In Episode 426 Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger visit a pond near a rural farm in Wakefield, New Hampshire. Back in January of 1977 a local farmer found a three-foot circle cut through the thick ice of his small pond. At the bottom of the shallow pond, he saw a strange black cube. He called the police and set off an investigation that led to radioactive readings, the National Guard getting involved, and a mystery that persists to this day.
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Produced and hosted by: Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger
Edited by: Ray Auger
Theme Music by: John Judd
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
*A note on the text: Please forgive punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Like us, the transcripts ain’t perfect.
[WALKING IN THE WOODS]
RAY: It’s getting cold, Jeff. Winter is practically here.
JEFF: That it is. Although here in Wakefield, New Hampshire, I think it’s safe to say it’s already here.
RAY: We’re walking by a pond near a farm in a wooded section of town. The pond already has a layer of ice on it.
JEFF: And that ice is just going to get thicker and thicker in the coming weeks and months.
RAY: What’s brings us to this small town on the New Hampshire and Maine border?
JEFF: Ray, this pond was ground zero for an out-of-this-world event. There’s a mystery about a strange object that may have been recovered right here. Keep your eyes pealed skyward, Ray. We’ve come to New Hampshire, to explore the Wakefield UFO mystery.
[INTRO]
JEFF: I’m Jeff Belanger. Welcome to Episode 426 of the New England Legends podcast!
RAY: And I’m Ray Auger. Thanks for joining us on our mission to chronicle every legend in New England one story at a time. We’re always on the hunt for aliens, UFOs, ghosts, monsters, roadside oddities, and all of the other wicked strangeness that makes our region like no other place. If you’ve got a story lead you think we should check out, please reach out to us anytime through our website.
JEFF: Our website is also the place to see dates for my ongoing story tour, dates for Ray’s band the Pub Kings, plus a link to buy the Christmas Ghost Stories issue of Shadow Zine, the 2026 Haunted New England calendar, and my latest book, Wicked Strange New England. We’ll go searching for the Wakefield UFO right after this quick word from our sponsor.
SPONSOR
RAY: So we’re standing by this frozen pond on a cold December day.
JEFF: We are. The pond is already iced over.
RAY: And we didn’t bring our ice skates.
JEFF: It’s not a very large pond.
RAY: No, it’s not. Just a small pond by a farm. You wouldn’t look twice at it.
JEFF: No, you wouldn’t.
RAY: As we mentioned, Wakefield is a small town just a bit east of Lake Winnipesaukee, and is located right on New Hampshire’s border with Maine. It was first settled by colonists back in 1749. It was mostly farms back in those early days. It was a popular town to make a stop on your way to or from the White Mountains. Today, it’s still pretty rural with a population of about 5,200 people.
JEFF: A small town where things can go unnoticed. But also small enough that anything out of place sticks out to the people who call this place home. To figure out this UFO Mystery, let’s head back to the year 1977.
[TRANSITION]
[WINTER WIND IN BACKGROUND]
RAY: It’s January of 1977 here in Wakefield, New Hampshire. Meldrim Thomson, Jr. is the governor of the state, and “Tonight’s the Night – Gonna Be Alright” by Rod Stewart is Number one on the radio. So far this month has been cold. That’s no surprise to locals, they’re a hearty bunch up here. Still… it’s cold.
[WINTER STORM FADING OUT]
JEFF: It’s the snowy morning of January 10th here on Rocky Ridge Farm in town. A big storm has just passed through and dumped a few inches of snow on the ground.
RAY: The farm is owned by William McCarthy. He bought this farm a few years back to get away from it all. It’s a great spot. A peaceful life.
JEFF: It is.
[HORSE NEIGHS AND TROTS]
JEFF: This morning, McCarthy is out tending to his horses as usual, when he notices something strange in the small horse pond behind his farm.
[WALKING ON SNOW]
RAY: Huh… look at that.
JEFF: Yeah. That’s… odd.
RAY: We’ve walked out on the ice with McCarthy and we’re looking at a perfect three-foot circle cut through the ice.
JEFF: There’s some slush floating on the three-foot circle. But I gotta say the rest of the ice has to be about a foot-and-a-half thick.
RAY: McCarthy grabs a rake to move away some of the slush. He’s concerned that somehow maybe a person or an animal fell through.
JEFF: That’s highly unlikely considering the thickness of the ice. You could drive a car on this. It’s that thick…
RAY: (INTERUPPTING) Hey, look in the water below!
JEFF: I see it!
RAY: It looks like a black cube. It’s maybe one-foot by one foot.
