Hello and welcome to the program UFO Warning.
In this episode, we're looking at the Berkshire UFO incident.
That's correct, the Berkshire UFO incident.
Now the Labor Day 1969 UFO incident took place on the night
of September 1st, 1969 in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.
There are over 250 individuals claimed to have witnessed a UFO.
As per the accounts from UFO Park Enthusiast Now, the event
has been characterized as a significantly historic and true
event by the Great Barrington Historical Society and
Massachusetts historians. However, local historians and
journalists have expressed skepticism, noting the absence
of tangible records of any reports made to police or media
at that time. It seems like you could have 250
people reported, or you could have 250,000 people report it,
but no matter what, you're going to have non believers regarding
the terminology used to describe the incident.
Those directly involved, particularly those who said they
had been pulled up into the UFO dispute, the characterization of
it as an abduction. Now they clarify that the term
abduction has not been used to describe your encounters,
distinguishing their experience from other notable UFO sightings
in the United States. One notable count from the
incident that allegedly occurred in Sheffield near the Old Cover
Bridge, Thomas Reed and his family reported seeing a disc
shaped object hovering in the air as they cross the bridge.
Reed described the craft as a white orb larger than a football
field. Attempting to evade the UFO by
driving down the covered Bridge lane proved unsuccessful as the
craft reportedly followed them. Reed claims the car was engulfed
in light as they were drawn into the UFO.
A subsequent polygraph test reportedly indicated reached
truthfulness at 99.1%. I find that a little bit
impressive. Another reported incident
transpired at Lake Mansfield in Great Barrington involving
Melanie Kirchdorfer and her family.
A bright light enveloped their cars.
Melanie's father reversed into the parking lot, causing panic
among the occupants. Despite pleas from Melanie, her
father pursued the light. Melanie recalls levitating and
finding herself on a ship where she was laid out.
Witness Tom Warner corroborated seeing Melanie on the ship,
describing a sense of fear on her face.
Melanie, however, did not recall seeing him.
She mentioned being in a room with other children who were
subsequently disappeared, and she woke up alone at the lake,
having to walk home. Simultaneously, Tom remembered
being laid down on his back at the other end of his family's
property. In 2015, a park was established
on the banks of the Husatonic River in Sheffield to
commemorate Tom Reed's reported Offworld incident.
A 5000 LB. Granite monument wasn't usually
placed in the park, later replaced in 2019 by a sign
conferring a Governor citation to recognize the Offworld
incident. On September 1st, 1969, the
Sitanish and erroneously bore the signature of then Governor
Charlie Baker, attributed to a request made by Reed to the
Governor's staff. The records of the event are
officially part of the Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Historical Society's collection, marking its acknowledgement in
Massachusetts history. Now, I tell you, it was
important for some people to get this stuff just kind of
documented at an official level, which is interesting because it
makes sure the story keeps getting told.
But it was funny to me how angry that made some people.
It really got they really got they really got put off by that,
that the government was involved in recognizing this thing had
even been reported. Now before we get to this most
recent article, I want to look at this here article that came
out back in July 2020 written by Rafaela Saracelia.
I think it says it's from 9news.com dot AU.
I'll try to post these at the Buy me Coffee website if I can
get hooked up there and also the coko-phi.com site.
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people, and it's nice to hear from people as we go on this
journey together to try to come up with some sort of Crowdsource
disclosure. Now, this article here, of
course is about 3 1/2 four years old now, but it says as a
family, as AUS family, We're driving home on a still warm
evening 50 years ago. They had no idea their lives
were about to be changed forever.
On September 1st, 1969, the Reed family claimed they had an
encounter with an unidentified flying object as they took a
shortcut home from the Sheffield Bridge in Massachusetts around
8:30 PM Tom Reed, who was nine at the time, still remembers
what he saw in vivid detail. It's got a pretty good map here
showing exactly where the thing was at.
His mother, Nancy Reed, was driving and his grandmother was
in the passenger seathetold9news.com dot AU.
Next to him was his younger brother, Matthew.
The pair had been sharing lollies, lollipops.
