By le , eighteen-year old Norman Muscarello had walked 14 km and had another 5 km to go before he reached his home in Exeter (New Hampshire). He had sold his car because he was headed to boot camp in three weeks and hitchhiked that evening to visit his girlfriend. Rides were scarce on the return trip and he had to walk most of the way. As he passed a farmhouse a reddish glow illuminated the surrounding area. The source was five flashing lights tilted at a 60-degree angle; only one light shone at a time as they pulsed in a rapid pattern back and forth, 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1. The lights were so bright that he could not distinguish any object behind them, but they stayed together as a body as they moved out over the fields and swayed with a motion like a falling leaf. Sometimes the lights disappeared behind the house or some trees then reappeared again, and once came so close that he dived into a ditch for fear of being struck. The UFO finally retreated across the wood-lands after about en .
Muscarello knocked at the farmhouse but received no response. He was able to flag a passing car and get to the Exeter
police station, where the officer on duty radioed Officer Eugene Bertrand to investigate. Bertrand had heard the story
of a woman motorist upset by a red-lighted object that followed her earlier in the evening, and after hearing
Muscarello’s account, drove him back to the scene. They arrived about en and the two of them had
walked into the field when a group of five red lights, flashing one at a time, appeared over a stand of trees then
moved across the field. The farm animals became agitated and noisy at this time. As the lights approached him Bertrand
dropped to his knees and started to pull his revolver, then thought better and pulled Muscarello back to the cruiser.
He radioed another officer, David Hunt, who arrived in a few minutes. By the time Hunt saw the lights they were moving
off into the distance, but he stated that the group of lights flashed in sequence and maintained an altitude of about
a 30 m. The animals quieted down as the UFO departed to the southeast in the direction of Hampton, where a man
phoned the police soon after to report that a UFO had chased him s1Hynek, Josef Allen
: The Hynek UFO Report (New York: Dell, 1977), 154-165..
When ufologist Raymond Fowler interviewed Bertrand a week after the event, Bertrand compared the brightness of the lights to facing an automobile headlight at close range. They lit up the entire field and two nearby houses with a red light. The five lights always maintained a 60-degree angle and when they moved, the lowest light always led the way. He suspected that the lights were attached to an object the size of a barn, and also remarked that the object could stop, hover, and turn on a dime. When asked to compare the apparent size of the UFO to a familiar object, he said that the object at its closest looked as wide as a grapefruit at arm’s length s2Fowler, Raymond E. Casebook of a UFO Investigator (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 34-43..
The Exeter case lacked nothing for documentation and field investigation. All three witnesses filed statements with the Air Force and some of ufology’s best investigators followed up with further questioning. J. Allen Hynek took an interest in the case, while Ray Fowler’s meticulous report was published in the Congressional Record for le , as part of the House Committee on Armed Services hearings on unidentified flying objects. John G. Fuller, a columnist for Saturday Review , learned of the case from Fowler and began his own investigation, leading to magazine articles in Saturday Review, Look, and Reader’s Digest , while a popular book, Incident at Exeter, followed in en . In this book Fuller also explored scores of other cases reported around New Hampshire during the fall of en .
The Air Force had a ready explanation for the Exeter sighting—nighttime maneuvers designated “Operation Big Blast” operated out of Pease Air Force Base, ten miles outside the town, on the evening of September 2. The witnesses simply saw an aerial refueling operation at the end of these maneuvers. This seemingly plausible explanation foundered on the fact that all Big Blast aircraft had returned to base by en on the 3rd, while Bertrand complained that he gained extensive familiarity with refueling operations during his four years in the Air Force and the UFO resembled nothing he had ever seen. As a result of Bertrand’s protest Project Blue Book reversed its verdict and declared the case “unknown.” s3Hynek, Hynek UFO Report , 161-165.
Other attempts to explain this UFO have ranged from the improbable, like an advertising aircraft (at 3:00 a.m.?) and electrical plasmas that detached from nearby power lines and floated across the countryside (unfounded and unlikely), to the more reasonable proposal that the planet Jupiter was responsible (probably true for some other reports but does not fit the testimony of the Exeter witnesses). Another explanation postulated a hoaxer flying a kite with flashing lights attached to the string. This proposal explained the 60-degree angle and the “falling leaf” motion, but raised too many other questions, like why would anyone carry out a hoax so late at night, or how could anyone run off through the woods but not entangle the kite string in the trees? s4Bullard: The Myth and Mystery of UFOs , 37-38.. With no viable conventional explanations at hand, ufologists trusted that a genuine UFO had descended on the rural fields outside Exeter, one of a series of sightings in that same area. Three credible witnesses confirmed the sighting and elements like the falling-leaf motion and animal reactions tallied with other reports as typical of UFO encounters. Truly, then, this case seemed to be one for the ages.
A reexamination of the case by James McGaha and Joe Nickell
reopened the possibility that a refueling aircraft was responsible. They pointed out in the
en issue of Skeptical Inquirer that the KC-97 tanker very probably participated in
the Big Blast maneuvers. This tanker had five lights above its refueling boom that flashed to guide aircraft to
docking, and since the boom hung at a 60-degree angle, reflections of these lights off the boom could account for the
witness observations. A slow-moving tanker circling the rendezvous area might appear to chase the witnesses on the
ground while fluttering of the boom in the wind could explain the falling leaf motion. The tanker could thus answer
the most striking observational questions raised by the Exeter UFO. At last a conventional solution to the
long-standing Exeter mystery seemed at hand s5McGaha, James, & Joe Nickell: “’Exeter Incident’ Solved! A Classic UFO Case, Forty-Five Years ‘Cold’.” Skeptical Inquirer 35/6 (Nov.-Dec. 2011), 16-19..
Ufologists did not buy this new solution. No refueling operations should have been underway an hour and a half after the end of the maneuvers, and in any case a low-level refueling operation over an inhabited area in the dead of night would be foolhardy and dangerous. And the fact remains that Officer Bertrand was familiar with nighttime refueling operations s6(The Big Study) “The Recent Fuss about the Exeter Case".. The most trenchant rebuttal came from Martin Shough, an association of the NARCAP. He pointed out that for the guide lights to appear as individual lights, the tanker would have to be no more than a mile away, and more probably a half mile at most. To stay in sight for as long as the observations lasted, the tanker would have to be flying as slow as about ten miles an hour, far too slow to stay airborne; and even allowing for significant overestimates in timing, the tanker’s air speed would still be too slow. Shough’s rebuttal makes clear that the tanker explanation does not fit the reported facts and is, in fact, mathematically impossible s7Shough, Martin: "Exeunt Exeter?” (posted en ).. The dispute might end here, but Shough suggested an alternative solution in which aircraft might explain the Exeter incident. He said that rotating red anti-collision beacons on several B-47s flying in formation at some distance could explain both the UFO lights and the duration of the sighting. The witness observations would depend on a lot of coincidences and he did not muster any enthusiasm for his own proposal, but here at least was one conventional explanation with some viability. Some evidence even exists that there were B-47s or other large aircraft in the air as late as en , even if not related to Operation Big Blast. The skeptics did not explain the Incident at Exeter but they opened a dialogue that led to another possibility. Ufologists may continue to defend Exeter as a genuine UFO case, and legitimately so; but these new examinations have diminished it to the point that it can no longer settle securely on every ufologist’s top-ten list.