The Exeter Incident

On September 3rd, 1965, the town of Exeter, New Hampshire, was rocked by countless sightings and calls of UFOs in the sky.

For three specific individuals, Norman Muscarello, Officer Bertrand, and Patrolman Hunt, their experience with these bright and mysterious lights became a long battle for credibility. Was their Exeter UFO experience believable? Listen now.

What would you do if you saw a bright red light from the sky light up a farm?

Could a refueling exercise by the Air Force be mistaken for a UFO?

Did an officer for the Exeter Police encounter an alien spacecraft?

What is up, Bizarros?! This week we are diving into The Exeter Incident.

About Exeter, New Hampshire

This UFO encounter takes place in the town of Exeter, which is located in Rockingham County, New Hampshire.

Exeter is a nice, quiet, historical town, and this encounter takes place in 1965.

This happened 4 years after the Barney and Betty Hill Incident, which also took place in New Hampshire in 1961. 

Just to help place it for people at home, Exeter is about 15 minutes from the Atlantic Ocean and an hour North of Boston.

UFO Activity In Exeter

So, starting in 1965, Exeter began having multiple reports of seeing unusual things in the sky. Unexplainable lights and strange crafts.

For the majority of the year, these encounters were not discussed in the news. All of that would change in September after a particularly unique experience.

So, this encounter involves 18-year-old Norman Muscarello.

This young man had just graduated from Exeter High School and was just a few weeks away from leaving for the Navy.

On September 3rd, Norman was hitchhiking back to Exeter from his girlfriend’s home in Amesbury, Massachusetts.

As he’s leaving his girlfriend’s house, he’s having pretty poor luck finding a ride back to Exeter. Mostly because it was 2 am.

So, he decided instead that he would walk the ten miles back home.

Here is a quote from Norman from Sea Coast, NH, to set the scene:

“On September 3, 1965, on or about 2 am, I was thumbing down Route 50 towards Exeter, in Kensington near The Dining Farmhouse.

It was a clear night, with no rain. There were plenty of stars in the sky. It was just a clear, beautiful night.

I’d been up there seeing a girlfriend of mine. I’d missed a ride, and I was thumbing back.

No cars pick you up at that hour of the morning. I observed planes in the sky earlier.

It’s pretty easy for me to understand the difference between a plane and what I saw.

I’m sure if you experienced it, there wouldn’t be any question in mind. I got just past the Dining farm – There’s a little field on the right-hand side.

You can kind of see the glow of Hampton Beach and the lights from the beach, which is distinguishable.

What I’m trying to say is that you can see what’s going on. It’s pretty obvious that that’s the beach area.”

Norman Muscarello’s Encounter

When he was close to the town of Kensington on his way home, just a few miles away from Exeter, he noticed something strange.

He saw what looked like 5 flashing bright red lights out in the distance. Initially, he thought they may have just been police lights.

However, the closer he got he realized that these lights were not coming from a police car or any vehicle for that matter.

The lights were hovering over the trees at a local farm.

To Norman, it seemed as thought the lights were part of one large, incredibly bright object that he estimated as being around 80 to 90 feet in diameter.

He described it kind of like a floating, lit-up leaf. It would go down behind the trees or behind a house and then rise up and reappear.

Almost as if the craft could sense that Norman was aware of its presence, he was startled to discover that immediately the craft began to rapidly approach him.

Here is a quote from Norman:

“I observed pulsating lights coming from the north, heading in a southwesterly direction, towards where I was.

I assume the speed must have been something terrific because it came up on me all of a sudden.

Very distant, pulsating erratically I couldn’t make out any distinct pattern, circles or anything like that. It was just very bright. Could not make out a silhouette at all.

I didn’t know what it was. There was absolutely no sound other than the fact that I heard horses in the Dining field, raising holy hell, kicking the barn.

Crickets seemed to just quit… My attention was fixed on these lights. I didn’t know what it was. Passed over, kind of like disappeared. I don’t know what direction it went in.

I was kind of dazed. My eyes were like, you know, seeing spots you go through when somebody takes your picture with a camera.

Got my eyes cleared — son of a gun — here it comes again. I don’t have to tell you, you get kind of nervous out there. I mean, I’m all alone; there’s nobody else standing there to refer to.

I just froze up. I didn’t know quite what to do. I got scared.

I ran across the street. I didn’t actually dive, I fell, because I tripped on something and I fell into the ditch, and I lay there with my head down.

