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Take it away Ashley. Aliens or extraterrestrials have been the subject of fascination for pretty much all of mankind. With some people theorizing that aliens were responsible for many ancient structures. The pop culture interest though waxes and wanes. Yet the fascination never quite goes away. From H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds in the 19th century to more modern movements which include the really odd pre-COVID memes that gain traction for people to quote unquote storm Area 51 which is mildly terrifying and luckily I don't think actually happened.
To something more serious like the congressional testimony in 2023. All of these things show a desire for people to believe in the unknown. Something beyond us.
And that endures the test of time and really takes up residence in the minds of skeptics and believers alike. One small town in New Hampshire became known for one of the most well documented UFO sightings in American history. Now the term UFO, unidentified flying object, is now kind of defunct.
They don't use it as much anymore. The official term now is UAP. Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon. And the reason that they've changed it is because unidentified flying object doesn't necessarily mean alien. It means something they can't identify that's in the sky. Well there are lots of things in the sea and on land that they can't identify either. So the government uses UAP as more of a catch all for these things that they can't identify. It is also important to point out that just because you can't identify it does not necessarily mean it is alien.
It just means they don't know what it is and they can't explain what it is. The Exeter incident or the incident Exeter occurred on September 3rd 1965. Although it's named after the town of Exeter and it involved the Exeter police. It actually didn't happen within town limits. It happened several miles over in Kensington, New Hampshire.
But I guess the incident at Kensington doesn't exactly have the same ring to it. Prior to Labor Day weekend, when they had the sighting, there were also several sightings made in about the same area by numerous witnesses leading up to that day. But on September 3rd, six separate police reports were filed and what was interesting was they were all describing about the same thing. Was everyone was seeing some type of red flashing lights.
At 2 a.m. on September 3rd, an 18 year old Norman Muscarello was hitchhiking home from his girlfriend's house not too far in Massachusetts along New Hampshire Route 150. Muscarello got to Kensington, so he was getting close, when he saw five flashing bright red lights. As he got closer, he saw that the lights were hovering in the air above trees and illuminating a field and there were two houses on that field, one belonging to the dining family and one belonging to the Russell family. I got right over to this stone over here, I'd say close to this stone wall and this is when this thing appeared and it was like it came out of nowhere.
I was just zapped. All of a sudden there it was, big as a house up over these trees. Muscarello estimated that those lights were about 80 to 90 feet in diameter and he claimed that the UAPs made no sound and then started to move towards him, so completely scared Muscarello dives into a ditch in order to avoid them. And he said the lights then changed direction to hover over the dining house, but no one was home or in town at that time. Muscarello then ran to the Russells and banged on the door and no one answered, of course, who would answer someone banging on your door late at night?
And the family would admit that they were there, but they were too scared to open the door. The UAP, according to Muscarello, then moved into the woods. In total fear, Muscarello went to the road and saw a car and made them stop and take him straight to the Exeter police station. Muscarello then tells his story to Officer Reginald Toland, who was the officer at the station at the time.
And Toland actually knew Muscarello and was concerned enough by how afraid he was that he asked Officer Eugene Bertrand Jr. to take Muscarello to where he saw the lights. What's kind of foreshadowing is that Bertrand actually saw a woman, passed a woman on New Hampshire Route 108 earlier that evening who was scared in her car. He stopped by, he asked her if she was okay, and the woman told him that a huge object with flashing red lights had followed her and hovered over the car before flying away.
He thought she was just crazy, so he wrote it off completely. Bertrand then drives Muscarello back to the location, and from the patrol car, everything looked fine. However, when they got out, they heard horses that were making noises, dogs that were howling. He pulled his cruiser up on the other side of the road, and we proceeded in this direction down this way.
He had a large seal beam flashlight in his hand. And then they saw an object rise from the trees. He came up over the tree line in this direction, moved this way, that way, back and forth this way, and then moved in that direction and headed eastward.
Bertrand called it, quote, a huge dark object as big as a barn over there with red flashing lights on it. It was a bright red object come up over the tree and actually started towards us. We got a hold of him and dragged him back into the cruiser. At this point, Officer Hunt showed up.