There was light coming through the bottom boards of the bridge,
he said. As we left the bridge and came
out the other side we saw what looked like a self-contained
sphere of white light and as it rose up, maybe two stories,
there was some rods of light. They fired several thin
directional laser like poles of light from one side to the
other. The light then retracted into it
and the sphere slowly moved around the line of trees going
in the same direction we were. My brother then happened to
notice a second round sphere off to the right of the car, but
looked like it was sitting underwater.
At that point everything felt odd to us.
It was almost like being pulled, it was almost like being
underwater as the car slowed, you know the tapping sound you
get from being in a pool, Like the sound was stones tapping
under the Fender of the car, Mr. Reed said.
Everything then became still and quiet and that's when the family
claims they saw it. A turtle shaped disk hovering
over the fields through their left.
So maybe what they saw was some kind of a probe, you know, that
was associated with this craft. As an illustration of this kind
of turtle shaped craft, kind of brown and Gray and white, really
cool looking, the three objects, the two spheres of light and a
shell, made a triangle with the Reed's car bang in the middle of
it. The car suddenly exploded with
light, Mr. Reed said. Almost like floodlights have
been shown on it, he explained to 9news.com dot AU.
Everything was illuminated in glaring detail.
A cacophony of noise erupted as crickets and frogs burst into
frantic activity on the banks of the Husatonic River.
That was the last thing Mr. Reed and his family remember.
For three hours, Bart vague visions of what resembled an
airplane hangar, describing it as a large, open area that was
much larger than the craft was itself.
When the family finally came to Nancy, Reed and her mother had
mysteriously switched positions in the car.
The car ignition was off and the lights were off, Mr. Reed said.
This is just like we've heard about happening out there.
And was it Montana, South Dakota, with a family, you know,
driving along the highway? Next thing you know, they're
back in the car, but they're not in the right places.
A community fractured and faith loss, it says.
That night across Berkshire County, about 40 residents from
multiple towns reported seeing a UFO, but instead of bringing the
community together, it tore it apart.
The sightings are the focus of an episode of Netflix's new
series Unsolved Mysteries, which details the encounters of Tommy
Warner, Melanie Kirstorfer, Jane Green, and the Reed family.
Of course, this is from 2020 mysterytold9news.com AU.
He never felt like he belonged in the small town the family
came from, New York City. Mr. Reed was the most vocal of
the family after the encounter and claimed he had seen UFOs
several times in Sheffield. Throughout the 1960s.
The 9 year old city experienced rampant bullying.
For speaking about his experience, we could imagine
1969. This kid probably was tormented,
Got a picture of the bridge here.
Pretty cool looking. His family was also rashed and
at one point Mr. Reed said they were regularly followed by a
white pickup truck. There were a lot of fights, he
said. The cops had to eat in our diner
to keep the pace. They divided the community.
We went through a lot. There was a lot of struggles.
The pain and hardship came from some of the locals.
What I saw changed my life. I used to be an altar boy.
I don't have my faith anymore. It's gone.
You start to think, why are we here and what all this means.
Less than a year after the encounter of Mr., Reed's mother
sold the family diner, The Village on the Green and
relocated the family to Great Barrington, MA.
In February 2015, the Great Barrington Historical Society
and Museum confirmed the Reed sighting and officially inducted
the case into U.S. history. And doing so, Mr. Reed, who had
set a polygraph and passed, was finally vindicated and has a
little right up here. They did for him kind of
interesting. The concrete monument was
erected outside their bridge to commemorate their sighting.
Mr. Reed now manages the Tom Reed UFO Monument Park.
It's a feat he couldn't do without the support sponsors,
something he's extremely grateful for.
Mr. Reed still doesn't know what his family saw that night, but
he has his theories and do. I think there was an awful
presence that caused us to be removed, to be removed from the
car, Absolutely, 100%, he said. I can tell you I saw something
extraordinary and we were surrounded.
The spheres were certainly working in conjunction with the
craft and both of these spheres were over water.
Do I think there was also a military or governmental aspect
also involved? More than likely.
At the end of the day, do aliens know how to shut our car off?
However, Mr. Reed said he's open to the fact that there could be
an environmental explanation. The magnesium that was mined for
the atom bomb in World War 2 was mined 3 miles from our
restaurant over in Connecticut, he said.
There was also a lot of military.
