Witnesses quoted at the time in the Poughkeepsie Journal pushed back on the formation explanation, saying they could easily recognise planes and that a handful of pilots could not account for the volume and spread of reports. Ufologist Peter Gersten of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, who offered a reward to identify the pilots, argued that some reports were consistent with planes while others were not. One motorist on I-84 told The New York Times he saw a gigantic triangle of lights hovering about 30 feet over a field that then shot straight up.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- 1984 Hudson Valley UFO sightings Wikipedia
- The Hudson Valley UFOs: How the Media Reacted to a 1980s UFO Flap The Debrief
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.