And I looked up, and it was like the whole side of this house which was next door, the next house down from Dining’s — I didn’t know the people at the time, but I found out that it was Mr. Russell later — the whole side of the building seemed to turn out like a blood red.

And yet the lights weren’t completely all red either. These lights were still pulsating in erratic positions.

I couldn’t make out any design or silhouette at all, and then it took off. I don’t even know what direction it took off in because I had my head down after that.

I got up out of the ditch and ran to that house, pounding on the door.

Later on, I discovered that Mr. Russell was awake. Mrs. Russell told me later that they were awake and they heard me pounding, but they’re not going to answer the door with this crazy nut pounding at two o’clock in the morning, no car out front or anything like that.

So they didn’t bother answering, but they did remember me.”

Norman began pounding on the door, and Mr. Russell didn’t answer, and then Norman saw lights approaching.

Norman sees the headlights of an approaching car, gets his hitchhiking thumb out and ready, and starts wildly flagging them down.

The couple stops, picks him up, and brings Norman to the nearest police station.

When he got inside, he told the police about what happened and the crazy lights and everything.

Despite knowing that he had to tell the police about what occurred, he was pretty nervous that he was going to be met with ridicule or just completely blown off.

To his surprise, Officer Reginald Toland told him that he believed him and that they’d received several reports of something in the sky similar to Norman’s report.

The officer told Norman that one of the witnesses even claimed that the flying craft had chased a woman in her car.

A different police officer, Eugene Bertrand Jr, mentioned that a woman claimed she was sitting in her car by the side of the road when a huge unidentified flying object hovered directly over her car before flying up and away.

After hearing these stories, Officer Bertrand decided to take Norman back to check out the farm.

The drive was pretty short, and when Norman and the officer arrived, there wasn’t really anything to see.

It was quiet, not quite as eerily quiet as when Norman had seen the pulsating lights, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.

The Dining Farm was empty, there was no one home, and the officer started thinking that maybe Norman saw a helicopter and, in a tired state, had mistaken it for something else.

As they were talking about this as a possibility, some of the horses at the nearby farm started going crazy. They were kicking and bucking which then led to a bunch of dogs start barking.

This startled both the officer and Norman, and they looked around to see what caused the animals to lose their cool.

Norman And Officer Bertrand See The UFO

A few moments later, it was completely clear to the duo.

Right above the tree line, Norman and Officer Bertrand witnessed a huge object as big as the barn rise up without making the slightest sound.

The UFO had a ring of bright red lights around it that seemed to dim from left to right and then back from right to left. It was like the lights only lit up one at a time back and forth, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

While they were able to tell the craft was somewhat round-ish in shape, it was hard for them to perfectly tell the form of the ship because the lights were so incredibly bright.

Then, suddenly, the spacecraft started jolting around in a series of erratic maneuvers, dipping and rising back and forth.

Alarmed and breaking out of his trance, Officer Bertrand radioed in for backup and even helped his firearm up towards it.

A few moments later, the UFO shot up into the night.

Right as that happened, a third witness, Patrolman David Hunt, pulled up and saw the craft right before it flew away.

It was a very quiet ride back to the police station as both Norman and Officer Bertrand were shocked and mystified regarding what they witnessed.

They both gave their own reports and soon discovered that a flood of other UFO-related reports was pouring into the station.

The phones were constantly ringing. It got so bad that the police station alerted the Pease Air Force Base nearby in Portsmouth.

The Aftermath Of The Exeter Incident

As days went by, the sightings by Norman and the police officers went from local news to national publicity.

One particular author, John G. Fuller, came to Exeter to look into the UFO sightings and interviewed various locals.

He ended up writing a book about the strange phenomenon, titled, Incident at Exeter.

With all of this publicity, the US Air Force decided to begin their own investigation into the matter.

They sent in Major David Griffin, not to be confused with the NBA General Manager, and Lieutenant Alan Brandt, who conducted their own interviews with townsfolk, but also the three main witnesses – Norman, Officer Bertrand, and Officer Hunt.

These interviews were submitted as a report into Project Blue Book, which may or may not become an episode of sorts down the road, but basically, it’s all about UFO Reports.

Here is a quote from Major Griffin:

“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.

Pease Air Force Base had five B-47 aircraft flying in the area, but I do not believe that they had any connection with this sighting.”

