The quiet beauty of New York’s Hudson River Valley is home to upscale professionals and retirees. They tend to be well-educated and cosmopolitan, hardly the type of people one would expect to be swept up by UFO fever. Yet, that’s exactly what happened to more than 5,000 residents between 1983 and 1986. Ultimately, the entire episode was largely dismissed as a hoax perpetrated by a group of local stunt pilots. However, to this day, many of the eyewitnesses maintain that what they saw could not have been a handful of airplanes.

Dennis Sant, a husband and father of five, had worked in local government for 17 years. He led a perfectly normal life. Then on March 17, 1983, Dennis’s home in Brewster, New York, was the site of an extraordinary event:

“It was a very large object. The structure of it was very dark gray, metallic, almost girder-type looking… The object seemed to be very silent. The lights were iridescent, bright, they stood out in the sky and three-dimension. It looked like a city of lights. It just hung in the sky, all brilliant colors… We followed the object around to the backyard. And at that point, a feeling of fright came upon me. Thoughts started to flood my mind, thoughts of the craft touching ground, thoughts of an encounter with an alien being. Thoughts of being abducted. All types of fearful thoughts started to enter into my mind.”

But Dennis and his family were not the only ones mesmerized by the extraordinary light formation. A few miles away, traffic screeched to a halt on Interstate 84 as the mysterious object hovered overhead. The Hudson Valley sightings had only just begun.

One week later, Officer Andi Sadoff of the New Castle Police was on routine patrol when he, too, had an encounter:

“I was working a 4 PM to midnight tour and assigned to set up some radar to look for speeding cars and I looked up into the sky and saw a series of lights. And at first I thought it was a plane, it was quite a distance, quite far away, but it was, it was really quite large. As I recall, there were mostly white lights, but there were green lights also. It was alternating green and white lights. It approached my vehicle and it stopped and it seemed to hover. And I’m looking at this thing, thinking what is it? I wasn’t afraid. I was just amazed. I was in awe of it. I didn’t know what it was. The only thing that I recall the most is I was amazed that there was no noise. There was no humming. There was no engine, there was no sound. It was absolutely silent.”

Then just seconds later, the eerie silence was broken by another eyewitness report. At virtually the same time, Ed Burns, a computer engineer and senior manager for IBM, was driving home on the Taconic Parkway, 10 miles north of Officer Sadoff’s location:

“Out of nowhere, I got a lot of static on the radio. I thought maybe I was on the wrong number, and then I went over to turn the dial again and that’s when I looked up and saw this craft. It was a triangular ship. And the back had to be as large as a football field at least. And there was no noise.”

Ed pulled off the highway and joined a group of motorists by the side of the road. According to Ed, they were all staring at the sky, seemingly dumbstruck:

“I’m not into astronomy… but what I had witnessed that night was not from this planet.”

The eyewitness reports indicated the object was slowly moving north over the Hudson River Valley. Officer Sadoff and at least 12 others saw it in New Castle. Ten minutes later, Ed Burns and at least 20 motorists, saw it near Millwood. Ten minutes after that, the phones began ringing off the hook in the police station at Yorktown. Officer William Wolf Jr. was the dispatcher on duty that night:

“Every line kept going, every single line, constantly answer the phone, another line would light up. I’d answer the next line and another one would line up. Got to the point… the county parkway stopped. The people were out in their cars. It was starting to get really crazy. I tried calling the cars to find out if they saw anything. And the only one that called… Kevin, said that he would stop in.”

Officer Kevin Soravilla arrived a few minutes later. He also saw the lights reported by dozens of Yorktown residents:

“The object was extremely large. I estimated it to be close to 300 to 400 yards wide. We stood out in front, facing to the north. And approximately about five minutes later… the object began to appear from the northern horizon.”

Although Officers Wolf and Soravilla were standing side by side in front of the Yorktown Police station, their accounts are entirely contradictory. Officer Soravilla was convinced that he saw a large object with a number of small lights:

“I would say approximately 16, 18 lights, running in a V formation, approximately 200 to 400 yards wide. I was standing between the lights to see any type of a solid structure where he may have basically been staring at the lights himself.”

