In Episode 379 Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger investigate a rash of UFO sightings that took place in East Richford, Vermont, back in 1982. From black triangles, to glowing balls of light, to saucer-shaped craft, these events were witnessed by police officers, fire fighters, and locals who all came forward to share their story. What were they? And why were they here?
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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.
[WOOOSHING SOUND]
RAY: What was that?!
JEFF: I don’t know. But something just flew over our heads.
RAY: Think it could be one of those drones everyone has been seeing all over the place?
JEFF: I don’t think that’s it. It didn’t sound like propellers. Plus, we’re in East Richford, Vermont. We’re less than a mile from the Canadian border. There is very little population around here for miles.
RAY: I saw that driving in. Just a few houses, a couple of farms, and a lot of trees. Whatever that was it wasn’t a plane.
JEFF: No way.
RAY: And definitely not a helicopter.
JEFF: Nope.
RAY: I guess it could be some kind of high-tech drone, but what could it possibly be spying on up here? Border patrol?
JEFF: Maybe. But yeah, there’s nothing to see up here. I guess we have to call it unidentified.
RAY: And it was flying.
JEFF: And it was an object.
RAY: I guess we saw a UFO.
JEFF: I guess we did. And I can tell you we’re not the first to see one here in northern Vermont. Back in 1982 there were a rash of strange sightings that made the papers. An invasion they called it! We’ve come to East Richford to search for UFOs.
[INTRO]
JEFF: I’m Jeff Belanger and welcome to Episode 379 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. This week we have a big announcement!
JEFF: We do!
RAY: Our annual Zombie Prom is back! It will be Saturday, February 22nd at the Doubletree Hotel in Milford, Massachusetts. This is always such a great party. You can dress as a zombie, a zombie hunter, or wear plain clothes and dress as a victim. The cost is $25 per person in advance and all proceeds go to benefit a great charity called Community Harvest Project in Grafton, Massachusetts. You can find a link to puy tickets in our episode description or on our web site.
JEFF: We’ll go searching for UFOs in Northern Vermont right after this word from our sponsor.
SPONSOR
RAY: Okay, we’ve covered some UFO stories in the past.
JEFF: We have.
RAY: Betty and Barney Hill’s famous UFO abduction incident back in 1961. They were traveling home from Montreal which is just about 60 miles northwest of where we are right now—and heading home to southern New Hampshire when they had their incidence in the New Hampshire town of Exeter.
JEFF: That’s right. We covered that one.
RAY: So strange flying objects have been in these parts before.
JEFF: They have.
RAY: And I don’t believe we’re alone in the universe. It wouldn’t make sense for all of this to exist just for us on one tiny planet. If there’s intelligent life out there that evolved thousands or even millions of years before us, who knows what kind of technology they may have.
JEFF: I agree completely. But why would they come here? It’s pretty ego-centric to think we’re worth observing, or that we could be a threat to anyone other than ourselves.
RAY: To be fair, no one is saying these UFOs come from some distant planet or galaxy.
JEFF: That’s true. Once in a while there’s not just one sighting, but a bunch in one area witnessed by multiple reliable people? It’s enough that it creates a flap and makes the news which is exactly what happened here in northern Vermont. So let’s head back to 1982, and watch the skies.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: It’s late March of 1982. Ronald Regan is president of the United States, “I Love Rock n’ Roll” by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts is number one on the radio, and here in East Richford, Vermont, locals are buzzing about something strange in the skies.
JEFF: That they are. Though it’s technically Spring, you wouldn’t know it this far north. The weather is still cold and frosty. It’s early. About 4:30 in the morning. The sun isn’t up yet, and we’re standing outside the farm of Cedric Morse on West Jay Road. That’s when Morse spots something a few hundred yards down the hill.
RAY: I see it! There’s three lights. They’re maybe three or four feet apart from each other. They kind of look like headlights, except…
JEFF: Yeah, weird. A headlight would cast lights ahead of them. We should see the road illuminated in front of the lights.
RAY: Exactly. But these three lights are just glowing and sitting there.
