I'm from the Lower Hudson Valley and my one sighting was in the late
1980's in Croton-on-Hudson just outside my backdoor. Everyone I know
from the area has had a sighting of one sort or another. This is a
great article explaining what when on back then.

Susan
Moderator, sftt2


By Rob Ryser
The Journal News • October 31, 2008

One generation ago, a boomerang-shaped sight as bright as a city
street and as big as a football field spooked the night skies of the
Lower Hudson Valley, dissipating into such mixed reactions for some
7,200 people who saw it that it never really congealed into the cosmic
public event that it was.

Instead, it settled deeper into the realm of legend.
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Now, 25 years after the well-documented but not necessarily
well-remembered UFO phenomenon put Putnam and Westchester counties on
the map as paranormal hot spots, the massive case study that the
sightings have become is elevating the Lower Hudson Valley as one of
the three major UFO vortexes in the world. The other two are
Stonehenge and Sedona, Ariz.

In a land with a heritage that celebrates Washington Irving's iconic
Headless Horseman every Halloween, the sightings are also yielding new
theories about why these quiet suburbs apparently are so haunted.

The most fantastic theory is developed in four books by one
high-profile UFO investigator who teaches middle school science in
White Plains. He believes the stone chambers in Putnam were built by
ancient European explorers to mark anomalies in the Earth's magnetic
field that may open windows into the fourth dimension, thereby giving
the supernatural universe a portal into suburban life.

Teacher and author Phil Imbrogno also was among the first on the Lower
Hudson scene with national UFO experts in 1983 to record eyewitness
accounts. At the time, hundreds of people in northern Westchester and
Putnam were calling police to report a huge but silent lighted ship
the witnesses were certain they had never seen before.

The Federal Aviation Administration explained the strange sights as
light-plane formations - a possibility that many eyewitnesses said
they rejected when they spoke to Imbrogno and the other investigators.

"At that time it was my experience that when UFOs appeared in front of
large groups of people over a period of time, there was usually a
logical explanation for it," Imbrogno said. "But in this case there
was none."

Witnesses told investigators that the government explanation of
conventional aircraft was cursory, although perhaps to be expected;
the Air Force studied 12,600 UFO reports from 1947 until 1969 and then
stopped, in part because it said it was a waste of taxpayer money and
in part because the sightings did not represent new technology or a
national security threat.

As a result, the government turned all investigations over to private
groups. And the Lower Hudson UFO legend only grew.

People came out in groups to watch the night skies for UFOs. New-age
seekers came to tour the stone chambers in the woods of Kent for the
chance to see a spook light or perhaps a druid ghost. More than 1,500
people packed a one-day UFO conference at the Henry H. Wells Middle
School in Southeast.

Support groups started for people certain they were contacted by
extraterrestrial beings, including a monthly gathering called the UFO
Roundtable in Yonkers. Cable networks sent production crews to
dramatize an already remarkable story with special effects.

In March, the History Channel aired a program that called the Lower
Hudson sightings the biggest UFO vortex mystery of all time.

And why not?

The Lower Hudson Valley has always been a place, as Irving writes in
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," where "stars shoot and meteors glare
oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country" and
where people are "given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs, subject to
trances and visions."

Patterson-based real estate broker Freddy Vicente found that out while
driving April 27 on the Taconic State Parkway, when, he said, a circle
of 12 or more clearly oversized lights glided past his windshield and
out of sight into the night.

For musician Gary Adamson of Rye, a witness of UFOs in the late 1980s
in Carmel, there is no conventional explanation for what he saw. So he
embraces the mystery of not knowing and tries not to presume what
manner of intelligence was behind the UFOs.

Still, the idea that there might be such a thing in his backyard as
windows to an undiscovered dimension allows for the possibility of
interstellar intelligence.

"If these things are interdimensional, then they are right here with
us," he says.
Credible people seeing something incredible

The burden of handling the UFO sightings - which came in the hundreds
on the same night across town and county lines on at least three dates
during the peak - fell somewhat unfairly on local police departments,
whose officers also sometimes witnessed the same unidentified object
as the public they were protecting.

"We are sworn to uphold the law and help citizens, but that night we
didn't know what we had," said Lt. Kevin Soravilla of the Yorktown
police. He was a patrolman on duty the night of March 24, 1983, when
he twice saw a silent and massive delta-shaped lighted ship. "It was
mind-boggling, but how do you impart that feeling to other people out
there?"

The day after a mass sighting police had the task, in Washington
Irving's words, of "collecting and collating the floating facts."
Departments often had little recourse beyond calling airport control
towers to find a conventional explanation.

Yet too many people saw the same surreal sight for the FAA suggestion
to fly that light aircraft in formation alone was the culprit. The
best pilots invariably break formation, and their engines are always
audible from the ground, Soravilla said.

It was not just police, of course, but hundreds and hundreds of
parents and professionals who saw the same extraordinary sight while
going through ordinary life.