But Officer Wolf had a completely different impression:

“They looked like airplanes to me, I said Kev… I live near an airport and I see these airplanes every day. So as they were coming over, he said well you can’t hear anything. I said listen, but then we started to hear a drone. It wasn’t one big solid unit. But if you looked at it for like a couple of minutes or even a fraction as it was coming over, I could see where some people would’ve gotten upset.”

Suddenly, the Hudson Valley sightings had taken a dramatic turn. It appeared that the UFOs were a hoax, nothing more than small aircraft flying in precise patterns. Anthony Capaldi was an air traffic control specialist at the time of the sightings. In the summer of 1983, he made an observation that seemed to settle the UFO controversy once and for all:

“The first time I observed the formation, it looked a little peculiar. And from our vantage point in the tower, they just appeared to be just one big light because they were flying in tight formation. I don’t think if this formation flew over an individual’s head at a thousand feet that there’s any way you could mistake it for anything but the formation flying, due to the sound of the aircraft engines. And I imagine that at a thousand feet, you could really determine that it’s aircraft.”

But not everyone agreed. Phillip Imbrogno, an author and UFO expert, spoke to several of the eyewitnesses:

“The UFO was surely seen before these hoaxster pilots began their night flights. After these hoaxsters began their night flights, people would call me up who had seen the UFO on previous dates and said well I saw something strange in the sky but it wasn’t the same thing that I saw a week before.”

A home video showing a light formation above Brewster, New York, was taken on June 10, 1984, by local resident Bob Pozzuoli. Phillip Imbrogno was convinced the footage showed an actual UFO:

“It has been looked at by a number of photographic experts who indicate that the movement of the object on the video seems to be one rigid object not individual objects. Plus there were hundreds and hundreds of witnesses who saw the UFO and said it was something strange. But the night that the airplanes were seen, there were also dozens of witnesses who said, in fact, that they did see airplanes.”

So what is the truth about the fantastic light formations in the sky above the Hudson River Valley? Were they aerial stunts performed by sophisticated pranksters? Or did the flying objects come from somewhere beyond the stars?

Source: https://unsolved.com/gallery/hudson-valley-ufo/

It’s often claimed that ufology is not a science because UFO sightings don’t follow any patterns, or obey any “rules” that could be tested scientifically. But a string of sightings in the suburbs north of New York City demonstrate that UFOs are also far from random: over several years in the early 1980s, thousands of people saw V-shaped and circular formations of lights over the Hudson Valley, many as large as football fields. The sightings came in waves, often recurring in the same few areas, and frequently on the same few days of the week. Though these patterns are difficult to explain, they suggest that there is some logic to UFO activity that may one day be explained by science.

The First Wave

The first recorded sighting in the Hudson Valley area occurred just a few minutes before midnight on December 31, 1981. An anonymous off-duty police officer and his family saw a boomerang-shaped object drift slowly overtop of their home in Kent, New York. The family could see a solid structure with roughly 15 red, green, and white lights anchored to its underside. It maintained a constant altitude of about 150 meters, moved at a gentle walking pace, and made only a faint hum. At one point, the lights went out, and three blinding white lights in the shape of a triangle appeared in their place. About 5 seconds later, the coloured ones returned, and the object drifted out of sight.(1) 55 year-old Edwin Hansen saw what appeared to be the same object as he was driving down Interstate 84, just moments after the family's sighting. Hansen, among others, stopped on the side of the road after spotting a boomerang-shaped formation of lights that projected a bright beam of light to the ground. It was so large that it filled the sky in front of him, and it made slow, tight circles in the air. Just as he thought he'd like to get a closer look, the object moved in his direction. He panicked as it approached, but then heard a voice in his head that instructed him not to be afraid. At the same time, the object turned away and the beam went out. Hansen said that he “felt thoughts that weren’t [his] own,” and believed that he had received a telepathic communication from the UFO.(2) Many other witnesses reported similar communications in the next few years, or felt that the UFO had read their minds.