We also had Command Aerospace, the Electric Boat, which made
the nuclear submarines for General Electric.
You had some of the most polluted water in the entire
country. And the Husatonic River, it's so
bad you can't eat fish out of it.
There's toxic waste in that waterway.
Who knows what happened? Well, that might be a little bit
of normalcy bias there. It sounds like this guy did have
an experience and he doesn't want to call it an abduction,
but certainly was taken aboard at a spaceship.
Sounds like and it sounds like. Also they weren't signing off on
any releases. Now here's a more recent
article. We'll finish up with this.
This is from December 15th, 2023.
This is nepm.org. That's New England
publicmedia.org. Revisiting an alleged alien
sighting in a Western Mass as UFO talk spreads to Congress.
Election and says this is by Caitlin Reardon has a picture of
this Tom Warner Here it says Tom Warner of Great Barrington, MA
claims he was taken at this spot in between his and his
neighbor's yard. The conversation of
extraterrestrial life has long had a spotlight in science
fiction movies and music, but in recent months it's been bumped
forward toward the front of political discussion.
This summer, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was
asked at a Republican presidential debate what he
would do about citing some unidentified flying objects.
I get the UFO question question, he replied to laughter.
Come on, man. Yes, come on, man.
UFOs are now actually called UAPS, Unidentified Anomalous
Phenomena, according to NASA, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,
according to some dictionaries. Just whatever number, whatever
name, whatever acronym they want to put on it.
A summer Congressional hearing saw testimony from US from
former U.S. intelligence officer David Gresh, who claimed the
government is possession of UA PS.
Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves and Navy Commander David Flavor
also testified, both alleging they witnessed UA PS in action
on multiple occasions. Although the debate over alien
life may seem to have reached a new heights this year, Western
Massachusetts has had a connection to the matter for
quite some time. The night of September 1st,
1969, it was just like any other summer evening.
Until it wasn't, according to Tom Warner of Great Barrington,
now 64 years old. Warner claims he was abducted by
a large hovering Oval object when he was 10.
Now, I'm just going to tell you, this tells me that the reporting
here is a little shoddy because these people have said
repeatedly that they do not think that they were abducted.
They don't. They don't think of as an
abduction. I guess this is just kind of one
of those invites on board a spaceship where you just go on
board without being invited. But it's important.
I mean, they're telling their story and I really believe that
the person writing this should take the time to respect how
these people feel about it. They should respect how the
experiencer feels about it. If the experiencer feels like it
was an abduction, then it was an abduction for that person.
If the experiencer feels like it was just this thing that
happened and it was some sort of contact they made, then it
should be described maybe then as a contact but not as an
abduction. It's important now.
It goes on and says. Warner said he was calling and
listening to music at his next door neighbor's house when a
voice spoke to him out of nowhere.
You have to go home, he said. The voice told him.
Warner followed the voices order he said and ran outside.
Something felt off. The September crickets.
The Katy is all the sounds just vanished, he said.
And that's what made me clue what's wrong.
Warner felt as though he was spreading to his house at full
speed, but he claims he was actually running a place stuck
inside a beam, shooting out from the sky.
Something told me, look over your shoulder and boom, it's
right there, he said. Right about this exact spot,
about 40 feet long and 20 feet tall.
Warner said the object was just parked in mid air and all of a
sudden my hands jerked back and I was on a UFO, Warner said.
Warner claims he was gone for several minutes, surrounded by
children who were also terrified in mysterious craft.
He said he remembers that a Yoda like figure put a reassuring
hand on his shoulder. This story became known as the
Berkshire UFO sighting and Warner shared his story in an
episode of Netflix series Unsolved Mysteries along with
multiple other witnesses from that night.
They all shared similar descriptions of the object.
Bright beams, saucer shaped, fairly quiet but faster than
anything they've ever seen. Warner still lives in his
childhood home, now with his own family, and he can't himself
quite make sense of the alleged abduction more than 50 years
ago, but has since accepted it. We have a perception of our
Earth. We have a perception of what
humanity is. I just happen to see things that
most people haven't seen, he said.
