Hudson Valley, Indian Point, Boomerang UFOs & the Stormville Flyers

“It was shaped like a boomerang with lights running up and down its wings....It was so huge it filled up the entire sky........”

It’s been a long time since we had a specific thread on the mass sightings of ‘chevron’ shaped or ‘triangular’ craft gliding silently over the Hudson River Valley area of the United States.

The Hudson Valley sightings seemed to have peaked in the early half of the 1980s and many sources claim that somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 witnesses saw something strange in the night skies of New York State and Connecticut. That is a truly astonishing amount of witnesses which cannot be ignored.

There were also reports that the Indian Point Nuclear Power Station was visited by an enormous craft that hovered above one of the reactors in 1983. Close encounters and tales of alien abduction were also reported in later years. The view taken by the de-bunkers was that the lights and strange sightings were caused by a team of bored pilots flying light aircraft in formation at night.

Besides alien spacecraft and bored pilots the sightings were also linked to secret projects.

Finally there may be people reading this who sighted something strange, or know of someone who did, and can add more information to the thread.

But first let’s go back to the early 1980s when it all started.

The Hudson Valley UFO Wave Begins

It all, possibly, started on New Year’s Eve way back in 1982. Driving home on the highway close to Kent, New York, Edwin Hansen was mystified by lights hovering above the road up ahead. He first thought it was a helicopter shining a searchlight. But then couldn’t detect any sound from the object. Suddenly the ‘searchlight’ was gone and a set of lights were descending towards him.Hansen noted a massive boomerang shaped UFO with the lights along its wings and a long triangular tail section. It was definitely not a helicopter.

Hansen was forced to shield his eyes as the light from the object became too intense and the search beam began to get worryingly closer to his vehicle. In a panic he hit the car horn and prayed that the object would go away. Then he heard a ‘sort of voice’ telling him to remain calm and collected. The object turned away and Hansen drove on in a state of relief.

As the New Year of 1983 approached a retired police officer, having enjoyed a lot of festive spirit, wandered into his backyard in Kent , New York, gazed up into the night sky and noticed a bank of red, green and white lights. As it glided over his home he was struck by the absence of any engine noise. Then it finally came into full sight and he saw an object that resembled a huge boomerang.



Although Edwin Hansen and the unnamed retired police officer didn’t know it at the time what has become known as the ‘Hudson Valley UFO Wave’ had just began.

Most of the reported sightings occurred between spring 1983 and summer of 1984 but they continued on sporadically until the mid 1990s. Many of them bore the same descriptions of a huge triangular (or boomerang) shaped craft with banks of coloured lights gliding silently above in the night skies.

‘Boomerangs Return'

The most dramatic sightings occurred in the month of March 1983.
Dennis Sant, who had worked as a local government employee for two decades, had never experienced anything he would describe as ‘out of this world ‘. But everything changed for him on March 17th, 1983. Returning home in Brewster, New York, he experienced something he describes in his own words below:

"As we approached the house I saw a large, triangular object hovering over my yard about fifty feet from my house. It seemed to be not much higher than my roof. We pulled into the driveway, and we all jumped out and ran into the backyard. The object was no longer there. I took the children into the house to get them ready for bed, but I felt a strong urge to go back outside."


"You could see people on the bridge pointing at it."

".. a very large object, its structure was a very dark gray, metallic."

"It had numerous lights from end to end-red, green, and white. There seemed to be an amber light coming from it. This was in sequence, from one end of the shaft to the other. I call it a shaft because that's what it resembled."

"It seemed to be about the width of a football field and was a dark, very grey metal. It was so close you could hit it with a baseball."
“We followed the object around to the backyard. 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.”


“What I saw was not airplanes in formation."

“It was a very large object. The structure of it was very dark grey, metallic, almost girder-type looking… The object seemed to be very silent. The lights were iridescent, bright; they stood out in the sky as three-dimensions. It looked like a city of lights. It just hung in the sky, all brilliant colours…

A few miles away, traffic braked to a halt on Interstate 84. A mysterious object hovered overhead and people got out of their vehicles to take a close look.

