Hello and welcome to the program UFO Warning.
In this episode, we're talking about the Hudson Valley UFO
wave. That's correct, the Hudson
Valley UFO Wave. Now in the early 1980s, the
Hudson Valley region of New York experienced a series of notable
UFO sightings that captured the attention of the locals and UFO
enthusiasts all over the place. Witnesses reported seeing large
boomerang or V shaped objects with bright lights moving
silently across the night sky. Now these sightings occurred
over an extended period of time from around 01982 to 1989 and
involved a significant number of eyewitnesses including police
officers and other credible individuals.
Despite extensive media coverage and investigations, the origin
and nature of the Hudson Valley UFO sightings remain
unexplained, contributing to the region's enduring reputation as
a hot spot unidentified aerial phenomena during that era.
These things were really something.
They were such a spectacle that it actually kind of changed the
way that the mainline media reported for a little while.
And maybe that's because, you know, the Hudson Valley was in a
area they perceived to be a cut above the rest of the country.
I don't know. But we find this article here
from the from the debrief.org, and it's dated July 11th, 2022,
written by Shaz as all it says, the Hudson Valley UFOs.
How the Media Reacted to 1980s UFO Flap tells us back during
the Summer of the Saucers in 1947, and for more than a decade
after, UFOs were a serious topic in the media.
The subject received plenty of coverage, as both the public and
the government seemed to grapple with what it was that people
were seeing in the skies. But by the time Project Blue
Book ended in 1969, remember, Project Blue Book was a
government program. The tone in America's newspapers
and news rules seem to change considerably.
Have to wonder if that had anything to do with Project
Mockingbird. Many journalists openly mocked
people who talked about little green men and flying saucers.
This no doubt pleased the federal government, and many
researchers suggested that this was happening by design.
Well, it seems pretty clear that it was.
I mean I mentioned the Project Mockingbird, that's the this
supposed secret program where CIA hasn't has infiltrated
multiple news organizations. I think that has been pretty
much proven that we've got several people from the inside
working in these things. I mean just look what happened
with Twitter here a while back. So I the the the media is a
target rich environment. I can't imagine that the
government wouldn't be in there making sure that their their
message was getting out. Just a thought.
It goes on and says that wasn't always the case, though.
There were some events that generated considerable public
attention and were reported on by the press in a mostly sober
fashion. One of these was the series of
sightings in upstate New York that came to be known as a
Hudson Valley flap. While there had already been
scattered sightings reported in an area a couple of hours north
of New York City, the real burst of activities seem to begin.
On New Year's Eve of 1982, a retired police officer reported
seeing a huge V shaped object with multiple colored lights
gliding almost silently over his property.
He wouldn't be the last person to report such an event.
Many others followed and by March 23rd of 1983 the local
newspaper in Port Chester, NY was running a front page feature
describing crowds of people claiming to have seen the
triangular object. The witnesses who were
interviewed included an on duty police officer named Kevin Sir
Avila who testified that he had seen the object twice in a 45
minute period after his department had received more
than 100 calls. He described the object the same
way the others had, saying that he had seen it stop in midair
and turned perpendicular before reversing course and heading
away from view. At no point in the article was
there any suggestion of people making up stories or
misidentifying something. Well, Can you imagine that there
was a time when mainline media reported a mass UFO sighting?
Just reported the facts as stated by the witnesses.
You know what they saw? It didn't call people names,
didn't call them conspiracy theories, didn't claim that
they'd seen swamp gas, didn't impinge your credibility, just
treated them like normal people who bought their newspaper, who
watched the television channel. We treated them with the same
basic respect that you would treat somebody that you walked,
that you, that you met on the street.
Interesting. By November of that year, the
local newspapers were not just covering the sightings
themselves, but also the people who were flocking to the Valley
to investigate this activity. On November 11th, the Journal
News in White Plains, NY run A2 column story featuring
interviews with UFO investigators and one ufologist
from Connecticut who was a member of Citizens Against UFO
Secrecy told a reporter that more aliens would probably visit
Earth if humans weren't so hostile toward them.
A second investigator accused the federal government of having
crashed flying disk and alien bodies, insisting they were
covering up the information to keep it from the public. 40
years later, man, we're hearing the same thing.
The paper even included comments from J Allen Heidy, who
described how and why he left in his capacity as a science
advisor to Project Blue Book. Hynek also said that researchers
were fighting a publicity war with the military because
military officials sought to ridicule anyone who reported a
sighting. Well, we've talked about J Allen
Hynek before many times on this program, and just I think
recently covered him in the podcast.
