We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Now, I’m going to say right off that I am dedicating this post to our precious Jazz.

Lord, how we miss him, and wouldn’t this story have been right up his UFO alley (And, yeah, I know they’re supposed to be drones, but you’ll see what I mean in a bit.)?

Advertisement

According to all reports, some strange and unsettling things have been making themselves at home in the dark winter skies over my old home state. Normally, I’d blame this sort of commotion on Bingley, but I don’t think he’s into controlling multiple flying objects. He’s more of a pub crawl type.

Whoever is responsible is getting a lot of attention.

It’s not only golf courses, either, nor are these the annoying little buzzy drones that the monsters next door got for Christmas that irritate you for a week until they mercifully crash them.

Reports about some of them have descriptions of being as big as “an SUV.”

I would not want that dropping on my house, so thank goodness people aren’t into eliminating them on sight just yet.

…“They weren’t like the normal drone that someone would purchase and use in their home,” Walt Miller, the police chief of Jersey’s Evesham township has been reported as saying. 

“They were large, some were described as being as large as an SUV, had blinking lights on them,” he added.

 “At this time we’re still investigating, we have no information of who the drones belong to or what their purpose was.” 

No one knows for sure what the drones are doing, who they belong to, and where they are coming from. 

Multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), are investigating the sightings.

Advertisement

There are also plenty of cameras around these days which don’t need any film developed, as opposed to the 60s, where overexposure or bad films, or simply being a lousy photographer, could screw up proof that you’d seen anything in the darkness over your house at all. Consequently, there are some wicked cool and very weird videos coming in.

Authorities are simultaneously saying, “We got NO idea who they belong to,” and “They’re perfectly harmless…“

Well, wait a minute, dudes. It doesn’t work like that, especially when something is hovering over your backyard in enough numbers to make a formation, and you live in New Jersey, so you can’t use a shotgun on them.

Advertisement

Everyone is all a flutter.

New Jersey mayors are demanding answers for their constituents after a flurry of mysterious drones have reappeared over roughly a dozen counties night after night, inviting questions about their purpose and origins.

Washington Township Mayor Matthew Murello and Mine Hill Township Mayor Sam Morris are among the officials who penned a letter to Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, urging his office to “take immediate action” and “provide transparency” while addressing these concerns.

They say the ongoing mystery has created fear and frustration among their communities.

Verminous New Jersey governor Phil Murphy offered a comforting “there’s no known threat at this time” which doesn’t mean a whole helluva a lot when something the size of a car is hanging out by your patio.

Or over the next-door neighbor’s porch, which seems to be happening quite a bit.

In this age of every human being ‘having agency’ or they completely wig out, this not ‘being-in-control/the unknowable’ is an entirely new experience.

However, especially for the northern part of the state, it’s not new, and this is where Jazz memories really make me smile. 

When I first started here at HA and heard about his deep-seated love of UFOs, we had several good chats about the 1966 Wanaque Reservoir sightings.

They made national news back then, and the Wanaque Reservoir is right smack in the middle of a lot of the action right now.

Advertisement

In 1966, it became the center of the UFO world…twice.

UFOs Over The Wanaque Reservoir: The Roswell of the Ramapos

January 11, 1966 started like any other mid-winter day in the small suburban town of Wanaque, NJ. The air was clear and cold, kids were enjoying the holiday vacation from school, and residents of the Passaic County borough went about their usual daily routines. Little did they know that before the day was over something would happen, something fantastic and unexplainable, that would change the lives of many of the townsfolk forever.

It all started in the early evening of that Tuesday night. It was about 6:30pm, and the winter sun was already long gone over the western horizon, past the great Wanaque reservoir, and behind the darkened Ramapo mountain range. Wanaque Patrolman Joseph Cisco was in his cruiser when a call from the Pompton Lakes dispatcher came over his police radio. It was a report of a “glowing light, possibly a fire.” Then as if right out of a sci-fi movie Cisco heard the words: “People in Oakland, Ringwood, Paterson, Totowa, and Butler claim there’s a flying saucer over the Wanaque.”