For many witnesses, the desire to conceal what they saw for fear of
ridicule was matched only by the urge to reveal it in order to connect
with a larger shared experience. The only people who seemed to
understand what the witnesses were going through were a handful of UFO
investigators, who took the reports seriously, recording every detail
the witness could recall.

But the lights in the sky were only the beginning, even if for the
majority of those who saw them, that was all there was.

Once people stopped asking who was seeing what and where it was being
seen, the focus turned to more existential questions of how the
northern suburbs had become such a UFO hot spot and why alien sights
were suddenly in the air.

To the first question of how, Imbrogno broached the idea of
interdimensional windows in the Lower Hudson Valley, opened by the
Earth's energy at points marked by ancient stone chambers.

To the second question of why, the UFO abduction expert Budd Hopkins
answered as one would expect from a UFO abduction expert.

"He said to me 'You want to know what all the UFOs are all doing in
the Hudson Valley? They're looking for people,' " Imbrogno recalled.

Here, of course, on the subject of extraterrestrial life, is where
folks often draw the line. For many without the benefit of a
supernatural experience, it is one step to call an object unidentified
but quite a leap to call an unidentified object occupied.

As Imbrogno noted in the book "Night Siege" about the early Lower
Hudson sightings that he co-authored with UFO pioneer Allen Hynek, few
witnesses wanted to label the strange lights they saw as evidence of
extraterrestrials. And Hynek was not going to print it even if they did.

Hynek, an astrophysicist who advised the Air Force during its 22-year
investigation of UFOs and went on to found his own UFO center,
believed the UFO reports coming out of Westchester and Putnam were
controversial enough without including stories of contact with
extraterrestrials.

"Those cases were purposely left out of 'Night Siege' to make the book
respectable because of Dr. Hynek's association with it," Imbrogno
said. "If you can call UFO sightings respectable."

In this instance, the investigators shared something in common with
the government and the media that are so routinely accused in the UFO
lexicon of covering up the truth about extraterrestrials.

It would take follow-up interviews and the death of Hynek in 1986 for
Imbrogno to publish in "Contact of the Fifth Kind" that some 340 of
the 7,200 sightings from 1982 to 1985 were contact cases, where people
said they heard telepathic messages or were scanned by light or had
vivid dreams of being taken aboard ships and tested by aliens. Some
said they actually saw little gray beings with the quintessential
oversized eyes, small mouth, large head and skin-tight body suit.

The witness accounts may not seem so different from the blockbuster
movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." But while acknowledging
that UFO sightings could be colored in some cases by a universal bias
propagated in popular culture about what UFOs and aliens are supposed
to look like, Imbrogno said the opposite is the case. Hynek's 1972
book, "The UFO Experience," and the phrase he coined - "close
encounters of the third kind" - was the inspiration for Stephen
Spielberg's movie by the same name, not the other way around, Imbrogno
said.

Spiritual healer Francine Vale of Yonkers speaks of seeing UFOs in
Florida and Manhattan and receiving telepathic messages that she
associates with building oneness on Earth.

"My feeling is that most of these sightings are positive," said Vale,
who opens the monthly UFO Roundtable in Yonkers with a guided
meditation. "Of course there are laws of the universe of
noninterference, so the ETs have to reach us through inspiration and
dreams."
The paranormal becomes normal

As much as the Lower Hudson sightings are part of the global UFO story
- which can suddenly gain prominence as it did last week, when Britain
released UFO files revealing an American fighter pilot's plan to shoot
down a UFO over the North Sea in 1957 - their legacy continues to be
one that lives beneath the cultural radar.

This is the case not only because of the stigma attached to UFO
sightings, although it is not always clear who is enforcing it: In a
recent CIA report, agency historian Gerald Haines said 95 percent of
Americans have heard about UFOs and 57 percent believe they are real.
The Lower Hudson UFO story is more legend than popular history because
the witness experience is so personal and varied.

Some people screamed out in fear at the sight while others felt awe
and even an attraction to it - especially those who sensed a wordless
communication from the object not to be afraid.

Fellow witnesses could report variations of the same object. While
some people sought out logical explanations for what they saw, it
appears to be a much more common case that witnesses found ways to
move on with life, work and love without answers.

Imbrogno's grand answer - that the stone chambers interlock with the
full spectrum of paranormal phenomenon - gets no credence from Mahopac
archaeologist Eugene Boesch, who holds the mainstream view that the
structures were built for cold storage by Colonial pioneers.

Imbrogno, who has an advanced science degree, concedes that some of
his work is more literary than literal and more spiritual than
scientific. That is not unlike a certain schoolteacher named Ichabod
Crane, also from Connecticut, by the way.

"Absolutely," Imbrogno said. "Maybe years from now the Hudson Valley
UFOs will be looked at like 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.' "

http://www.lohud.com/article/20081031/NEWS01/810310331/1018/NEWS02