Nearly two months later, on February 26, 1982, Monique O’Driscoll and her daughter followed a lighted object down several miles of country road, and watched it pass over their car. When it stopped to hover above a frozen lake, Monique got out of her car to watch it. The object had about 50 red, blue, and amber lights, and a large amber light in the middle. It was about 60 to 90 meters across and perfectly silent. Its underside was lined with metal beams and criss-crossed supports, like the underside of a bridge. Although it began to turn away, at the exact moment that she wished for it to stay, it turned back and flew towards her, then retreated when she got scared.(3) There were several witnesses nearby who saw the same object at the exact same time, and later when it crossed over the I-84. The Police in Kent and Carmel, New York, and Danbury, Connecticut, all received a flood of calls about a UFO that night.(4)

The sightings resumed the next Spring. On the evening of March 17, 1983, a woman in Brewster, New York, saw a V-shaped object with numerous lights "all the colours of the rainbow" arranged along its wings, and one large light in the centre. It then made a sharp turn and flew two doors down to the home of Dennis Sant, the Deputy Clerk for Putnam County. Sant had seen the object hovering over his yard earlier that night, and confessed that he felt a strong urge to look for it outside.(5) He found it hovering over the I-84, then ran inside to get his family. As soon as he wished that he could get a closer look, it rotated in his direction, then floated towards him and stopped about 12 meters away. The object was just under 40 meters long, and more than 100 meters wide. It had many red, green, and white lights along its sides, and an amber light that swept from one end of the V to the other. As it hovered there, the lights grew to be three times as bright. Sant and his father were so close to it that they could see its dark metal surface, and hear a finely-tuned engine sound.(6)

The following week, on March 24, another wave of sightings occurred, mostly in Yorktown. Many of the witnesses were Yorktown police officers who admitted that their switchboard had been flooded with calls reporting a large, boomerang-shaped UFO with red, blue, and green lights.(7) Police in the nearby village of New Castle received a flood of calls as well, describing an object as large as a football field.(8) Bill Hele, a meteorologist, saw an asymmetrical V-shaped object that was about 400 meters long, with six or seven lights. The object descended from about 600 to 300 meters altitude, and slowed as it approached. Hele realized that the lights were all changing colors at different times, as if lit by a rotating prism within the structure. Suddenly, all the lights went out, leaving nothing in their place, as if whatever object was supporting them had simply disappeared. The lights reappeared 30 - 40 seconds later, and a few seconds after that, the object turned to the north and flew away, as the lights changed to a slime green.(9) At the same time, people 15 miles north in Putnam county saw a smaller object exhibiting similar behaviours.(10) It was a big night for sightings, and this time, the press caught wind.

The Investigation

On March 26, the West-chester-Rockland Daily Item published a story on the sightings, as did the North County News, and that night, the lights returned. The publicity brought the sightings to the attention of amateur UFO investigator Philip J. Imbrogno. Imbrogno began collecting witnesses' statements with assistance from J. Allen Hynek, former consultant to US Air Force Project Blue Book, and investigators from Hynek's own Center for UFO Studies.(11) The team set up two phone lines to collect witness depositions, and shared them in local papers. They took more than 100 calls in the first 10 hours of the papers’ publication, and eventually received over 300 calls about the lights on March 24. They estimated that there were several thousand witnesses that night. 85% of the sightings occurred over an area less than 60 square km in Westchester and Putnam counties, along the Taconic parkway.(12) 

The reports described the same type of boomerang-shaped object, usually moving between 20 to 50 kmph.(13) Many times, the UFOs were seen to hover over bodies of water. But every sighting involved somewhat different behavior. Witnesses reported seeing the lights jump positions in the sky; disappear and reappear in place; and release self-propelled lighted objects. Some even saw lights detach from the formation and move on their own.(14) On October 26, a group of witnesses saw a formation of seven white lights fly overhead. The central one remained in place, but the six others began jumping around independently, before reforming and flying off as one.(15) Others saw a small red “probe” detach from the UFO. On October 28, Jim Booke, a biomedical engineer, saw a massive, lighted, boomerang-shaped object fly up and hover over the Croton Falls Reservoir. It was at least 30 meters long, with nine red lights along its sides. It began to move around the reservoir, while maintaining a constant altitude of about 4.5 meters above water level. Each time that it stopped, it released a cherry-red light and projected a type of screen from its underside that appeared to interact with the water.(16) The object made no noise at all, and its lights went out every time another car passed by.

