

Betty thought at first it was a shooting star, but then it changed direction and moved upward. According to their account, the Hills saw a bright light in the sky while driving home at about 10:30 p.m. The Portsmouth, New Hampshire, couple claimed to have been taken by extraterrestrials near Franconia Notch on the night of September 19, 1961. The first widely publicized report of an alien abduction in the United States was that of Betty and Barney Hill. Photo Credit : Richard Marsh, Barney and Betty Hill (1961) In July 2011, the state of New Hampshire erected this sign near the site of the Hill encounter in the White Mountains. The base closed in 1963 and now sits abandoned. Given that the events involving Barney and Betty Hill (below) happened just a short time later, some assert that this was the same UFO. In 1961, according to military reports, a strange object appeared in the skies above East Mountain and remained visible for about 18 minutes. At the height of its operations, about 175 men worked at the station they lived in a little Quonset hut village (complete with store, bowling alley, and theater) about a mile down the mountain. Named the North Concord Air Force Station, this remote facility started operating in 1956. Air Force maintained a radar base on Vermont’s 3,438-foot East Mountain. It seemed to dart at first as quickly as light and appeared to be in the Atmosphere, but lowered toward the ground and kept on at an equal distance sometimes ascending and sometimes descending.” East Mountain Radar Base (1961)ĭuring the Cold War, the U.S. At the first sight, I thought it was a métier, but from its motion I soon perceived it was not.

It was a light, which proceeded from the East. Her entry on July 22 reads: “About 10 o’clock I saw a very strange appearance. Winthrop reports that “when it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton, and so up and down about two or three hours.” By the time the lights moved away, Everell and his boatmates had been delivered one mile upstream, although they had no memory of how.Ĭynthia Everett, a 24-year-old Massachusetts woman working as a schoolteacher in Camden, Maine, in 1808, recorded in her diary a somewhat similar account. In his diary entry of March 1 that year, Winthrop wrote that a “sober, discreet man” named James Everell was rowing a boat up the Muddy River at night when he saw a “great light” in the sky. The first documented UFO sighting in America dates back to 1639, when Massachusetts Bay Colony cofounder and governor John Winthrop recorded a secondhand observation of unidentified objects in the sky over Boston. Photo Credit : unknown artist, Wikimedia Commons Want to learn more about New England UFO sightings and alien encounters? Here are a few highlights from New England’s very own “X-Files.” History of New England UFO Sightings and Unusual Encounters First Reported Sighting (1639) In 1639, Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop recorded the first UFO sighting in America. The first documented UFO sighting in America occurred here, as did the first widely publicized claim of alien abduction. Yet some believe New England has also welcomed guests from much, much farther away. Even before the first European settlers arrived on these shores in the 1600s, New England was hosting visitors from around the world.
