Case · C-022

Exeter: two officers and an object with red lights over the fields of Kensington

Kensington, near Exeter, New Hampshire · United States · Sep 3, 1965

In flight Mixed witness types

What happened

Around 2 a.m., eighteen-year-old Norman Muscarello reported to the police a large, silent object with flashing red lights over a field in Kensington; returning to the site with him, police officers Eugene Bertrand and David Hunt described a dark object as large as a barn hovering at low altitude. Two officers from the nearby Pease base questioned the witnesses without identifying a probable cause, and in early 1966 an officer in the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force wrote that the Air Force was unable to identify the object observed by the police officers. The case is listed among Blue Book's “unidentified” cases; the file is held at the National Archives.

Proposed explanation

The Pentagon at first spoke of stars and planets made to twinkle by a temperature inversion, and Project Blue Book suggested the “Big Blast” air exercise of the Strategic Air Command and NORAD, but the police officers objected that the sighting had occurred almost an hour after the exercise ended. In 2011 Joe Nickell and the former Air Force pilot James McGaha proposed a KC-97 tanker aircraft during an in-flight refueling.

Official investigation

U.S. Air Force (Pease Air Force Base, Project Blue Book, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force)

Sources

1. Wikipedia – Exeter incident (other)
2. Patrick Gross – the “unidentified” cases of Project Blue Book for 1965 (from Don Berliner's list) (analysis)

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