The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings Explored And Explained!

One hour north of New York City, in a place you might not expect to find it, is the site of one of the most widely seen and yet most mysterious UFO sightings ever. The Hudson Valley is the place, and the strange UFO story began on December 31, 1982.

A retired police officer in Kent, New York, was in his backyard just before midnight when he saw a group of strange lights to the south. They had red, green, and white colors. At first, the former officer thought they were from a jet plane that was having trouble, but as the object flew over his house at a height he estimated to be about 500 feet, he realized it was moving too slowly and making too little noise to be a jet. Just a hum in the distance. As he watched, he came to the conclusion that the lights, which looked like a “V,” were linked by a dark, triangular fuselage.

What the former officer had seen would be seen by hundreds of other people in the Hudson Valley area over the next few years: A set of lights in the shape of a “V” that move slowly and quietly across the sky.

In this article, we will try to analyze the sightings from all possible points of view and come to a logical conclusion as to what could be the most likely explanation for the Hudson valley UFOs.

There Were Hundreds Of Witnesses To The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings

“HUNDREDS CLAIM TO HAVE SEEN UFO” was the headline on the front page of the Westchester-Rockland Daily Item on March 26, 1983.

The article about seeing a triangular UFO on March 24 caught the attention of a group of UFO researchers in the Valley who work with Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the founder of the Center for UFO Studies. The group started looking into the phenomenon, and Dr. Hynek, Philip J. Imbrogno, and Bob Pratt later wrote a book about it called Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings.

The group set up a UFO hotline, and on March 24th night alone, over 300 calls came in from people who had seen the UFO. One person who was interviewed for the book said that it moved up the Taconic Parkway in “kind of a Z pattern.” He said that the object was triangular and had 30–40 colored lights along the back edge. He said that the object was very big. “If there is such a thing as a flying city, this was a flying city,” he said.

The object also seemed to have flown over the town of Yorktown that night, where the police switchboard was so full of calls that officials worried they wouldn’t be able to answer emergency calls.

People stopped on the Taconic Parkway to watch the object slowly move along its path. One person who saw it thought it was as big as an aircraft carrier.

Over a period of five years, from 1982 to 1986, UFO researchers thought that more than 5,000 people had seen the object. Often, the UFO seemed to float over large areas, causing dozens of sightings in one night. No one saw it during the day.

Most Reports Of The Sightings Came From Credible Witnesses

Most of the reports came from people who seemed to be trustworthy. “Ordinary people who have seen something extraordinary,” as the authors put it. The UFO was seen not just over the Hudson Valley, but also as far east as New Haven, Connecticut, and as far north as Brookfield, Connecticut.

Most reports said that the UFO moved very slowly, hovered, or turned slowly like a wheel. However, a few said that the object suddenly zoomed away at very high speeds or just vanished. In some accounts, the shape of the lights changed so that they looked more like a circle than a “V.” As people watched, the color and arrangement of the lights often changed. Some reports said the object was in two different places at the same time, which suggests there might be more than one.

The guards at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant gave one of the most interesting reports. The UFO may have been hovering over a working nuclear reactor for a few minutes, getting as close as 30 feet to the reactor’s dome. The head of security even thought about telling the guards to shoot it down. One security guard said it was as long as three football fields.

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The thing also looked like it was interested in bodies of water. One person saw the UFO flying over Croton Falls Reservoir, where it seemed to use a red beam to look at the surface.

So what was going on in Hudson Valley? Were these UFO sightings real, or was someone just messing around?

Were The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings Hoax By Ultralight Aircraft Pilots?

A New York Times article from August 25, 1984, says that at the time, officials said that the “UFO” was just a clever hoax. The only thing they didn’t know about the flying thing was who was behind it. They thought it was made up of five or six pilots flying in close formation. One officer says he followed the lights in the shape of a V to the Stormville Airport. There, he says, he saw a group of small, single-engine planes flying close together. The bottoms of the planes were painted black, perhaps so that people on the ground couldn’t see them. Bright lights of different colors were put on the planes.

On another night, a pilot in the area said that he had followed the lights to the Sky Acres Airport parking lot. When he got out of his car, he said that he could hear their engines and hear the pilots talking back and forth. When he looked up, he saw a large group of ultralights flying in a tight formation, each with a single light hanging below it. He says that this is the real “UFO.”

At the time, many people thought that the object was a group of ultralight planes. This seems unlikely since the UFO was almost silent, could hover, and had very bright lights, none of which are things that ultralight aircraft can do.

The plane hoax did, however, clear up only a small number of reports. Most people who saw the lights said that they moved as one solid object. Between the lights, people could see the UFO’s body. No one who saw both the planes and the object thought that they were the same thing.

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Pilot With Extensive Flight Hours Experience Claims The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings Were Real

A pilot, who had thousands of flight hours and a lot of experience flying in formation with high-performance jets, said that the hoax explanation was a bunch of nonsense. He also saw the UFO and says there was no way ultralight pilots could have stayed in the sky at such slow speeds or kept their positions relative to each other the way he saw.

Even though a group of ultralights would have probably sounded like a sea of lawnmowers buzzing through the sky, he could not believe how quiet it was. Also, the plane’s structure could be seen, and it looked like a single mass of metal. He and thousands of other people say that this was a real UFO.

Could The UFO Sightings Be Linked To A Top-Secret Aircraft Being Tested?

U.S. Air Force has historically been adept at making awesome-looking triangular crafts that fly, like the eerily quiet B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, the subsonic TR-3A Black Manta spy plane, and the F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft, to name a few.

Maybe one of their top-secret flying triangles was this “UFO.” Even though anything is possible, it seems a little less secretive to test fly such a plane where so many people could see it. Also, it doesn’t seem to help to cover it with a sea of bright lights. So the likelihood of the Hudson Valley UFO sightings being linked to a top-secret aircraft being tested seems highly unlikely.

Our Verdict

In 1992, the Hudson Valley UFO story was told on the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries.” Because of this, a group of pilots tried to take the blame. But when Robert Stack’s team tried to get in touch with them to recreate the flight, the pilots disappeared.

Anyone who hasn’t seen the so-called UFO in person could easily dismiss it as a hoax. It’s likely that more than one group of pilots pulled it off, with some being better at it than others. But because so many trustworthy witnesses are so sure that what they saw was a single, visible structure, the door to this mystery must remain open.

So, after carefully looking at all the possible scenarios and proofs, it’s clear that the Hudson Valley UFO has no normal explanation.

The next question is where it came from.

Maybe, just maybe, what the people of Hudson Valley saw wasn’t a hoax, but a real UFO.