I called in saying that I was going to be out of the cruiser. He had started out and he showed up. And I turned to look back at it, and I had turned and gone down towards the end of the field about 100 yards away. All three of us stood and watched it. It had no wings on it. It had bright lights around it, red lights. It did not give off a beam like many lights give off. It wore a glow like a neon sign. And there was no plane in the area that night.
We just watched it head towards the coast and it disappeared out over the horizon. It made no noise. Now the horses and the animals around, they apparently could hear some kind of a noise because they were really, the horses were kicking the sides of the barn. Some people were seeing it before them, but they didn't say nothing about it.
They were afraid people would laugh at them. And you've been listening to Ashley Lebinski tell the story of the incident at Exeter. Boy, do we love those accents on this show. So three different people seeing an object the size of a barn or a house with red lights when we come back.
What happens next at Exeter? You'll learn about it here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present from small towns to big cities and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to our American stories dot com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That's our American stories dot com. The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card.
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Let's return to Ashley Lebinski. Again, the object moves silently and Bertrand draws his revolver and points at it, which I'm not really sure what that was going to do, but whatever. Fear does a lot of things to people. And so both the officer and Muscarello, they race to the car and they call for backup. They call Officer David Hunt and then they stayed in the car waiting for him to arrive. When he arrives, the object was still there and Hunt was able to witness it. So they all got back out of the car and they watched it.
Kept moving steadily. I didn't hear anything. No, I didn't hear a thing. Very quiet. Now this is a quiet fall at night and there's no traffic or anything. So everything was very quiet and if the thing was making any noise, I heard it.
It was very quiet. Well, I tried to edge over to the other road and get closer to it. The thing all of a sudden just jumped.
Jumped and just disappeared. The next sound they heard was that of a B-47 bomber. And this is notable because according to the three men, the distinction between the aircraft that they saw with the red flashing lights and the B-47 were not comparable. This sighting made national news. In fact, it was covered by the magazine Saturday Review. And that's because journalist John G. Fuller was in town and he interviewed many of the people who claimed to see the UAP, including a high school student at Exeter High who claimed to see it weeks prior with his mom and his aunt. In an interview with the officer at the station that night, Toland told him that he got several calls and seemingly agreed that people had seen something. So he didn't necessarily see it himself or believe in it, but he said to Fuller, Now why would people go to all this trouble, people all over the area, if they weren't seeing something real? After reading the reports from that evening, the police chief called Peace Air Force Base, which is about 25 minutes from Exeter, and reported the UAP. An Air Force officer, David Griffin, and Lieutenant Alan Brandt came to Exeter to interview the men.
And initially they asked them to keep it quiet, but it was too late because they had already given multiple interviews at that time. They came in my mother's kitchen, asked where I was. He said, Where's Norm?
She says, In the living room. And he marched right out there without asking or anything. Exactly what did you think you saw? He was trying to say to me that I didn't see what I saw. And he said, You shut your mouth.
Don't you say another word. Major Griffin sent his report to the staff of Project Blue Book, which is a research group assigned to investigate UAPs. And he wrote, At this time, I have been unable to arrive at a probable cause of this sighting.
The three observers seem to be stable, reliable persons, especially the two patrolmen. I viewed the area of the sighting and found nothing in the area that could be the probable cause. Peace Air Force Base had five B-47 aircrafts flying in the area, but I do not believe that they had any connection with this sighting. Before Project Blue Book could send a report to the Pentagon, though, the Air Force issued an explanation to the press. We have not been hiding anything. The investigations have been made public. The explanations of those where there is a clear explanation have been made public.
The hearing this morning was public for just that reason. And the Pentagon believed that they had seen nothing more than stars and planets and owed the red flash to some type of temperature inversion. Project Blue Book issued another explanation that it was connected to another Air Force project called Operation Big Blast, which was a training mission. And Project Blue Book's supervisor, Major Hector Quintanilla, wrote the officers saying that there were many aircrafts in the area and none of their personnel claimed they saw UAP. So if none of their personnel claimed they saw it, then they could assume that these men did not see anything that was connected to any of their projects.