The Yorktown police eventually declared that the UFOs over the Hudson Valley were nothing but a group of planes flying in formation, although they were unable to identify the culprits, and the Putnam police stated that the lights belonged to a squadron of ultralight aircraft flying in formation.(17) However, ultralights bounce around in the breeze, and would be nearly impossible to fly in perfect formation. Also, they make an engine noise like a lawn mower that would have been perfectly audible in nearly every sighting.(18) The Federal Aviation Administration told police on multiple occasions that the lights belonged to unspecified planes or helicopters, and later conducted an investigation of the sightings, but never shared their conclusions.(19) The Police departments in Brewster and Carmel said that an official at Stewart Air Force Base told them that the lights were planes being transferred from the base, though others at the base denied this.(20) In April, 1983, a group of private pilots buzzed the area in a v-shaped formation of planes in an attempt to fool the locals into thinking they were seeing UFOs. But many of the witnesses that Imbrogno’s team spoke with had seen these planes as well as the UFOs, and could easily tell the difference. For the next four months, people in the Hudson Valley reported seeing similar formations of planes, in what many assumed was some government effort to confuse the issue.(21) In the midst of a flap on Halloween night, 1984, a small plane landed at the Stormville airport, where the UFO had been seen, and a state trooper apprehended him, and accused him of causing the sightings. Though the pilot denied it, and the officer never charged him, debunkers have cited the report he wrote as proof of a hoax.(22) 

The Second Wave

Public excitement over the first wave of sightings died down in the following months. However, on March 25, 1984, almost exactly a year after the big flap, another wave of sightings began, and several more occurred that summer. This time around, the shapes and behaviours of the UFOs were more varied than ever. Imbrogno’s team received reports about flying Xs, crosses, and circular formations: one cross formation was even captured on video.(23) Several witnesses reported UFOs that hovered overhead and bathed them in beams of light.(24) On March 25 alone, an estimated 200 - 300 people saw a UFO, again over the Taconic Parkway. The Carmel police had at least 20 calls, and saw the UFO themselves: a lieutenant with the department said that he felt sure it wasn’t a conventional aircraft.(25) There were more sightings on March 31, and many more that summer.(26) On June 11, 1984, a giant, V-shaped formation of lights buzzed a town board meeting in New Castle county.(27) Several officers saw the object, and a neighbouring county's airport tracked it on radar. On July 12, and then again on July 19 and 24, people saw circular formations of lights across Connecticut and New York state. Imbrogno and Hynek estimated that there were 5000 witnesses on the first night alone.(28) At least 12 of these were police officers, and one was the Danbury County Chief, Nelson Macedo. Macedo was on a fishing boat on Candlewood lake with family and friends when they all saw a circular object rimmed with 20 - 30 multi-coloured lights hovering high overhead. The lights seemed to be spinning, though the object was still. When the operator shut the boat’s lights off, the object’s lights went out as well, and on and off again with the same effect.(29) On July 24, Bob Pozzuoli of Brewster, New York, captured some lights on film.(30) 

Later that summer, Imbrogno and Peter Gersten, a lawyer and ufologist, decided to arrange a conference in Brewster in an effort to draw the public's attention to the recurring waves of UFOs. Reporter Andy Blum did a story on the effort, alerting a host of regional news outlets. Over 1500 people attended the conference on August 25, including more than 75 reporters from the likes of the New York Times, ABC, and the Chicago Tribune.(31) Here the investigators showed the Pozzuoli film, which was subsequently broadcast on TV news. HBO aired a special production on UFOs in 1985, and sent Pozzuoli’s film to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where a specialist was unable to identify the source of the lights.(32) The New York state police and the FAA were invited to present, but declined. Still, the conference caused a media splash, and the additional exposure brought new sightings to the team's attention.(33) They learned that on two occasions in June, workers and guards at Indian Point nuclear reactor complex had seen an object hover over the site, and that the facility's security systems mysteriously shut down during the encounters.(34) There were more sightings the night after the conference, but very few after that, and sightings declined in the following years.(35) In the midst of this decline, on March 21, 1985, Imbrogno’s team finally saw a UFO for themselves. Immediately after leaving the University of Bridgeport to take part in a call-in TV show about the sightings, the team saw a circular structure ringed in lights hovering over a 15-story building, watched it turn in the sky, and chased it down the interstate.(36) 