JEFF: Being such a small pond, it isn’t that deep. McCarthy is trying to bring up the black cube from the water below with his rake, but it seems to be stuck in the mud.
RAY: This is strange. The farmer didn’t recall hearing any noise the night before, but something broke through… or melted through this ice.
JEFF: McCarthy is looking up at the empty sky above us.
RAY: Maybe this is space junk? Or maybe it’s a piece of an airplane?
JEFF: That’s what McCarthy is thinking too. He decides to call the police…
[ROTARY DIALING PHONE]
JEFF: The police agree to send someone out.
(PAUSE)
[CAR PULLS UP]
RAY: The police officer looks at the hole in the ice, and the black box at the bottom and agrees, this is something strange. The police notify Civil Defense and the National Guard who agree to send someone out to look.
JEFF: Meanwhile, local police contact the FAA, local Air Force bases, and local airports for miles around asking if any planes had reported any problems.
RAY: Problems like pieces of the plane falling off in mid-flight.
JEFF: Right. Problems like that. Police turn up nothing on that front. No planes or airports had any incidents to report.
[CAR PULLS UP]
JEFF: Okay, the Civil Defense people are here.
[CAR DOOR SHUTS]
RAY: I see a couple of men approaching the pond. They’ve brought a Geiger counter with them. (PAUSE) Okay, they’re approaching the hole in the ice…
[GEIGER COUNTER CLICKS AND SQUELCHES]
RAY: Oh man. They’re getting a radioactive reading! The officials warn McCarthy to keep his family and animals away from the pond.
JEFF: Could this be space junk? Part of a satellite? A meteorite?
RAY: Maybe. Officials ask McCarthy to keep this incident quiet… but it’s too late. With so many inquiries to both civil and military authorities over the past few hours, the press soon catches wind of the story. Soon reporters arrive wanting to know if this is space junk, or something more out of this world.
[SMALL CROWD OF PEOPLE]
RAY: It’s January 12th, and now the home of William McCarthy is full of people from the press.
[CAR PULLS UP]
RAY: It’s after midnight when two cars pull up to the farm. So many people have come and gone today, that McCarthy doesn’t make much of it. It could be more Civil Defense people checking the pond again.
JEFF: It’s the following day when the pond is drained by state officials. With the water gone, no one can see anything at the bottom. And the Geiger counters are getting no strange readings, which means either the radiation has dissipated… or…
RAY: Or the radioactive object was removed. Do you think those late-night visitors pulled that black cube out from the bottom last night?
JEFF: They must have, because it’s not there now.
RAY: Another day passes, and now Governor Thomson’s office has issued a statement that they have investigated the Rocky Ridge Farm incident and found no problems. They claimed the initial radioactive readings were false due to a faulty meter. The hole in the ice was just a quirk of nature, and nothing more. Case closed.
JEFF: Case closed officially. But that hole in the ice remained slushy for days. In these frigid temperatures, we would have expected the hole to have quickly frozen over again. But it didn’t. Something strange happened here at Rocky Ridge Farm.
RAY: For some, the governor’s statement was good enough. Just a strange event at a pond, but nothing more. For UFO believers, this is a classic cover-up. They believe a UFO landed here. And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
JEFF: Several UFO field investigators came out to the site to check out the pond. They searched the nearby woods for any sign of debris, or anything else that could be amiss, but they found nothing. The case remained a mystery and inconclusive.
RAY: “Inconclusive” is exactly where legends are born. Believers think this was a cover-up. Skeptics think this was just a strange weather incident.
JEFF: The theory about the hole in the ice is that there were actually two layers of ice with a gap in the middle. With the fresh snowfall it created enough weight to make the top layer break and fall on the bottom layer, and then that broke through into the circle. Unusual, but not impossible.
RAY: But the black cube McCarthy tried to fish out of the pond?
JEFF: Yeah, that’s gone. According to the Governor’s office, it was never there.
RAY: So in the end, we’ll never know.
JEFF: No we won’t. Not unless something is declassified one day, or disclosure finally happens and we learn the truth.
RAY: But the truth COULD be a weird trick of ice and weather and a mistaken look at something at the bottom of a small pond.
JEFF: Yes, it could be that. And it could be a cover up. Either way, something happened in this small pond back in 1977 that caused a big stir. Considering New Hampshire already has a storied history with UFOs thanks to the Betty and Barney Hill incident back in 1961, what’s one more strange out of this world account for the Granite State?
[OUTTRO]
RAY: And that takes us to After the Legends where we take a deeper dive into this week’s story and sometimes veer off course.
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To see some pictures related to this week’s story, click on the link in our episode description, or go to our website and click on Episode 426.
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Until next time… stay legendary.