Lots of people didn't agree with the Pentagon and the Air Force, and one of those people was the journalist Fuller, who had been interviewing the people. And one of the reasons he didn't agree with the Air Force was because he claimed to have seen it himself and that it was being chased by an Air Force jet fighter. The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon also filed a report claiming that the Air Force is wrong, so they're really getting the deck stacked against them. But the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon claimed that people were seeing the lights from Pease Air Force Base, and he said that he could prove it.
And so he gathered all these people around and, embarrassingly, there were no lights that people could see. It was so bad that he had to yell into the microphone for people to turn the lights on at Pease Air Force Base, only to then be publicly told the lights were already on, which completely disproved his theory, and he left completely embarrassed, and they kind of moved on from that story. In January of 1966, Colonel John Spaulding from the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force replied to these officers, the men who had seen the UFO, and wrote, based on additional information submitted to our UFO investigation officer, Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, we have been unable to identify the object you observed. One of the reasons that this sighting gets so much traction and so many people believe that it could be a legitimate sighting was because, firstly, a lot of people saw it, and those people allegedly didn't confer with one another as to what they had seen, so you had multiple people, you had police officers that also saw it, so that adds a level of legitimacy, but then you also have this fight going back and forth between the Air Force, the Pentagon, and several other observers who have other theories. So you've got so many people arguing, and you have the Air Force basically saying, no, it was nothing, and then saying, never mind, we can't prove it, less than a year later. Does this mean that the Air Force really thinks that there are such things as flying saucers? This cannot be released, no statement, until after the United States Air Force has reviewed the investigation. So there's just so many contradictory stories going on of the people that are supposed to be able to legitimize it, and then you have so much unison from the people who claim to have seen it. I have no question in my mind, they're covering up something. I wish to hell that it never happened. No, I really do. I wish I could have just waltzed through life without this happening.
I'd like to just be a normal person and like everybody else. True or not, though, the incident at Exeter is one of the best documented sightings in UAP history, and it really has completely taken over New Hampshire's identity in some respects. In 1966, the journalist Fuller published Incident of Exeter, and that book made the New York Times bestseller list. And to this day, Exeter is so fascinated by its UAP sighting that they commemorate it in their town every Labor Day weekend with their Exeter UFO Festival. Well, an out-of-this-world event wrapped up today at the annual Exeter UFO Festival. The Exeter Area Kiwanis Club hosted the festival at Town Hall, which draws UFO enthusiasts from across the country. It's an educational experience for believers and skeptics, complete with speakers and apparel for sale.
In its seventh year, the festival is a major fundraiser for the Kiwanis Club. And a terrific job by the production and editing by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks, as always, to Ashley Labinski. She's the former co-host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, she's the former curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum, and she's the co-founder of the University of Wyoming College of Law's Firearms Research Center. And Ashley is also a frequent contributor here on Our American Stories. And boy, just hearing Muscarello at the end, that citizen who first made the claim, went to the police station, and saying, I wish it had never happened.
I wish I could have just lived like everyone else. But there are all those independent sightings, folks, those two officers, that woman on the side of the road, others as well. And then in comes that fight, almost an inter-agency and inter-turf battle fight, and that, of course, between the Pentagon, the Air Force, and everybody else involved, who, well, just wanted to, well, kind of write it off. And, of course, what we have in the end is a town, Exeter, making the best of it, turning it into a fundraiser for the Kiwanis Club, quintessential American activity at its heart. Let's play with it, let's have a sense of fun, let's debate this, let's argue about it, but let's raise money for the community while we're doing it.
The story of the incident at Exeter, here on Our American Stories. Whether you want to enjoy snorkeling, endless margaritas, and more, or simply soak up the sun and sand in a tropical paradise, Cheap Caribbean Vacations has your deal for that. Plan and book the exact getaway you want at exactly the right price for you by using our exclusive budget beach finder.
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