Feature > UFOS

Maybe, Just Maybe, We’re Not Alone
By Susan Piperato . Photos by Roy Gumpel

My introduction to what’s known as the local UFO community took place in 1975, but until recently I had no idea what I’d discovered. At the time of my first sighting, I had just turned 16, and I was growing up in Wallkill, near Pine Bush, which has ranked since the 1980s, along with the Hudson Valley in general, as one of the top places in the world for UFO sightings and reports of extraterrestrial activity. (Other ET hotbeds include parts of Canada and the Midwest, England’s Stonehenge, the state of Oregon, and Australia’s Nullarbor Plain.) There was a heat wave going on, and I was seeking relief at my best friend's house, sitting outside on lawn chairs after having spent a long afternoon in the pool. There were seven of us—three teenagers and four adults—drinking iced tea and chatting as it grew dark and cooler, when my friend’s dad suddenly motioned for us to look at the sky. A bright green disk was moving along the road toward my friend’s house at the western edge of town. We all stood up and stared. There was no sound. The adults all said they didn’t know what to make of it. And then, whatever it was, it was gone, inexplicably vanished, and everything was back to normal, except that it was time for me to go. I had to walk home, just a few blocks, but alone. Strangely, this alarmed only me. As I walked, I spooked myself thinking about the green thing, and ran so hard that I practically fell through my parents’ screen door when I finally got home.

I hadn’t thought about that incident much until recently, when my sister asked me whether I still remembered “seeing the bright round light.” In one of those flashes that feels almost like an electric shock, it all came back, and later I even found verification that I really saw it in an old diary entry. But I didn’t remember it back in later September 2001, in time for my second sighting. That one took place not so far from the first, over the Shawangunk Ridge as I drove south through Gardiner along Route 208. My kids saw it before I did and yelled for me to stop. We pulled over, and then took off down the prison road, toward the ridge, with them yelling, “Chase it!” Ahead of us was a cluster of white lights that moved like a rubber ball, bouncing through the sky. Like most kids at the time, my guys had been a little nervous about seeing anything overhead. Commercial flight clearance had either just been or was about to be restored (we were taking a complete break from the media, so I can’t be absolutely sure), so I was glad to see whatever it was appear to beckon us back to normal. I told the kids it was probably a small plane, perhaps used for military surveillance, that was experiencing turbulence. But the truth is, I didn’t know what it was, and I knew I didn’t know. All I can say for certain is that chasing it was the first fun thing we did in the weeks immediately following 9/11.

According to Brandon Chase’s 1993 documentary UFOs Are Real, featuring California scientist-UFOlogist and nuclear physicist Dr. Stanton Friedman, more than 13 million adult Americans believe they have seen a UFO, and surveys show a direct correlation between education and belief in UFOs—the better educated, the more likely people are to believe that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Thus there are some surprisingly “straight” professional folks into UFOlogy, like US Navy Inelligence officer Dr. Travis McHenry, a paranormal investigator who says he approaches “most cases with a healthy dose of skepticism,” yet is “willing to set aside [his] initial disbelief and investigate the case further.” Dr. McHenry’s case studies have revealed only three UFOs “of extraterrestrial origin”—two of them in Pine Bush. But there are also plenty of well-educated people who scoff at the idea of ET life, who believe that the thousands of Hudson Valley sightings reported since 1982, when the Westchester Boomerang first appeared in Putnam County's Mahopac, are the result of some kind of mass hysteria, or a very common psychological ailment. Or as noted astronomer Bob Berman of Woodstock puts it, stories reported by people who are too deeply identified with “New Age-type things” to be credible.

“I’ve watched the sky extensively for [over] 45 years, and been a night-flying pilot for 18, and never seen one. Astronomers, particularly amateurs who watch the sky all the time, do not seem to see these things,” Berman says of UFOs. “It seems implausible that beings from another world who wish to remain anonymous—because they’re not announcing themselves—and who generally stay hidden, nonetheless can’t keep it together enough to avoid detection here and there, now and again. It seems too suspiciously sloppy. And in this age where people videotape everything, why don't we have a single clear, focused, un-jiggling tape of a flying saucer?”

All in all, true believers come from all walks of life, with varying degrees of education and experience with UFOs, with their prior interest in the subject ranging from none whatsoever to obsessive. Some believers claim only to have seen weird lights, while others tell frightening stories of out-of-body experiences, being immobilized against their will, and having blood, tissue, and semen samples removed from their bodies by non-humans with absolutely no compassion. Some are scientifically knowledgeable, some are sci-fi fans, and some are interested in neither, yet know all about the various alien species and can explain the difference between a Nordic and a Gray. And then there are people like me, who despite being skeptical at heart, might have seen something, but don’t know what to make of it.