The sightings were still going on well into the following year
and journals had spread out to explore other possible
explanations not involving extraterrestrials.
On June 28th of 1984, the Poughkeepsie Journal posted a
feature in which they spoke to witnesses who were accusing
stunt pilots with small aircraft flying over the region and a
close V shaped formation to trick people into thinking they
were seeing something otherworldly.
Yes, that's almost as crazy as a satanic cow.
Tippers out there tramping through the deep woods of Oregon
trying to find range cattle to perform surgical mutilations on
and leaving no tracks. Nope, we've just got a cluster
of stunt pilots flying close together to to to represent AV
shaped object. Yeah, that sounds really
believable to me. Even.
They even spoke to a police officer who claimed to have
followed the planes back to a local airport and spoken to one
of the pilots who admitted to pulling off the hooks.
Now they like to call people crazy for reporting UFOs and
suggesting that maybe they need a long talking to.
But this cop who says that he followed the planes, did they
name him? This is this is where you this
is where you can see that someone's really trying to
deceive you. They even spoke to a police
officer who claimed to have followed the planes back to a
local airport and spoken to one of the pilots who admitted to
pulling off the hoax. Now and then it says the pilots
were never named. OK, now you've told me a story.
Now do your work and give me a name to back it up.
Show me a source. So you know you're being lied
to. Pretty much.
That's, that's my opinion 99.99% that this is a lie spoke to a
police officer. Now, maybe this reporter knew it
was a lie when they took down the notes.
Maybe they didn't, but they're not telling us who.
This is a huge story. It's a police officer.
They're a public servant. They have to give you your badge
number and name, but they choose not to tell us this guy's name.
1984, we're talking about. So you can see the kind of
parallel narratives that were being constructed after these
things were seen, these giant flying triangle UFOs going over
the Hudson Valley. And the media apparently didn't
get their marching orders right away.
And they started to report the truth.
And people were like, wow, these things are cool.
Let's go take a look. And I think maybe the government
felt like they were losing control over the story.
So what do they do? Well, they create a parallel
narrative. Must have been.
It must have been the secret stunt pilots.
I mean, how many stunt pilots are there even in the whole
country? But I guess we got a bunch of
them together here over the Hudson Valley.
And boy, they've decided to trick people.
Yeah, and we've got an unnamed police officer that tracked him
down and talked to the pilot. Of course, we can't tell you his
name either. See, this is the the problem is
when you tell a lie, you have to keep telling lies to cover it
up. You know, the old, the old
saying the truth. The truth stands on its own.
It's just there. The truth is just there.
We saw giant, flying, triangular shaped UFOs over the Hudson
Valley. 100 of us did. We saw it.
That's the truth. But then the government comes
along, tries to cover it up with a lie.
Oh, they were stunt pilots. They were this, they were that.
And the lies have to get more and more crazy because they're
so easy to disprove that they have to keep piling lines on.
They have to keep piling lines on top of them.
I just saw the other day where we talked about that case in
Vancouver where the nurse saw the UFO at the window.
And here we are, 54 years later, and some guy comes forward and
says, Oh yes, we did that. That was a balloon prank.
Yeah. We heard about these guys that
were filling up these giant plastic bags and then using,
like, I don't know if it's sternal cups or something for a
heat source to cause them to rise up in the air.
And it was so much fun that I did that.
I did that. I let this giant balloon up in
the air and it it flew up next to the hospital there.
And that's what she saw. So 54 years later, parallel
narrative, what do they do with Roswell?
You know, we got to crash ship and a couple dead bodies and I
think, I think Clinton was in office back then and they came
out with the whole thing of it was a crash test dummy.
Yes, we were dropping this. We were dropping this crash test
dummy out of the sky to see how he would react.
And then it was a weather balloon.
First one doesn't work, then the second one.
So he just keep coming up with lies to try to cover up the
truth. The problem is, no matter how
many lies you tell, you can never completely cover the truth
when something's just there. Like these giant triangle shaped
UFOs flying over the valley. No matter how much you lie about
it, no matter how many different stories you make up, doesn't
matter They were there. People saw them.
That's the truth and you can deny it.
You can lie about it, you can claim it didn't happen, but it
doesn't change the truth. So then the article goes on a
little bit and just basically talks about how this temporary,
truthful and reporting seems to have impacted how society views
UFOs. I don't know, they might be
given the media a little too much credit.