Sant’s neighbour, Linda Nicoletti, was another witness to the object as it hovered over the Interstate. She reported a huge V-shaped object with rows of bright lights, in all colours of the rainbow, along what she thought must be wings. There was also one much larger, brighter light underneath the craft in the centre. It was deathly silent as it glided towards her home. She also saw Dennis Sant watching the object in his backyard. The UFO slowly glided north until it went out of sight without ever making a sound.

Linda Nicoletti reported the sighting to the Brewster sheriff's office to alert the police about the events. She was allegedly told there had been numerous reports that night and people were seeing a type of experimental craft from Stewart Army Base nearby.

The sheriff's office denied she was told any of this information in later investigations.

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A week later sightings continue...

New Castle Police Officer Andi Sadoff was working on a late night shift setting up radar detectors to catch speeding motorists. She gazed skyward at an object displaying a series of alternating green and white lights moving East to West in the distance. They looked too large to be those of a normal aircraft. As it approached her vehicle it appeared to hover and then moved silently overhead towards the town returning a few minutes later only much lower in the sky. She described it as :

“It was in the shape of a V with white lights on the top and green lights on the bottom. It was flying towards me and headed right for my car....It then hovered there about 20 seconds, and I could see a masse that was very large. Behind it, that is, behind the lights, I could see a large solid object."

"There was no sound, and I was looking at this thing and I was thinking, what it is? When I put my head out of the window and looked up, it was huge."

“So I got on my radio and I made a call to one of the other guys and they said they got quite a few calls about it. The object then started to move again and headed over the ridge, and that was it."

"The thing that I recall most is that I was amazed that there was no noise. There was no humming, there was no engine, no low sound to it. It was absolutely silent."

"I'm not trying to say what it was, I don't know what it was. I know it wasn't airplanes."

Officer Andi Sadoff – Unsolved Mysteries

Around the same time Ed Burns, an IBM Executive, was driving home on the Taconic Parkway, some 10 miles north of Officer Sadoff’s location.



Hearing lots of static on the radio he looked up and saw a huge craft with multiple lights all around it moving silently and slowly through the sky.

"It was a triangular, chevron, ship. And the back of that chevron had to be as large as a football field, at least. It was one solid piece of a chevron shaped ship. And there was no noise. It seemed so close to the ground. It seemed that I could have thrown a rock at it maybe."

"It was truly a flying city, if that's what you want to call it. I mean it was huge."

"It was so shocking. People were just staring at this thing. I remember one guy, the size of his eyes was so large. It seemed I could talk about it for an hour. I was so excited about it, I wanted to share whatever I was feeling at the time."

"When I reached the Millwood area, I noticed twelve cars off to the side of the road. I pulled over and stopped, and then all of a sudden this huge craft was right over my car. That's when it was really shocking."

"Then the craft seemed to stop. The different coloured lights seemed to go off, and just the white lights seemed to stay on. It was hovering a bit. It was just there looking like it was observing us as we were observing it."

"What can I tell you? I'll never forget that for the rest of my life. Five airplanes it was not."

Officer William Wolf Jr. was the police dispatcher on duty that night at Yorktown as calls lit up every line available. Both he and Officer Kevin Soravilla witnessed the lights outside the front of the station but neither agreed on what they saw.

Soravilla said he saw an extremely large object some 300 to 400 yards wide.

“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.”

Wolf had a completely different view of the lights:

“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.”

The Stormville Flyers

As the accounts of sightings increased into the summer of 1983 suddenly things took a different turn. Anthony Capaldi, an air traffic control specialist, proclaimed:

“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.”

The Hudson Valley UFO flap was being attributed to a bunch of bored amateur pilots flying at night out of Stormville airfield. The pilots allegedly had begun flying in loose groups honing their skills until they could fly in tight formations with less than a foot between wing tips. The majority of aircraft used were Cessna 152s and when flown at 3,000-4,000 feet were said to be virtually inaudible to anyone at ground level.