Significance

Hynek and Imbrogno teamed up with Journalist Bob Pratt to write a book on their investigation. Hynek died in 1986, but the book was published the next year, the last work to bear his name. Although the sightings decreased in frequency after 1984, Imbrogno continued to collect reports in the Hudson valley for years after, and sightings continue to this day.(37) Imbrogno’s credibility took a hit when it was discovered that he had fabricated many of his supposed scientific and military credentials. Still, UFO debunkers have had remarkably little to say about the reports that he collected. Even Philip Klass, the preeminent skeptic of ufology, claimed that the Hudson Valley sightings may be the hardest ever to explain. Those who have endeavoured to do so have mostly fallen back on the implausible mystery airplane theory, as Discover magazine did in a 1984 article.(38)  In 1992, Unsolved Mysteries devoted an episode to the Hudson Valley sightings, and interviewed many of the police officers who had seen a UFO, lending credibility to their accounts.

With all the reports they’d collected, Imbrogno’s team noticed a few patterns in the data, and made some interesting discoveries. First, reports were remarkably consistent in their descriptions of triangular or boomerang-shaped objects, and sometimes circular ones. These kinds of objects had been reported in a number of southern states since the mid 1970s, and similar reports in the US date back at least as far as 1951.(39) Just a few years later, in 1989 and 90, there was a wave of sightings over Belgium that involved black, triangular objects that behaved much in the same way as the Hudson Valley UFOs. In 1997, a giant lighted, V-shaped object buzzed the city of Phoenix, Arizona. However, not all of the witnesses in the Hudson Valley reported the same UFOs: a building inspector in Torrington, Connecticut, saw a cigar-shaped craft with four windows, and the guards at the Indian Point reactor saw an object shaped like an ice-cream cone.(40) And while some insisted that there was a solid structure behind the lights, many others were certain that there wasn’t. It’s unclear if the discrepancies between witnesses’ accounts are due to errors in observation, or if they are indicative of a wide variety of sighted objects. 

Sightings were heavily clustered, geographically, and they fell disproportionately often on Monday, Thursday, and Sunday nights.(41) What’s more, some of the biggest nights for sightings in 1984 fell on almost the exact same days as the biggest nights from the year before. No one has been able to make sense of these curious anomalies in the data, nor have they been able to explain why there is such a concentration of sightings in the same 3600 square kilometers of the Hudson Valley region.(42) However, Imbrogno’s team noted that some of the areas most frequently visited by UFOs contained a lot of government-owned land. This land is rich in iron ore, and dotted by abandoned mines, and locals also claim to have experienced an unusual number of electrical disturbances here.(43)

Lastly, witnesses frequently claimed to have had some form of telepathic exchange with the UFOs they saw. Such claims are common in UFO reports, and suggests that there is an intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon that is able to interface with the human mind directly. Imbrogno's team also received several reports of so-called "missing time," as well as strange dreams and abduction experiences that occurred at the same time as the sightings, although the abduction phenomenon was not well understood at the time.(44) Elsewhere, Hynek noted that such incidents of “high strangeness” were typical of UFO reports, and very difficult to explain.

Summary

Over 30 years later, the Hudson Valley sightings of the early-to-mid 1980s remain some of the longest-running, and most intensely studied in UFO history. Many sightings involved trained observers and multiple, independent witnesses, and some were even corroborated on radar. What’s more, the data that Hynek and Imbrogno collected shows that the UFO activity over the Hudson Valley followed a number of strange but discernible patterns. We can’t exactly predict a UFO sighting, but we also can’t say that there is no logic to the phenomenon: it may just be that we don’t yet understand how that logic operates. 

Sources

Garelik, Glen. “Special Report: The Great Hudson Valley UFO Mystery.” Discover. November 1984, 17 - 20. Available as part of a compilation by UFO History Files, accessed August 17, 2019: http://ufohistoryfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/338C.pdf.

Hynek, J. Allen, Philip J.  Imbrogno, and Bob Pratt. Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987.

Randle, Kevin. “The Crash of Philip J. Imbrogno. July 17, 2011. Accessed August 17, 2019: http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/07/crash-of-philip-j-imbrogno.html.

Schmalz, Jeffrey. “Strange Sights Brighten the Night Skies Upstate.” New York Times. Saturday, August 25, 1984. Preview available:

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/25/nyregion/strange-sights-brighten-the-night-skies-upstate.html.