Maybe not. Maybe.
Maybe all of the harassment and the name calling, telling people
that the conspiracy theorists probably has dampened down
people's curiosity or willingness to report these
things. Maybe.
Maybe for this few months in the early 1980s when mainline media
was honestly reporting about what people saw.
Maybe that did have enough of an impact that it encouraged people
to go to UFO meetings to for people to put up museums, for
people to talk about this openly just to have a conversation
about it. Interesting enough.
Now I want to go back to the the actual case of this.
I found this article on unsolved.com and sealed Unsolved
Mysteries site and it says Hudson Valley UFO.
Were the lights or the Hudson Valley really UFOs?
Well they were unidentified and says the quiet beauty of New
York's Hudson River Valley is home to upscale professionals
and retirees. They tend to be well educated in
Cosmopolitan, hardly the type of people one would expect to be
swept up by UFO fever. Maybe that explains why the
media went in there with a kid gloves attitude to begin with.
Yet that's exactly what happened to more than 5000 residents
between 1983 and 1986. Ultimately, the entire episode
was largely dismissed as a hoax perpetrated by a group of local
stunt pilots. However, to this day, many of
the eyewitnesses maintain that they saw what what they saw
could not have been a handful of airplanes.
Now how idiotic is that? I'm just going to say it.
Did they pull every person that saw this thing was largely
dismissed as a hoax perpetrated by a group of local stunt
pilots? I don't know.
I don't even know a stunt pilot. I've been to a couple of air
shows, well, 11 big one, and from what I can see, there
aren't that many Stump pilots. I mean, as a percentage of the
population, and they probably do make pretty good money and they
are highly professional from what I can see.
I can't imagine that you're going to get a half a dozen or a
dozen of these stunt pilots to get together and perpetrate a
hoax on an entire area over a period from now.
They say 83 to 86 and others forces say 82 to 89.
So minimum of three years, these guys are getting together,
they're getting up in the morning.
Hey, Bob, Are you ready for a hoax tonight?
And seven or eight of them are getting together and flying
their airplanes to the Hudson Valley to put on a show.
That's about the most stupidest thing I can imagine.
Dennis Sant, a husband and father of five, had worked in
local government for 17 years. He led a perfectly normal life.
Then on March 17th, 1983, Dennis's home in Briston, New
York, was a site of an extraordinary event.
It was a very large object, not multiple planes object.
The structure of it was very dark Gray, had a structure,
metallic, almost grinder type looking.
The object seemed to be very silent.
The lights were iridescent, bright.
They stood out in the sky in three, in three dimension.
It looked like a city of lights. It just hung in the sky, all
brilliant callers. We followed the object around to
the backyard and at that point a feeling of fright came upon me.
Thoughts started to flood my mind.
Thoughts of the craft touching ground, thoughts of an encounter
with an alien being, thoughts of being abducted.
All types of fearful thoughts started to enter my mind.
I can completely understand that.
But Dennis and his family, we're not the only ones mesmerized by
the extraordinary light formation.
The author's doing something a little bit sneaky here.
OK, a little deceptive. Now, we just heard the
experience for Dennis Sant. He just told us that this thing
was a structure. It looked like it was made from
metal. Told specific kind of metal.
He described the lights, OK, this is an object.
And then these guys, they go down into the next paragraph and
all of a sudden it's a light formation.
No, it wasn't a light formation. If somebody sees your car coming
down the highway, they might see your two headlights.
But believe me, your car is not a light formation.
And if they do not get out of your way, they will be run over
and killed If they are on foot, Not a light formation, an object
with lights. And that's what Mr. Sant said
and seen. An object with lights a few
miles away. Traffic screeched to a hall on
Interstate 84 as the mysterious object hovered overhead.
The Hudson Valley sightings had only just begun.
One week later, Officer Andy said of the Newcastle police was
on routine patrol when he too had an encounter quote.
I was working at 4:00 PM to midnight tour and assigned to
set up some radar to look for speeding cars.
And I looked up into the sky and saw a series of lights and at
first I thought it was a plane. It was quite a distance, quite
far away, but it was it was really quite large.
As I recall there were mostly white lights, but there were
green lights also. It was alternating green and
white lights. It approached my vehicle and
stopped and it seemed to hover. And I'm looking at this thing
thinking what is it? I wasn't afraid.
