United States.Exeter · low-flying object seen by two police officers

At about 2:00 a.m. on September 3, 1965, Norman Muscarello (an unemployed 18-year-old due to join the Navy two weeks later) was hitchhiking on Route 150, about 5 km southwest of Exeter, New Hampshire. In the statement he signed for the Air Force he said that "a group of five bright red lights" appeared over a house about 100 feet from him, in a line at an angle of about 60 degrees and so bright they lit up the area. They came on one at a time, in a back-and-forth sequence, and were so intense that he could not make out any shape. They moved over a field "like a floating leaf", dropped behind trees or a house and reappeared elsewhere; at one point they came so close that he jumped into a ditch. After about 15 minutes the lights went down toward the field, and he got a ride to the Exeter police station.

At about 1:00 a.m., Patrolman Eugene Bertrand, 30, had checked on a woman stopped on Route 108 who said a light had followed her and stopped over her car; he stayed with her 15 minutes without seeing anything. Back at the station he found Muscarello and drove him to the field. According to his statement, they turned off the cruiser's lights, walked about 50 feet with a flashlight, and "a group of five bright red lights" came from behind some trees; they flashed one at a time, moved over the field and at one point came so close that Bertrand fell to the ground and started to draw his gun. He heard no sound or vibration, could make out no shape because of the glare, and the farm animals nearby became agitated. They ran to the car and he radioed Patrolman David Hunt, 28.

Hunt received the call at about 2:55 and, on arriving, saw the red lights flashing in sequence, half a mile away over the field to the southeast; they moved off to the southeast at a height both patrolmen estimated at about 100 feet. In a December 1965 letter to Blue Book the two added that it was no more than a couple of hundred feet up, absolutely silent, with no wings or tail, that it lit up the field and turned two houses red, and that Bertrand had spent four years in Air Force aerial refueling and knew the aircraft that crossed the area well. The case's most quoted phrases, such as "as big as a barn" or a dark object maneuvering as no plane could, come from John Fuller's book, not from these statements.

The case entered Project Blue Book, the Air Force program that studied sightings. The Pease AFB report, signed by Major David Griffin, says he had been unable to arrive at a probable cause, that the three observers "seem to be stable reliable persons, especially the two patrolmen", that nothing in the area could be the cause, and that the base had five B-47 bombers flying in the area but did not believe they were connected. When the Pentagon attributed the sighting to stars, planets and a high-altitude air exercise, the patrolmen wrote to Blue Book twice: Operation Big Blast, which the Air Force itself said took place between midnight and 2:00 a.m., could not be it, because their observation was nearly an hour after 2:00. The case card notes Big Blast aircraft in the area between 12:44 and 1:35 a.m. local time (0444Z and 0535Z, universal time).

In February 1966 the Air Force wrote to the patrolmen that, based on the additional information, "we have been unable to identify the object you observed". The internal reply of March 1966, drafted by Blue Book chief Hector Quintanilla, is less generous: it holds that a conventional aircraft with rotating beacons, or one using infrared lights on photographic missions, could have caused the sighting, and that the case is regarded as unidentified "for statistical purposes" only because no specific aircraft could be identified. The case had no instrumentation: it was a low-altitude, close-range sighting described in writing within days by two on-duty police officers in addition to the initial witness.

Exeter is a Project Blue Book case that keeps its "unidentified" label to this day, and its file shows exactly what that label means: Blue Book did not conclude that the object was inexplicable, but that it could not name the aircraft that, according to its chief, "could" have caused it. The label records a lack of evidence against the conventional hypothesis; it records no evidence for another one.

Besides the initial observer, two on-duty police officers described in writing, and concordantly, silent red lights at low altitude and close range. Pease AFB rated them stable and reliable, one of them knew refueling aircraft well, and the Big Blast explanation failed on timing. There was no radar, photograph or film, and the statements at the time describe lights, not an object: the shape, the barn size and the impossible maneuvers came later, with Fuller's book.

In 2011 Joe Nickell and James McGaha proposed that the lights were the row of red belly lights of a KC-97 tanker with its refueling boom, which hangs at about 60 degrees. The hypothesis fits the alignment and the sequence, but not the absolute silence at low altitude or the timing, and no specific flight has been documented. The Blue Book file itself weakens it further: Sgt. David Moody checked the refueling units' records and noted that there were "no refueling operations in the New England area during the time in question", and a telex of February 11, 1966 indicates that the B-47 crews who were questioned had made "no unusual sightings" during that period.