Once stories of UFOs began to circulate in the local media they decided to up their game and give people ‘something to talk about’. More pilots from other locations joined in the fun and some of the group decided to call themselves ‘The Martians’. They would co-ordinate their movements in the air by watching each other’s navigation lights and taking signals from a lead plane. Sometimes they would turn off all their exterior lights to make it seem like the ‘UFO’ had vanished whilst turning on their dim red cockpit lights for guidance (which would only be visible to the other pilots).

Formations would be circles or crosses that appeared like diamonds or V shapes to observers on the ground. Sometimes the pilots would all turn their landing lights on whilst flying slowly to give the impression of a giant UFO .
Supposedly the pilots even began a disinformation campaign by pointing the finger at the top secret goings on at nearby Stewart Air Force Base or even holograms generated by IBM!



Decide for yourself if this video from Brewster, New York taken on July 24th 1984 was a bunch of light aircraft or a huge UFO. It is one of the only videos of the lights known to exist from the time.





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UFOs above Indian Point Nuclear Reactor




A year later things took another turn again. On June 14th 1984, three security officers at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant in Buchanan, New York witnessed a huge craft fly over the plant. However a much more alarming incident supposedly occurred on July 24th 1984 when a huge V shaped object, displaying two rows of glowing lights, flew within 100 yards of Indian Point.

Although they remain anonymous, a number of security officers at the plant revealed the story to UFO investigator Phil Imbrogno and Lt. George Lesnick, a police officer, from Fairfield, Connecticut.

Allegedly the object hovered over the plant emitting a low humming noise. Due to the uncertainty of the situation orders were issued to contact nearby Fort Smith and the men were issued with shotguns in case of an imminent attack. Some reports indicate that the security system was also shut down at the facility. Around 15 minutes later the object drifted slowly away heading North West and then it accelerated out of sight.

When questions were asked about the CCTV security tape, officials at the plant replied that there had been a ‘technical malfunction’. FOIA requests of such nature were refused on the grounds that anything documented relating to the reactor complex was protected under national security regulations.

Later in Oct of 1984 whilst researching the UFO flap for himself, astronomer and UFO expert J. Allen Hynek, accompanied by Philip Imbrogno saw a "Ferris wheel" shaped UFO in the sky over Hudson Valley, that turned on its side and then disappeared. Sadly Hynek passed away in 1986 before the book he co-authored with Imbrogno and Bob Pratt ,’Night Siege’ was published.



New York Times: “Strange Sights Brighten The Night Skies Upstate"

In August of 1984 even the New York Times published an article on the sightings.

NEW CASTLE, N.Y., Aug. 24— The public hearing was plodding along routinely at the Town Hall one night last month.

''All of a sudden, a cop burst in yelling: 'The U.F.O.'s here! The U.F.O.'s here!' '' said Peter A. Brandenberg, a 43-year-old real-estate developer. ''Everyone jumped up and jolted out. We went flying down the stairs to see this thing, just staring at it.'' ............

At night, the curious sometimes crowd the Taconic Parkway, a prime site for viewing. A hot line has been set up in Westchester to field inquiries. And in shopping centers and at parties, the talk is of a secret weapon or of close encounters.

The Police Call It a Hoax........

The state police say the ''object'' is really five or six small planes flying in tight formation as part of a hoax. Some residents are not so sure. And others say that if that really is the case, authorities ought to put an end to it.............


......................In an effort to pull together information, Peter A. Gersten, a criminal lawyer who has made sightings from his Peekskill apartment, has organized a meeting for Saturday at the Henry H. Welles school in Brewster. He has invited U.F.O. experts and local officials.