It takes all kinds to fill the old schoolhouse room at the monthly meetings of the United Friends Observer Society (UFOS), a support group for experiencers and an information resource for seekers. UFOS was founded in 1993 in Pine Bush by Margaret “Max” Lay and her daughter Dawn, both of whom had seen strange lights in the area and were curious about whether other people had too. Today the group is based in the Town of Shawangunk and is the Hudson Valley’s most prominent UFO organization, attracting the attention of individuals and media from around the world. Its leaders—Bill and Sue Wiand, John and Sue Mann, and Tony “Smoothe” (pronounced Smoothie) Stevens—have been featured in numerous documentaries and TV and newspaper feature stories, as well as in the series “Unsolved Mysteries.” In recent months, the group has been the subject of articles in three Hudson Valley newspapers. Dr. Bruce Cornet, a geologist-turned-UFOlogist who frequently drives up from New Jersey to speak at meetings, has also been the subject of countless media projects, always supplying the necessary data as well as “the voice of reason” in proving there is something else out there in space. To wit: “Why call Unidentified Flying Objections AOP [Anomalistic Observational Phenomena]?” he asks on his homepage. “Because UFO has become synonymous with ET spaceship[s] in the minds of the general public and the media, Unidentified means UNIDENTIFIED. Therefore, a name change is required in order to disassociate logic and reason from fantasy and delusion.”

Judging from last June’s meeting (my first), it would be difficult to come up with a consistent profile of UFO believers. The crowd of 28 included four African Americans; the rest were white. There were 17 men and 11 women, aged from about 20 to 70, coming from both sides of the Hudson River, as well as New Jersey and Pennsylvania. (For the August meeting, most of the June attendees were back, joined by approximately a dozen others, including a New Zealander and a couple from Hoboken and Jersey City.) Outside in the parking lot, the cars ranged from beaten-up Chevys to Volvos and SUVs that sparkled like new. Several cars sported UFO-related vanity plates like “AREA 51,” referring to the government-sealed site of the alleged UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, and “UFOS.” The group included several corrections officers, an environmentalist, a scientist, healthcare workers, housewives, farmers, retirees, and a shy young woman who looked about 17 and was accompanied by her mother. Instead of being crystal-wearing New Agers, the crowd looked perfectly ordinary, not the kind of people who’d attract attention in a large crowd, but the sort of folks you’d meet standing in line at, say, Wal-Mart or the DMV. The shared characteristics among UFO believers, says Bill Wiand, who claims he's been abducted since childhood and wrote his PhD thesis on spiritual changes in UFO abductees, aren’t always readily apparent—not because they don’t exist, but because they run so deep.

“These people can put the past behind them and live for tomorrow,” says Wiand. “They tend to become more Earth-minded. They’re in better contact with themselves—who they are, where they’re going, what they’re doing. They have a bigger ‘people picture.’ People who believe they have been abducted seem to be more concerned about other people’s welfare. God is more to them than what you see on Sunday at church. That’s why everyone here seems so nice. Even church groups don’t get far into people’s personal lives, but we do.”

Proceeding in a manner reminiscent of a 12-Step program, people at UFOS meetings take turns giving their first names only, perhaps naming their occupations, and then stating whether or not they “have anything to report.” At the June and August meetings, the accounts varied wildly. Some said they’d seen things, or woken up to find their bedroom full of “entities”; one person simply mentioned having discovered a new UFO magazine. Someone asked if anyone else had seen a headless cat, or noticed any ghost activities. (Many in Pine Bush believe a recent insurgence of ghosts is connected with alien activity.) Surprisingly, skepticism pervaded all reports and discussions, along with compassion. “You could’ve just been tired,” a woman suggested, following someone else’s confused account. “We don’t automatically discount anything anybody says,” says Wiand. “But we do ask a lot of questions. Sometimes the hard part of an experience is getting a definitive answer. During the alien abductions wave, there were a lot of wannabes.” One anonymous UFOS member gently suggested another explanation for someone’s roadside sighting: “Well, there’s lots of drug running on the Taconic Parkway; it could be extra police,” one man who'd noticed lights over the highway was told. A few had words of wisdom to share, but nobody forced their opinions on anyone else. “Be careful what you look for,” one man, who says he’s been abducted and probed several times, told another who’s been searching unsuccessfully for UFOs for 10 years. “Because you might just get it. And you might not like what you get. I don’t take ‘em as always being friendly. People look at these things as exciting, but it’s kind of scary when they follow you home.”

The June meeting included two other journalists, one of whom, the Times-Herald Record’s Beth Quinn, told the group about having witnessed the car she was in being “slimed,” perhaps by aliens, near Pine Bush in the 1990s. And there was an actor, newly arrived in Millbrook from California, who’s noticed so much going on in the sky at Salt Point that he’s found himself driving around every night, looking for UFOs, and forgoing sleep. No, he told the group as they questioned him, Unionvale Airport officials couldn't explain the moving lights he was seeing. And they couldn’t be explained away by the moonlight either, it was decided. Meanwhile the youngest woman there sat quietly, drinking a Coolatta, awaiting her turn to speak. When it came time, she turned from shy to spunky while relating having been “chased” on foot by “small, complex triangles of energy and green light, like Lego” while taking a shortcut home from work across an empty golf course. Members of the group shot questions at her from all sides of the room: Had she seen an entity? Yes, a gray being, about 20 feet away. Had she been stopped from moving by the triangles? Did she lose any time? Had she experienced nosebleeds, insomnia, stomach problems, or a sore throat afterwards? Did she have any cuts, scars, or injuries? No, nothing, she answered; she was fine. “Well, good!” said Wiand. “So what was it?” the girl’s mother asked. “I don’t know,” Wiand replied. “But she’s been given a gift, and it's important to acknowledge that.”