Pulsating lights in the dark winter sky, and some folks even reported a ‘saucer,’ that alternately glowed green and red, over the reservoir ‘burning a hole in the ice.’

 …Wanaque Mayor Harry T. Wolfe, Councilmen Warren Hagstrom and Arthur Barton, and the Mayor’s 14-year-old son Billy were on their way to oversee the burning of the borough’s Christmas trees, when they heard the reports that something “very white, very bright, and much bigger than a star” was hovering over the Wanaque Reservoir. They decided to pull into a sandpit near the Raymond Dam at the headworks to meet Officer Cisco and get a better look at the ‘thing.’ The Mayor’s son Billy spotted the object at once, flying low and gliding “oddly” over the vast frozen lake “like a huge star.” “But it didn’t flicker,” Billy told reporters the next day. “It was just a continuous light that changed from white to red to green and back to white.”

Advertisement

The visitors flew around – or hovered – for days. And remember, no cell phones, no videos. Just landline phones, police radios, and crappy cameras.

No one could talk about anything else.

It got to the point where the reports were so numerous and from reliable enough sources that jets from Stewart Air Force base just over the border in Newburgh, NY, would be scrambled. Wanaque is about 25 miles from our old house and on the beeline from Newburgh, so they’d roar overhead on their way to intercept…whatever it was at the reservoir people had seen.

We’d hear them at nine at night, which was totally unusual, and the whole neighborhood would be on UFO alert.

DOES THIS MEAN THE LIGHTS ARE BACK?!

Phones would start ringing.

Exciting times and spooky for us kids.

It was like living in an Outer Limits episode you couldn’t turn off.

Ever see that show? You wanted to turn it off, believe me.

First, the government’s excuse was a “helicopter with searchlight, ” and then they tried a “weather balloon” until the bases contradicted themselves about who was whose and gave up. Famed UFO debunker Dr. Allen Hynek offered his swamp gas theory, which had everyone in frozen NJ scoffing and even more disgusted with officialdom.

Eventually, there were no more lights, spring came, the ice melted, and pretty much everyone went about their business.

Until it all started up again in October.

…Whatever it was that visited the skies over the Wanaque reservoir in January, reappeared for its most fantastic showing to date in October of that same year. The first reported sighting of it came shortly after 9pm on the evening of Monday the tenth, when Robert J. Gordon, of Pompton Lakes, and his wife Betty saw what they described as a single saucer-shaped object about the size of an automobile glowing with a white brilliance. “At first I thought it was a star,” Betty Gordon recalled, “but it seemed to be moving. It had a definite pattern. It would move to the left of the tower, and then move back directly over the tower. I’m quite sure it was not a star or planet.” Bob Gordon, an officer on the Pompton Lakes police force, called police headquarters and requested that a patrolman be dispatched to their home. Officer Lynn Wetback responded, but was told that the “saucer” was already gone. The Gordons, and their neighbor Lorraine Varga, who had also witnessed the UFO, told Wetback that the object was headed in the direction of Wanaque Reservoir. The officer radioed Wanaque police and notified Sgt. Ben Thompson, a six year veteran of night duty with the Wanaque Reservoir police department, who was driving his patrol car south along the reservoir at the time.

Advertisement

There were some questionable ‘photos’ of the January phenomena (none from October), and a fellow named Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos did a dive into those. He was able to tear most of them apart as camera glitches.

Then the lights went away, as they always do. With no explanation, as there almost never is.

Most memories of the 1966 Wanaque excitement faded away, too, except when people like me got a chance to spend time talking to real aficionados like our Jazz.

And now here we are, with mysterious lights over New Jersey in the winter again.

Kind of spooky.

Maybe the clowns can figure it out THIS time.

This one’s for you, Jazz.