Among those attending will be Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who is a retired head of the astronomy department at Northwestern University, former associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and former consultant to the Air Force on U.F.O.'s. 'You Have to Look Into It'

Dr. Hynek, the head of the Center for U.F.O. Studies, a private group that acts as a clearinghouse for U.F.O. reports, said, ''When you have highly trained technical people, lawyers, C.P.A.'s, government people seeing what they're seeing, you have to look into it.''
The experts should have plenty of photographs to study at the meeting.

''We're seeing quite a few U.F.O. pictures,'' said Greg Dunlap, 22, the manager of CPI Photo Finish in Yorktown. ''People come in and hand you the film and say: 'Be careful with these. We ran outside with our camera because something was flying over our house.' It breaks up the day for us. You get tired of seeing Hawaii.''

Full Source : www.nytimes.com...

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Conclusions and Speculation


This is by no means a comprehensive account of the Hudson Valley UFO flap. The peak period of strange sightings was those two years 1983 and 1984 highlighted. However reports carried on into the 1990s,and beyond to a lesser extent, if some reports are to be believed.

The Hudson Valley sightings are perhaps not quite as well known, nor debated, like other mass “Triangular” UFO sightings. Perhaps because they came before the Belgian UFO wave of the late 80s/early 90s and the Phoenix Lights in 1997.

The book “Night Siege” was published in 1987 documenting the sightings across the Hudson Valley Area. It was co-authored by Phil Imbrogno, Bob Pratt and J.Allen Hynek. Imbrogno later claimed that many cases of ‘alien abduction’ were reported to him from the area. However Hynek insisted they should be left out of the book until more data could be collected and analysed.

There are a few stories out there in the wilds of the internet but the witnesses were all given pseudonyms by Imbrogno making the stories difficult, maybe impossible, to verify. They are the usual abduction tales of little grey guys, stealing people in the night and scanning them, removing generic material or placing ‘implants’ in them. Who knows whether they are true or not?

Unfortunately Phil Imbrogno, was found to have embellished his qualifications and history a few years ago. This cast a shadow of doubt over his work. But we shouldn’t be hasty to dismiss all of it.

See : Phil Imbrogno gone from field - he faked his educational credentials

A theory by Michael Schratt (PDF link : projectcamelotportal.com...) claims the ‘boomerangs and triangles’ were all part of Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI) program . Coincidentally Reagan made his “Star Wars” speech on March 23rd 1983 just 24 hours before the mass sightings across the Hudson Valley. Was something already being developed and tested as he spoke?



Well if it was they still haven’t revealed it to us some 30 years later.

The ‘skeptical’ voices will maybe claim that the ‘Stormville Flyers’ were to blame for the sightings. Apparently the FAA did visit the Stormville Airport in September of 1984 looking for light aircraft with illegally rigged lights and any other violations they might find. The aircraft on the ground there all passed examinations but the Stormville pilots decided to curtail their activities at that point. It just wasn’t worth losing their licenses for a bit of high jinks.

Were they really to blame for all the sightings though? I simple cannot believe that they overflew the Indian Point Nuclear Power Station.
Can thousands of eye witnesses have all been fooled by light aircraft?

Finally, of course, we should not rule out that some people maybe saw something truly extraordinary.

Perhaps you were even one of those that saw something?







References and Further Information


Hudson Valley: Lights, Triangles and Boomerangs

Star Shield

Flying Triangle Mystery

Yorktown police officer remembers life-changing UFO sighting

Incident at Indian Point Reactor

1982 Boomerangs Hudson Valley

Bored pilots conceive Hudson Valley hoax with lights

Night Siege - (Hynek, Imbrogno, Pratt)

It really amazes me the sheer number of UFO sightings that have been documented,
even if we dismiss 90% we are still left with hundreds....
are we really waiting for the POTUS or the POPE to tell us about alien visitors?

originally posted by: manuelram16
It really amazes me the sheer number of UFO sightings ........
the POTUS or the POPE to tell us about alien visitors?

Why do you assume "UFO" indicates aliens?

Excellent thread, this is the type of post that brought me to ATS.