“UFOs are a frightening subject to some people because on an ordinary level, our experience just doesn’t include this stuff, so people can get very angry at the idea or the experience, or even go into denial,” Woodstock UFO Network (WUFON) founder John Jordan later tells me. His own beliefs are based on seeing lights, doing a lot of research (he happened to be watching UFOs Are Real for the third time when he was contacted for this article), and listening to other people’s stories. “They’re here, I don’t doubt that,” he says. “But in what context are they here? That’s a seriously difficult question to answer.”

Jordan believes “aliens don't really harm us” because “there are some good aliens; they’re not all scary. People are not all scary either. We’re all children of the same creator.” But not everyone who's experienced an encounter feels so generous. Joe from Scranton, in attendance at the June UFOs meeting, says he drove to a truck stop to sleep the night after he encountered “three Grays” in his bedroom, having been immobilized when they hit him, “with a cane of Novocaine,” and coming out of it with “sea legs.” He resents both his experiences and the fact that there is not wide acceptance of abduction stories. “If I open my mouth at work, I’m done for,” he said. But Wiand tried to put the situation into perspective by making a sort of joke: “What’s the worst thing that can happen [in an alien abduction]? They don’t bring you back. What’s the worst thing that can happen if you tell someone about it? They laugh.”

Not everyone who’s experienced a close encounter of the first, second, or third kind (sighting of a craft, sighting of a non-human entity, and direct interaction with said craft and/or entity, respectively) wants his or her story to go public. “This stuff happens,” says John T., a local environmental scientist who attends UFOS meetings. “You’re not alone and you're not crazy.” Even so, says Wiand, “Some people come to the meetings and are silent, not because nothing's happened, but because they’re afraid of being ridiculed. A lot of the stories get told before and after the meeting. That’s why I come early and stay late.”

When Betty [not her real name], a professional healer and writer who is of Native American lineage, witnessed a large craft overhead in uptown Kingston following a professional meeting in the mid-1990s, she was in a group of seven. “We all saw it,” she recalls, “but only one other person there was willing to get into the car and try to chase it with me, or will talk about it now. Sometimes we get together to go out and be with the skies. For the others—and there were psychiatrists standing there looking at it with me, asking ‘What’s that?’—it's like it didn’t happen. They won’t talk about it.” For that reason, she keeps her lifelong experiences with ETs (many of which she recalled after reading Whitley Strieber’s landmark book Communion) and her personal beliefs mainly to herself, but because of them, she says, “I’ve devoted my life to working to heal the Earth.”

For the past two years Jordan has been “informally” compiling reports of sightings—“Generally, they’re about the lights," he says—invited courtesy of an ad he runs on Local Access Channel 23. Nobody has called him yet this year, nor has he ever received a report from anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens. Nonetheless, he’s a believer. “People always say, ‘I want to see actual proof, I want pictures, then I’ll believe,’” he says. “Well, here are hundreds of videos with witnesses—some videos of the same thing shot by two different people, and some videos and pictures taken by a photographer who was witnessed by other people. It’s just incredible.”

If there’s anything I’ve never wanted to be, it’s a wannabe, but I have to admit that I’d like to see something (more) out there. All scientific evidence for and against ET life aside, I can’t help feel that it’s just plain arrogant to believe that humanity is the only—or even the best—form of life the universe could create. However, all I’ve seen on my skywatches, alone and with UFOS members, this past summer have been satellites, shooting stars, fireflies, and the flash of Smoothe’s camera as he photographed the night sky. I’d sincerely like to believe that what I saw back in ’75 and ’01—and what so many other people, including some scientists, say they've seen—is real, hard evidence that something lives out there, way beyond ourselves. But I guess I can suspend my disbelief only so far until I actually need to reach my hand out toward a nonhuman being standing in front of me. As Berman says, “There are many, many hoaxes in which others believe in a UFO because of another’s ‘report,’ or even a third-hand report. What would it take [for me] to believe that an alien spacecraft had arrived? Simple: I’d have to see one. Seeing is believing.”

For now, until something else happens or appears before me, I’m applying to the whole matter of UFOs something Gertrude Stein said: “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.” But in the meantime, I’ll keep looking. There’s something to be said for sitting quietly and watching the sky, as well as for watching a man as meditative and certain in his convictions as Smoothe as he attempts to capture orbs on film, pacing the ground in the hills above the Town of Shawangunk, his gait both purposeful and languid, the look on his face in the light of his flash nothing short of reverent.