I came forward to help people and I'm not surprised that some
of the stuff is going on now, he said, referring to the recent
interest in UAPS. There are recorded accounts of
the 1969 sighting and local historical societies like Great
Barrington's and the Pittsfield Library.
But Andrea Maiden, Berkshire Historical Society site
supervisor, said while the event is in their records, recent
museum goers aren't asking about the alleged sighting, and
instead there's greater interest in the rich history of writers
to pass through western Massachusetts from the 1700s to
1900s. We're located in Arrowhead,
which is where Herman Millville wrote Moby Dick.
So we've we're going to have a lot of things about writers in
the area, Man said. Now that you're asking, I wish
that more people asked, too, she said.
I mean, I have seen the episode of Unsolved Mysteries a bunch of
times, but Harvard professor and astrophysicist Abby Loeb said we
need to be careful of human accounts like Warner's and even
those who testified in their congressional hearing.
So all these stories should be intriguing and motivating to do
scientific work, but they are no substitute to that, and we
shouldn't believe them until we have scientific evidence, he
said. Loeb has been researching the
possibility of interstellar objects in space as the head of
the Galileo project, a group combining astronomers,
physicists and mathematicians, and search for what lies above
our skies. He has reason to believe there
could be scientific evidence of alien civilizations that goes on
here. It's got a picture of Loeb.
Also got a picture of Charles Hoskinson from Cardano, the guy
that funded this thing. It's interesting.
This June, Loeb LED A2 week privately funded expedition off
the coast of Papua New Guinea, where they recovered remnants
from a 2014 fireball that landed in the Pacific Ocean.
Then it goes on and talks about that a little bit.
I won't go over all that. We've talked about that and done
a podcast on it, actually, it finishes up here.
It says Great Barrington's Warner still reckons with what
he said happened to him all those years ago.
He welcomes the attention on the issue, but he worries that with
climate change, oh boy, humanity might not be around long enough
to actually solve the problem. And I'm gonna get to my soapbox
a little bit here. And, you know, I've talked about
this before, this whole thing with climate change, I've had a
big problem with the evidence. People putting up, you know,
thermometers and parking lots and airport tarmacs.
We have. We have huge, huge environmental
issues on this planet. I think probably the biggest one
is plastic pollution and maybe nuclear waste.
I mean, right now we have all the stuff being dumped out of
the reactors in Fukushima, so there's lots and lots of stuff
that needs to be addressed. I think climate wise and
environment wise in this planet and I'm I'm just concerned that
climate change is a just a huge distraction to people just
picking up their trash and not letting it wash into the ocean.
That would be a start. The congressional hearings that
says it's one giant step, you said, but it's just one step in
a marathon and this marathon is a long haul.
OK, the congressional hearings, much like climate change, I
think are mostly a distraction at best, limited hangout, more
important to get these accounts. I'm glad that we're able to get
this guy's account. This was kind of a, it's a hard
UFO incident to happen because you know, the the, the facts in
it have been kind of a little obtuse over the years.
I mean anywhere from 40 to 250 people having seen this saying
multiple people, having experiment, having experienced
being taken on board this, this craft and then coming back and
saying well we weren't abducted. It it to me it just goes to show
the emotional and mental effect that these things can have on
people. And I see that in the backdrop
of a lot of people being, you know, their first, their first
response to this being anger you you notice this sometimes with
people are faced with cognitive dissonance.
I mean, they have a certain way of seeing things and then when
something shows up that they don't think should be in the
picture, they tend not to ask questions or accept it or just
compartmentalize it or just say, well, I'll think about that,
maybe I'll have an answer later, but they tend to become a little
panic stricken, very angry, explode, name calling, you know,
conspiracy theorist. And that's not helpful.
So I guess what I'm looking at when I look at these stories is
is, you know, the best way to approach these things logically.
First and foremost, let the person that saw them, the
experiencer, let them have their story.
If they feel like they were abducted, then they were
abducted. If they feel like they were just
taking on this thing randomly, this craft or whatever, then let
them own that experience in whatever way that they own it
and listen to them and hear them out and make up your own mind.
But we can do this without the name calling and without the
debunking and without all the sideshows.
Overall, very very cool case. I recommend you take a look at
the Berkshire UFO case from 1969 until next time.
This is UFO Warning over and out.