Explanations For The Exeter UFO

Regardless, the Air Force wanted to quickly sweep everything under the rug and spoke to the media, saying that everything was just misidentified stars and planets.

Or perhaps temperature inversion caused a mirage.

Which is, according to the National Weather Service: A temperature inversion is a layer in the atmosphere in which air temperature increases with height. Basically, a layer of warm air is trapped above cold night air.

Examples of this occurring are:

Mist, fog, dew, or frost are present.

Smoke or dust hangs in the air; it may move horizontally just above the surface.

Cumulous clouds disperse as evening approaches/clear skies.

Then, Project Blue Book claimed that despite Major Griffin’s analysis, they believed that what the witnesses truly saw was, in fact, the B-47 aircraft flying in the area on training missions.

They claim, quote:

“The incident might have been caused by planes from a training exercise dubbed “Big Blast,” which occurred in early September.

The town of Exeter is within the traffic pattern utilized by Air Traffic Control in the recovery of these aircraft at Pease Air Force Base.”

Norman, Bertrand, and Hunt were adamant that this was incorrect. Bertrand, in particular, voiced his opinion that he would be able to accurately identify any craft in the air, commercial or military, and strongly believed it was a UFO they witnessed.

He even claimed that around that time, he had seen a B-47 in the area, so he had the perfect ability to discern one from the other.

Here is a complaint filed by Officer Bertrand:

“As you can imagine, we have been the subject of considerable ridicule since the Pentagon released its ‘final evaluation’ of our sighting of September 3, 1965.

In other words, both Patrolman Hunt and myself saw this object at close range, checked it out with each other, confirmed and reconfirmed that it was not any type of conventional aircraft … and went to considerable trouble to confirm that the weather was clear, there was no wind, no chance of weather inversion, and that what we were seeing was in no way a military or civilian aircraft.

It was absolutely silent, with no rush of air from jets or chopper blades whatsoever.

And it did not have any wings or tail … it lit up the entire field, and two nearby houses turned completely red.”

An Alternative Theory Of The Exeter Incident

This is from CDN CENTURY FOR INQUIRY. ORG

“Like seeing an old friend, he gazed at a mothballed KC-97 tanker whose fuselage is arrayed with a row of five red sequencing lights.

These would reflect onto the refueling boom, which (according to the flight manual) when lowered, is inclined at sixty-four degrees.

Just this type of craft operated out of Strategic Air Command bomber bases like that of Pease AFB and, indeed, would surely have been involved in a SAC/NORAD training exercise like that dubbed “Big Blast” of September 2–3, 1965. But what about the “fact” that this exercise—which was ongoing in the skies over Exeter at the time of the first sightings—had supposedly ended about an hour before Norman Muscarello and Officer Bertrand had their“close encounter”?

It seems quite apparent that, although the particular exercise was reportedly over, there were still planes in the sky. Bertrand and Hunt, in fact, witnessed a B-47 jet at about the time the UFO disappeared.

Perhaps it had just refueled. The airborne refueling process of the KC-97 is both interesting and relevant. Briefly, it involved the KC-97 making long circuits of the rendezvous area.

As the jet to be refueled began to approach, the boom was lowered, and the receiver (sequencing) lights were turned on.

However, when the jet was in very close proximity, the receiver lights were turned low; otherwise, their extreme brightness would temporarily blind the approaching pilot. (The sequencing stopped as the aircraft hooked up.)

There would be some jockeying as the two planes connected, and all of this could look exceedingly strange to an observer on the ground.

Thus, on one of its long passes, the slow-moving KC-97 could have seemed to be “chasing” the first eyewitness on Route 101.

It was subsequently seen by young Norman and, later still, Bertrand, with its boom down at its characteristic angle. This boom, which bore its own small wings, would actually flutter in the air currents (except when specifically being controlled by the boom operator), which no doubt explains eyewitness Muscarello’s statement that the UFO “acted at times like a floating leaf.”

Most notable were the tanker’s five red lights, which were flashing—in the sequence accurately described by the two witnesses—one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one.

The extreme brightness of the lights, rendering other features of the object indistinguishable from the ground, is further corroborative evidence of the UFO’s identification as a KC-97 refueling plane.”

Was The Exeter Incident Really A UFO?

What do you think, Bizarros?

Did Norman and Officer Bertrand see a UFO?

Could it have been a refueling exercise done by the US Air Force?

Or is Exeter home to magic clouds that people would confuse for a UFO?

Let us know in the comments what you think.