I was just amazed. I was in awe of it.
I didn't know what it was. The only thing that I recall the
most is I was amazed that there was no noise, there was no
humming, there was no engine, there was no sound.
I was it was absolutely silent. Well, there you go, the silent
stunt planes. Then just seconds later, the
eerie silence is broken by another eyewitness report.
At virtually the same time, Ed Burns, a computer engineer and
senior manager for IBM, was driving home on the Taconic
Parkway, 10 miles north of officers status location.
Out of nowhere, I got a lot of static on the radio.
I thought maybe I was on the wrong number.
And then I went over to turn the dial again, and that's when I
looked up and saw this craft. It was a triangular ship and the
back had to be as large as a football field at least.
And there was no noise. No noise.
Ed pulled off the highway and joined a group of motorists by
the side of the road. According to Ed, they were all
staring at the sky, seemingly dumbstruck.
I'm not into astronomy, but what I had witnessed that night was
not from this planet. The eyewitness reports indicated
the object was slowly moving N over the Hudson River Valley.
Officer set up and at least twelve others saw it in
Newcastle. 10 minutes later. Ed Burns and at least 20 motor
saw it near Millwood. 10 minutes after that the phones began
ringing off the hook in the police station at Yorktown.
Officer William Wolfe Junior was a dispatcher on duty that night.
Quote every line kept going. Every single line.
Constantly answer the phone. Another line would light up.
I'd answer the next line and another one would line up.
Got to the point the County Parkway stopped, the people were
out in their cars. It was starting to get really
crazy. I tried calling the cars to find
out if they saw anything, and the only one that called Kevin
said that he would stop in. Officer Kevin Shurvila arrived a
few minutes later. He also saw the lights reported
by dozens of Yorktown residents. Quote, the object was extremely
large. I estimated it to be close to
300 to 400 yards wide. Imagine that 1200 feet across.
We stopped out in front facing to the north and at
approximately 5 minutes later the object began to appear from
the northern horizon. Although Officers Wolf and
Sravilla were standing side by side in front of the Yorktown
Police station, their accounts are entirely contradictory.
Officer Sravilla was convinced that he saw a large object with
a number of small lights. I would say approximately 16 to
8 lights running in AV formation approximately 200 to 400 yards
wide. I was standing between the
lights to see any type of solid structure.
He may have basically been staring at the lights himself,
but Officer Wolf had a completely different impression.
They look like airplanes to me. I said Kev, I live in an airport
and I see these airplanes every day, so they were coming over.
He said, well, you can't hear anything.
I said, listen. Then we started to hear a drone.
It wasn't one big solo craft, but if you looked at it for like
a couple minutes or even a fraction as it was coming over,
I could see where some people would have gotten upset.
So there you go, 1D bunker. Some people can look right at
these things and not admit with AC.
That's what I think The guy says, Oh yeah, it was airplanes.
So 100 other people call in the police station and they all say,
I see a giant triangle flying overhead and one cop looks at it
and says, no, you don't you see airplanes?
Who am I going to believe the 100 that tell me that they see
the UFO or the 1D bunker? He says don't believe your lying
eyes. Suddenly the Hudson Valley
sightings had taken a dramatic turn.
It appeared that the UFOs were a hoax.
Nothing more than small aircraft flying in precise patterns.
And then it says Anthony Capaldi was an air traffic control
spatial at the time of sightings.
In the summer of 1983, he made an observation that seemed to
settle the UFO controversy once and for all.
The first time I observed the formation, it looked a little
peculiar, and from our vantage point in the tower, they just
appeared to be just one big light because they were flying
in tight formation. I don't think if this formation
flew over an individual's head at 1000 feet that there's any
way you could mistake it for anything but the formation
flying due to the sound of the aircraft engines.
And I imagine that at 1000 feet you could really determine that,
that it's an aircraft. Well, I imagine that they would
be able to hear it even more than 1000 feet.
I mean, I see small planes fly over all the time and they make
a lot of noise. Now, these witnesses all said
these things were completely silent.
It was honest. But not everyone agreed.
Philip and Burgundy and Arthur and UFO expert spoke to several
of the eyewitnesses. The UFO was surely seen before
these hoaxer pilots began their night flights.
After these hoaxers began their night flights, people would call
me up who had seen the UFO on their previous dates and said,
well, I saw something strange in the sky.
But it wasn't the same thing that I saw a week before.