For Further resources, including newspaper clippings and witness’s drawings of the UFOs they saw, see the material compiled in the following documents: 

Discover article, witness drawings: http://ufohistoryfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/338C.pdf.

Newspaper clippings: http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/United%20States/UFO%20Newsclipping%20Service/UFO%20Newsclipping%20Service%20-%201984%2011%20-%20no%20184.pdf.

Source: https://www.thinkanomalous.com/hudson-valley-ufo.html

THE date: March 24, 1983. The time: about 9 P.M. Gloria Scalzo of Ossining was driving north on the Taconic State Parkway near Route 133 in the town of New Castle when she said something caught her eye.

''A cluster of lights,'' she recalled, ''almost like a town but it was in the sky.'' She turned off onto Underhill Road but could not get the sight out of her mind; she decided to go back on the parkway. ''As soon as I got back onto the Taconic, I looked over to my left,'' she said, ''and I saw this object with white lights, shaped like a boomerang, coming toward me, going northwest, and I said to myself, my God, that thing is huge.'' Slowing down, she said she watched the object for a few seconds and then it disappeared.

''All of a sudden it just re-appeared over my windshield,'' she said, describing red, green and white lights about two feet apart in a semicircle. Then the lights started to go out, ''as if someone reached over and turned them out, first one, then the next, until they were all gone.'' Mrs. Scalzo pulled to the side of the road, turned the car off and opened the window. When she looked up, she then saw ''two smaller green lights directly in front of me, about 60 feet high,'' which then went out. ''And then I saw nothing,'' she said. ''It just vanished.''

She was not the only one to report seeing a strange object last month in the skies over Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess and Fairfield Counties. Hundreds of phone calls were made to police stations and airports on at least five separate evenings last month. Most of the reports described a large, silent, hovering V-shaped object with bright lights. Reports of the sightings have now ceased, but interest in them continues.

''If we can't solve it, it will become a classic case,'' said J. Allen Hynek, the former chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern University who is now the director of the Center for U.F.O. Studies in Evanston, Ill. ''It has all the potential for that. It could be a very nice textbook case.''

An authority on unidentified flying objects, Dr. Hynek spent last weekend interviewing area residents who say they saw the object. He also received briefings from the center's local investigators.

At almost the same time that Mrs. Scalzo reported having her experience, Carmen Mejuto, a kindergarten teacher who lives in Ossining, was traveling east on Croton Avenue in a car driven by her mother.

Stopped at a light, she said she saw an object approaching in the sky. ''My first reaction was that it was a plane,'' she said. ''Then, as it got closer, I realized I wasn't seeing the nose cone of a plane and there were no blinking lights.'' There were, she said, steady lights, shaped like a chevron. ''I saw two large wings,'' she added, ''each the size of a commercial jet. I realized it wasn't a plane.''

Expecting some sound since the object was so large and so close, just above the treetops, she rolled down her car window. ''I heard nothing,'' she said, adding that the object then veered off. She watched it disappear.

Dr. Hynek said that it was unusual to have such sightings in a relatively urban area. More unusual, he said, was the number of people who reported witnessing the phenomenon. ''If we continue to get reports, then it could be the largest sighting ever recorded,'' he said.

Many of those witnesses experienced what is called a close encounter of the first kind, a sighting within 500 feet of an object without any interaction occurring. There are also what have been called close encounters of the second kind, where reportedly there is some sort of influence on the environment, such as interference with electronic systems. A so-called close encounter of the third kind, where occupants of the object are reported sighted, has been made famous by Steven Spielberg's motion picture of the same name.

Dr. Hynek, who devised the encounter-classification system and who served as Mr. Spielberg's technical adviser, stressed last week that no extraterrestrial origin should be attributed to last month's sightings -or, in fact, to any sighting. He explained that the center's investigations attempt to attribute rational causes to sightings. If these ultimately cannot be discovered, incidents are categorized as ''unexplainable.''

''The Westchester sightings are sufficiently unusual to cause people to look closely for a natural explanation,'' he said. ''If it can't be found, they will go down as unsolved.''

One person working hard to provide a rational explanation is Philip J. Imbrogno, a Greenwich, Conn., resident and a science teacher at the Windward School of White Plains who is a field investigator for the center. Mr. Imbrogno said he already had hundreds of reports of sightings, many referred to him by local police departments, and that the number ''may eventually reach the thousands.'' He does not expect to issue a final report on his findings until summer.