There is one pic you posted that reminds me a lot of a B-2, I realize the flight characteristics do not match (silent, slow, hovering), but-



Also, why do you think it seems like the only time the craft made any type of noise was when it was over the nuke plant? What was it doing?

Nice thread, friend. There used to be lots of good UFO-related posts like this on ATS. Sadly, the quality of the site overall has taken a tremendous nosedive.

I personally believe these giant triangles are out there cruising about. Just too many flaps involving too many witnesses reporting very similar experiences for me to blow it all off as "airplanes".

Great stuff....
I think the lack of UFO material is due to suppression somehow.....
Either direct or psychological ........
The evidence is otherwise overwhelming.....

a reply to: mirageman

Nice post and always interesting to see additional info! Thanks
Here's another neat video with some real footage from 1984 to further back this.

originally posted by: mirageman...

The ‘skeptical’ voices will maybe claim that the ‘Stormville Flyers’ were to blame for the sightings. Apparently the FAA did visit the Stormville Airport in September of 1984 looking for light aircraft with illegally rigged lights and any other violations they might find. The aircraft on the ground there all passed examinations but the Stormville pilots decided to curtail their activities at that point. It just wasn’t worth losing their licenses for a bit of high jinks.

Were they really to blame for all the sightings though? I simple cannot believe that they overflew the Indian Point Nuclear Power Station.
Can thousands of eye witnesses have all been fooled by light aircraft?.....

That remains the key question -- how plausible is it that many many witnesses misinterpreted a group of moving lights as a large structured single object with mounted lights?

It IS indeed hard to believe.

Fortunately, from another family of UFO reports, we now can demonstrate that it DOES actually happen.

It's significance to Hudson Valley remains worth discussing.


www.jamesoberg.com...

a reply to: mirageman

Thanks for the extreme high quality of your post!

I WISH I could add something to this post.. but
I've never lived in that part of the country.
I was caring for a nuclear warship in the 80's

What does interest me, is the phenomenon
of waves.

As you know, I don't "believe" in alien UFOs
visiting us, or biological aliens visiting
us, and I had a high security clearance
for a while.. and I know that most
military tech is more prone to be 25
years behind the times, not some
black super tech despite all the
nonsense talk.

So that doesn't leave us with a heck
of a lot, other than misidentification
or other very strange theories.

I really have no conclusive opinion
about the "phoenix lights" or the
"hudson valley" type incidents,
where it might be possible
that some type of flare or
'swarm' or tricky squadron
could possibly be an explanation.

I really can't say.

What interests me, is the people
who have witnessed something
appearing large in scale, and
possibly floating in place
or other very strange behavior
that cannot be explained away
by any of the mundane theories.

But back to waves..

There seems to be no evidence
that solar minima or maxima
of solar flares has any relationship
to it.

I haven't had any luck tracking
geomagnetic anomolies well
enough to correlate with waves
either.

Now, I know that there are ridiculous
quantities worldwide of "UFO sightings"..
something like maybe a million a day
globally..

But I suspect that most of those are
hysterical misidentifications..

and people call a couple lights in the sky
with no resolution of detail whatsoever
a "UFO". That disgusts me; mainly
because it completely fouls the
data in terms of attempting to
correlate with something.

But anecdotaly it SEEMS that most
of the "good cases" were over by
1989 or so.. it almost seemed like
a "hard stop".

Now I've recently been examining
the correlation (correlation is not
causation i know) between
2.5 micron or less particulate
pollution and UFO waves.

I was surprised that in the USA
there seems to be a coincidental
timing between improving
air quality and a marked
decrease in "interesting
waves".

If you look at the charts, such
particles are down something
between 33% and 50% or more
since the early 80's.

And not just the USA.. but
surprisingly many parts of
china have also been cleaning
themselves up too.

But I haven't been able to get
any good data on China.

Really.. I don't think that there
is good enough data in any form
to draw such conclusions..

and this is just a mild interest
of mine.. this whole "UFO"
stuff.

Thanks again for your quality work.

