by Charles Lear

In the 1980s, New York’s Hudson River Valley was home to a wave of extraordinary UFO encounters by thousands of people. It was explained away as a hoax perpetrated by a group of nighttime pilots in ultralights and this was enough to make it fade from the public consciousness, even among those in the UFO community. However, one town in the area has kept the memory of the events alive with a yearly fair and a recently opened UFO museum.

A book about the wave, “Night Siege” by J. Allen Hynek, Philip Imbrogno, and Bob Pratt, was published in 1998. Hynek died in 1986 before the book was published but actively investigated and contributed to the book. His wife, Mimi, helped edit the book after his death.

According to “Night Siege,” the wave began in Kent, New York, on New Year’s Eve 1982 with a sighting by a retired New York City police officer identified by the pseudonym,“Tony Vallor. He’d just christened his new house by smashing a champagne bottle against it, and his wife had sent him back outside to clean up the broken glass after he’d told her about it. As he was cleaning up the glass, he saw a group of red, green, and white lights to the south. At first he thought he was seeing a jet having trouble but it was moving too slowly to be a jet. Read more →