UFOs sighted by people in the Connecticut-New York border area have been described as taking three shapes. Sky-gazers have reported seeing a disk, separate lights flying in different formations and a boomerang shape, drawn above by an artist.
UFOs Amaze Experts, Chill State Residents
By MICHAEL VITEZ
Courant Staff Writer
CONNECTICUT CROSSROADS
Charles Acocella and his buddies say they saw it in Danbury. They were sitting in Acocella's condominium watching a baseball game on television when his brother ran inside, shouting: "You've got to see this!"
In the night sky that July 12, the men saw a huge boomerang-shaped object the size of a football field move across the sky. There were multicolored lights of red, yellow and blue.
One of his buddies ran inside thinking it was an invasion.
"It was no illusion or mass hysteria," said Acocella, 31, an auto-body mechanic who owned a cheap telescope as a youngster. "I've read all about that garbage. Forget that. We saw it. Everybody saw it clear. We saw it go right over the roof."
More than 3,000 people living near the Connecticut-New York border, including Acocella and his friends, have reported seeing the phenomenon in the last few months, according to Philip Imbrogno, a Fairfield resident and field investigator for the Center for UFO Studies outside Chicago.
It has appeared in different shapes to different people, appearing then disappearing. Some people report that the object shot spotlights onto the ground. One woman says when she flashed her porch lights, the object reciprocated.
"This is the most phenomenal UFO citing in UFO history," said Imbrogno*, who has interviewed more than 200 eyewitnesses. "Everyone in the field agrees with this. There is no man-made or conventional explanation."
Area police departments and airports say they have received numerous calls about the sightings, and some speculate that people actually are seeing ultralight planes flying in formation with lights on. Or perhaps it is meteor showers, which are common in August, or even the Goodyear blimp, which was in the Westchester area last month. **
But Imbrogno and others reject these possibilities. He said nearly all the sightings have been of one of three shapes: a huge disk, a boomerang-shaped object or a group of smaller objects that fly in different patterns.
"If it's not some type of government experiment, it's definitely beyond our technology," Imbrogno said.
Susan Trackman, a concert cellist from Bethel, said she and her husband saw a UFO on that July 12 night.
The couple was walking a friend to his car when they saw the object from their driveway. She described it as "a football-shaped ring of white lights, a double ring that was flashing very brightly. The lights disappeared every once in a while and we saw nothing holding it all together.
"We looked through binoculars, too," she said. "It was an exciting moment."
The nation's leading authority on UFOs, the man who says he coined the phrase "close encounter," calls the high number of sightings unprecedented.
"We have some 80,000 cases over 40 years, and there's never been this concentration of sightings before," said Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a former Harvard professor, former chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern University and director of the Center for UFO Studies.
"Heretofore, whenever there were so many sightings, it invariably had some natural explanation, like a meteor. But on this we can't find an easy, natural solution. If there is one, we just can't find it."
Imbrogno says the sightings first began in March 1983, but they have increased dramatically this summer, primarily in Putnam, Dutchess and Westchester counties in New York, and in Fairfield County in Connecticut.
So many sightings were reported in May that a UFO hotline was established in Westchester in early June. More than 700 calls have already been recorded.
Imbrogno, who has worked up to 70 hours some weeks on the investigation, says UFOs have been seen by hundreds of people on the same nights, stopping traffic on highways,*** even interrupting a town meeting in New Castle, N.Y. He says a priest in Danbury devoted a sermon to the UFO since so many of his parishioners had been frightened.
Because of the number of sightings, a special conference has been scheduled on Aug. 25 in Brewster, N.Y., just across the state line from Danbury. Hynek will speak at the conference that begins at 10 a.m. at Henry H. Welles school. Investigators will provide updates on their findings and videotapes and photographs of UFOs will be shown.
One of those attending will be Bill Hele, a meteorologist for the National Weather Corporation at Westchester Airport. He saw the UFO on March 24, 1983, one of the first recorded sightings, while driving along the Taconic Parkway in New York. Scores of others also saw it that night, said Imbrogno.
"I've been around aircraft all my life and I can honestly say I've never seen anything like it," said Hele. "I had the feeling of being stared at, analyzed and rejected. It wasn't a dangerous feeling, but I had the feeling of being examined from head to toe."
He described the phenomenon as "a series of lights, maybe a half dozen in a row, with one or two hanging on the end like a pendant. They went out for 15 or 20 seconds and reappeared with no sound."
"There was no shadow, no silhouette, no nothing," Hele said. "Just lights, but they were changing multiprismatically. We're talking a magnitude of a quarter mile long or longer of lights... It caught me by total surprise."
Peter A. Gersten, a criminal lawyer in Tarrytown, N.Y., is one of the conference organizers. He has been involved in UFO investigations for years, and was the man who established the UFO hotline in Westchester County.
"We're dealing with something so advanced that it can appear to be different things to different people seeing the same thing," he said. He said he is convinced the UFO is something "extraterrestrial."
"I think something is going to happen after the conference is over and we'll all go outside. It wants to be seen, no question about that, and we'll find out why on Aug. 25."