Kev

a reply to: mirageman

These cases do actually give the clearest indication of the Psych-op that was perpetrated on the American people by their own Government, those are PSV craft, Paradigm-Shifting-Vehicles, the paradigm to be shifted into that of an actual alien threat.

Essentially turbo powered inflatables their size is down to the desirability of extensive surface area for such constructs, look great from a distance but up close a tubular framework fitted with all sorts of lights and speakers simply for spooking, of course also used as the basis for some secret inter-galactic space programme whereas the reality is it's just a big balloon in a hanger fitted with junk and all the Black budget simply ends up in the back accounts of those who run such scams, so a case of to the infinitely stupid and beyond...

originally posted by: KellyPrettyBear.....

What interests me, is the people
who have witnessed something
appearing large in scale, and
possibly floating in place
or other very strange behavior
that cannot be explained away
by any of the mundane theories......
Kev

Agreed. Trying to imagine what might cause such perceptions has led to desperate complexities such as psy-op balloons.

Research by Ted Molczan has uncovered one particular 'prosaic' but very rare phenomenon which seems to replicate the effects you specified -- nighttime reentries of large artificial satellites creating a near-horizontal stable swarm of bright fireballs high enough [~ 100 km] to be visible over wide areas and far enough from most observers to appear slow-moving.

Results -- including visually stunning drawings by witnesses of what they recall seeing when the were actually looking at a fireball swarm -- are here --
www.jamesoberg.com...

Once it can be established from such reports that such a consistent, repeatable misperception HAS occurred across decades, continents, among witnesses of all educational and professional levels, the bigger question is how often it has been happening with OTHER sources of moving bright light groupings in the night sky. It cannot be accepted as THE explanation, only as one POSSIBLE explanation, but it may provide a breakthrough insight if it's considered fairly.

There certainly seems to be a mixture
Of reasons for sightings and mass
Sightings, including reasons
Given in this thread.

However I wouldn't be surprised
If something skin to the Hessdalen
Lights was actually a global
Phenonemon, with either pure
Lights being sighted, or in
Conjunction with psychoactive
Effects.

Kev

a reply to: Signals

Yes the picture does look very like the B2. That of course does not mean this is what all the witnesses saw.

I really don't know what the object over Indian Point was, never mind what it was doing. From what I've read there is a no fly zone around the reactor so it certainly shouldn't have been there.

There is more on the story here for those interested : www.ufoevidence.org...

originally posted by: BiffWellington

I personally believe these giant triangles are out there cruising about. Just too many flaps involving too many witnesses reporting very similar experiences for me to blow it all off as "airplanes".

I'm not sure why there were so many "Triangle" from the mid-1980s to the late mid 90s. I suppose we can attribute some to stealth projects and mistaken identification. But can we attribute all of them?

originally posted by: bandersnatch
Great stuff....
I think the lack of UFO material is due to suppression somehow.....
Either direct or psychological ........
The evidence is otherwise overwhelming.....

Well the evidence for UFOs is overwhelming yes. It's what they actually are that represents the big mystery.

a reply to: mirageman

Ufostalker.com tracks black triangles
'real time' as a separate sighting
Type.

There are sure plenty of current sightings.

I asked the site owner why he/she tracks
Them separately but got no response.

Kev

a reply to: Kantzveldt

These cases do actually give the clearest indication of the Psych-op that was perpetrated on the American people by their own Government, those are PSV craft, Paradigm-Shifting-Vehicles, the paradigm to be shifted into that of an actual alien threat.

For me this really should be the focus, was it military or not? If it was military, what was gained? I personally really struggle to believe it was a military operation, what if someone from a news-crew managed to put a camera on it?

Same goes for the Belgium wave, I understand the skeptical mind wanting to default to a black project, but when you start looking for motive, it just doesnt make any sense.

There are other cases in the US where craft are seen late a night, perhaps a black project being moved to another base. Whether it is a black project or alien, at least the moving argument is plausible. I just dont see that with the Hudson Valley case.