by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

This past week, I found myself in the position of having two co-workers who are UFO witnesses and decided to take advantage of this and have them tell their stories for this blog.

The first story is that of Ilya Vett, 54, who has been with the organization for over three years, and he first told it to me not long after I met him. He grew up in the area of New Paltz, New York, which is near Pine Bush and the Hudson Valley. Both of those areas are notorious for UFO flaps in the 1980s (Ilya and I went to the 2022 Pine Bush UFO Fair where I met up with Martin), which is when Ilya said he had his sighting. Ilya also told me that his wife, prior to their marriage, had a sighting of a UFO with her family while they were driving. According to him, when they got home, it was over their house.

As for Ilya’s story, he recorded it for me on his own time not prompted by any questions from me. According to him, he and some friends were riding their bikes on Prospect Street in New Paltz sometime in the fall (school had started) “in the early 80s.” It was dark, and they were heading north towards Henry W. Dubois Drive. The area was undeveloped at the time, and there were “a lot of trees” on both sides of the road. They heard what Ilya indicated through vocalizations was a combination of a whoosh and a hum, though he settled on it not being “distinct.”

He and his friends stopped and looked up. They saw some lights through the trees that were on a “ship” with a shape they couldn’t make out that proceeded to move slowly from east to west over their heads. They checked with each other: “Do you see this? I see this. Do you see this? We’re all seeing this, right?” He said, “We were all confirming with each other that we weren’t mad.”

According to Ilya, they sat frozen and watched as the craft moved off towards Mohonk Mountain. It went out of their sightline and they rode to the end of the block to where they expected to see it, and it was gone.

As Ilya is unavailable at the moment for follow-up questions regarding the size and shape of the craft seen by him and his wife, I’m not able to include these details in this blog.

The second story is that of Michael Brooks, 33, who has only been with us for a few weeks. He came up to me and said he was told that I have an interest in UFOs. I said I not only have an interest but that I write about them. He then told me he’d had a sighting and proceeded to show me footage he took with his phone that was posted by a friend of his on Reddit. It was intriguing, and he agreed to be interviewed.

I’ve written about how frustrating it is to see UFO footage on social media, posted by an anonymous source with no way to follow up, and this was an opportunity to do just that. As Brooks’s footage was taken at 230 5th Rooftop Bar, in midtown Manhattan, as a responsible investigator, I felt it was important that we do the interview there and arranged to meet him with my field recorder.

When we got there and went to buy drinks, we were informed by the bartender that happy hour would be over in five minutes. While it took me a moment to process this, I came to my senses and ordered a second vodka and soda. Brooks stuck to just one rum and coke (I was buying), which is a detail I include to support Brooks’s claim that he wasn’t drunk at the time of his sighting. We sat down amidst some loud and terrible Christmas music and proceeded.

I asked him to describe the UFO, and he said, “It was floating and kind of gyrating” and “was a doughnut of light.” He added that this was how it looked to the “naked eye.” As far as size, he said that the light of a plane he saw “in the distance,” which he estimated was at 30,000 feet, could have fit “in the circle of the doughnut.” According to him, it was either “not too big, or far away.”

He shot “for a little over a minute,” and stopped because they “were getting ready to leave.” He said, “Right as I stopped filming, it actually sped up and left towards the northeast.”  According to him, the initial acceleration was caught “on film,” and “it accelerated even more after the film stopped.”

I asked Brooks if he had any emotional reaction, and he said he was excited and felt “nothing negative” and that “the beer was hitting at that point.” He explained that he had never seen “anything so definitively, myself, that was a UFO.” He added that he’d seen lights before, but could possibly explain them as satellites or shooting stars.

When asked if he’d had any other strange experiences recently, Brooks said he hadn’t, and when asked about his knowledge of the UFO subject, he said he knew very little.

Brooks’s footage was posted on Reddit “about a week after” by his friend under the username mindmelder8. Responding to positive comments, he provided these details:

Video is facing North-East, my guess based on a map is about 40 degrees from North.

And for those saying balloon or plastic bag: -it was emitting light, constant. Reflecting light would fluctuate.

• the camera does not catch what our eyes saw, it looked like 2-3 orbs chasing each other in the loop, and the whole loop was gyrating.