''It's something I do because I have an interest in it,'' he said last week. He and three associates are sifting through ''all the information we have so far, weeding it out and trying to focus on the best recollections.'' They have interviewed about 30 people. Questionnaires are filled out for each witness, recountings of the incidents are tape-recorded and cross-examinations are conducted.

''We have to remain objective,'' Mr. Imbrogno said. ''We go in with a clear mind and try to put the facts together. We don't go in looking for a spaceship. We go in trying to disprove the sighting, to come up with a possible explanation.''

The investigators volunteer their time, and are occasionally reimbursed for their expenses. They include Lieut. George A. Lesnick, a member of the Fairfield, Conn., Police Department who has been tracking reports of U.F.O. sightings for 30 years. Unlike Mr. Imbrogno and Dr. Hynek, Lieutenant Lesnick has himself sighted an unexplained object. He said he approached each case as ''a trained scientific investigator,'' employing some of the techniques from his 26 years of police work. ''When you talk with people and they know you're a police officer, you more or less get respect,'' he said. ''And they, in turn, feel you're going to respect them, not regard them as kooks.''

But there are some who are unimpressed with the process. ''Sometimes Hynek's investigators, or investigators of other groups, succeed in finding prosaic answers to sightings,'' said Philip J. Klass, a Washington-based avionics editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology, a leading aerospace publication. ''But they're not disposed to such answers. They're more disposed to finding inexplicable cases.''

Mr. Klass, author of a number of books challenging supposed authenticated U.F.O. sightings, is a longtime critic of Dr. Hynek and termed the center's work ''superficial and unscientific.'' He said that in 17 years investigating cases, he had ''yet to find a single one that is inexplicable.'' Offering possible explanations for the Westchester phenomenon, he said, ''I suspect it was triggered by an advertising airplane.''

Bill Hele, chief meteorologist for the National Weather Corporation, which maintains an office at the Westchester County Airport, disagrees. On March 24, Mr. Hele said he had sighted an object while driving south from Peekskill on the Taconic Parkway, at almost the same time that Mrs. Scalzo was heading north.

His account is similar to hers: a series of lights 10 to 15 degrees above the horizon, ''perhaps three times brighter than a first magnitude star,'' six of them on an axis, two or three at a 45-degree angle forming ''a checkmark.'' Mr. Hele estimated that the object he saw was moving at 250 knots but, as it approached him, it ''slowed down to a crawl.'' The multicolored lights went out, then reappeared, this time colored blue-violet, and the object drifted over Mr. Hele at a 100 feet. ''The size was unbelievable,'' Mr. Hele said. ''Over 1,000 yards.''

It remained stationary above him for a few seconds during which he said he ''had the sensation of being scanned and rejected,'' and then it moved northward. Mr. Hele could discern no shape: when the lights went out he saw only the stars. There was no noise save a dull drone as it left.

Mr. Hele, who said he had been around planes most of his life and who provides weather forecasts for the Goodyear blimp, added that he doubted that it was an airplane. That explanation was also ruled out by a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, Robert Fulton, who said, ''It was unequivocally not an aircraft.'' Mr. Fulton said he had checked throughout the area, including military bases.

''It's inexplicable as far as we're concerned,'' he said, suggesting that perhaps it was an occlusion, or weather disturbance. ''An occlusion cannot be given a scintilla of credibility on a clear night like that,'' Mr. Hele said.

Other explanations? Perhaps a secret device being tested by the Government, Dr. Hynek suggested. Possible, Mr. Klass said, but unlikely. A hoax of some kind? ''If it was a hoax, it was fantastically contrived,'' Dr. Hynek said. Hallucinations? ''Definitely ruled out,'' Dr. Hynek said. ''There are no nuts coming out of the woodwork,'' Mr. Imbrogno said. ''We have credible people reporting incredible things.''

The answer may never be found. Mr. Klass said that if Dr. Hynek's group could not come up with an explanation, he would ''be tempted to come to Westchester'' and undertake his own investigation, a challenge Dr. Hynek said he welcomed. Meanwhile, residents have continued to look to the skies to see if the reported object will return.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/17/archives/on-the-trail-of-ufos.html