A home video showing a light formation above Bridge to New
York was taken on June 10th, 1984 by local resident Bob
Pizzoli. Philip Umbrella was convinced
the footage showed an actual UFO.
It has been looked at by a number of photographic experts
who indicate that the movement of the object on a video seems
to be one of seems to be 1 rigid object, not individual objects.
Plus there were hundreds and hundreds of witnesses who saw
the UFO and said it was something strange.
But the night that the airplanes were seeing, there was also
dozens of witnesses said in fact that they did see airplanes.
And then down below the article here there's just like, I mean
like a ton of these eyewitnesses who have commented that they saw
stuff and talking about when they were kids back in like
828384 and they saw these giant triangle UFOs.
So what I think you see here is a clear pattern that we see so
often these cases. To begin with, you had multiple
eyewitnesses seeing this wave of UFOs and they describe exactly
what they sell. You know, many of them are cops,
many of them are people. They're considered reliable
witnesses. It's in an area where it's
mostly well off upper middle class people and maybe wealthy
people. So the media comes in to
investigate and they meet people that they perceive to be like
themselves. We're educated.
We know more than you. So they didn't come in and they
didn't start calling these people conspiracy theorists
right away because these were the kind of people that there
were their neighbors and friends, people they went to
cocktail parties with, went out to dinner with.
So they treated them with respect, unlike how they treat
most people. And what we, what we ended up
with was for a little while, we got some truthful reporting.
They just reported the facts. They interviewed people that saw
these giant triangles hovering over the Hudson River valley, or
a period of years, actually, But it sounds like the most intense
part of that was about a three-year period.
They got the word out there it it began to really foster some
discussion about UFOs in a positive way.
And then somewhere along the line toward the end of that
first couple years, I suppose it sounds like somebody got
involved with a parallel narrative.
Well, they couldn't. They really couldn't get the
swamp gas. There weren't drones to talk
about. The only thing they could come
up with, which to me is just the the dumbest thing ever was that
a bunch of anonymous unnamed stunt pilots got together did
this. They just decided to hoax the
whole neighborhood for three years.
You know, doesn't matter how much fuel for those airplanes
cost. Doesn't matter where they land
the things at doesn't matter how long they can fly for.
Doesn't matter that even the best stunt pilot in the world
can't bring his stunt plane to a complete stop overhead and hover
there. None of that matters.
Doesn't matter that stunt stunt planes aren't silent, but they
got a parallel narrative going and you can see the difference
in reporting from what I talked about with when we when we
focused on the drive, how they talked about report, how people
have reported on it and they did a pretty good job telling about
what happened, what people saw. And then this here article I
just went over from unsolved.com doesn't list an author on it,
which I can see why I think this must be some part of the
franchise, the Unsolved Mysteries TV show or something,
but they give some of the facts. But a lot of this article is
dedicated to trying to debunk and and spread a lie in my
opinion, that these people didn't see a UFO that they saw.
Stunt pilots, well, stunt pilots don't hover.
Stunt pilots don't fly silent. They never named a single stunt
pilot. And you have to ask yourself, do
the anonymous unnamed stunt pilots, does that pass a
reasonable person's standard? Which seems more likely to you
that a lot of people were so enthralled by seeing this what
they described as this giant 400 yard wide, triangular shaped UFO
with lights all the way around it.
They described this thing just kind of moseying over the
valley, hovering in places, not making any noise.
That's that's what they saw. And then on the other side,
after the fact, after all the reports came in, then the
debunking starts. Then the parallel narrative gets
kicked in. And you have to ask yourself,
does this idea that half a dozen or a dozen stunt pilots
clandestinely and anonymously got together and pulled off this
hoax night after night over three years?
And to this day, not a single one of those anonymous pilots
has come forward to say, Oh yeah, that was me.
Yep, I was there. We did this.
I mean think a little just think of the logistics of these guys
having to randomly get together over multiple nights, over
multiple years and fly their planes in in exact formation at
night. OK, not be picked up.
I I'm seeing nothing about these guys being picked up on the
radar anywhere. So when you look at it, just ask
yourself what seems more reasonable that 100 people saw
something at night. They they give you a description
of it. That they that they can't
explain it. Or that a half a dozen or a
dozen stunt pilots, highly skilled individuals with very
expensive machinery, randomly got together over a three-year
period, maybe a half a dozen to a dozen times, and pulled off
one of the biggest UFO hoaxes in history.
Until next time, this is UFO Warning.
Over and out.