[CAR ENGINE STARTS]
RAY: Cedric Morse thinks it’s strange for someone to be out here in this remote area at this hour, so he’s jumping in his car to head down there to investigate. (BEAT) Let’s go with him.
[CAR DOORS]
[CAR DRIVES OFF]
JEFF: The road has a thin layer of ice on it from the heavy frost last night.
[CAR STOPS / DOORS OPEN/CLOSE]
RAY: Huh.
JEFF: Yeah.
RAY: There’s nothing here.
JEFF: I don’t see anything either.
RAY: The lights were here when we got in the car. We didn’t drive more 30 or 40 seconds over that slight ridge, and they’re gone.
JEFF: This is even weirder.
RAY: What’s that?
JEFF: Look at the road we just came down from Morse’s farm.
RAY: Yeah.
JEFF: You can clearly see the tire tracks we left in the frosty road.
RAY: Yup. Clear as can be.
JEFF: Look around. There are no other tracks anywhere near us. If those were cars or motorcycles or even people with lanterns, there would be some kind of tracks in the frost just like we’re leaving right now.
RAY: You’re right! That’s so odd.
JEFF: This wasn’t Morse’s first UFO sighting either. Back in September of 1962, he and his wife, Doris, got a phone call from their neighbor, Phyllis and Robert Waterhouse claiming that something strange was hovering over their farm’s milkshed. So the Morses drove the short distance down the road to see. That’s when they saw what he described as two big, rounded, metallic, domelike objects in the sky. A few moments later they spotted another pair of these objects coming up from the south. He described them as looking like oatmeal bowls upside down. Morse said he and his wife joined the Waterhouse family standing outside their front door and watched these objects for several minutes. The objects made no noise at all, and then sped away at incredible speeds.
RAY: So Morse was already a believer.
JEFF: That he was. Back then they called the nearby U.S. Border Patrol who came out, but the objects were already gone. Eventually a government official came to investigate and advised them not to talk about it because it could cause a panic. With young kids in school, they agreed. They didn’t want their kids to get teased.
RAY: But that was back in 1962. Today it’s different. The Morse isn’t alone in his sighting. There have been so many sightings that the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, Washington, has taken notice. The sheer volume of sightings in this region lately is highly unusual and unexplained. And that also attracts the attention of the local newspapers. Once a few of these sightings make the papers, others also come forward.
JEFF: The UFO reports are poring in from Richford and Windsor, and from highly credible witnesses like Police Chief Homer Combs. Back in November he was patrolling Richford’s Golf Course when he saw quote, “two huge, real big, orange-colored lights moving across the same Jay Peak valley that is just blow the Morse farm.” Police Chief Combs knows what he saw. His view was unobstructed, and it looked different than anything else he’d ever seen in the sky.
RAY: Earlier this month a St. Alban’s nurse was visiting her mother in East Richford. At dusk they heard a loud roar over the house so they went out onto the porch to investigate. She said she saw what looks like an object that quote “looked black, like cast iron, the size of a normal plane but with a bug-shaped body, flying at treetop level. It had wings pointed upward and many blinking red lights all over the wings and bottom. It was heading toward East Richford.”
JEFF: Police Chief Combs said earlier this month he was getting a call almost every single day from locals who had seen something strange in the sky.
RAY: Back in February, another police officer, Sgt. Richard Polland, saw a UFO from his home around 6PM. He called into the police department to ask his colleagues to look up in the direction of his house. Officers went outside and saw a triangular craft with red and blue lights flying about 1,000 feet in the air. They were observed through binoculars cruising along and then suddenly changing direction and speeding off toward Mt. Ascutney. Soon after, they saw two U.S. military jets racing overhead. They seemed to be pursuing these crafts. When the jets came on the scene, the lights on the black triangles went dark and they seemed to vanish.
JEFF: Just a week ago on March 22nd, local firefighters Ralph Burnham and Dave Kibling along with police Sgt. Gorden Gillen, gazed skyward around 11:30PM to see red, blue, green, and white lights in a triangular pattern. They watched it hover from the parking lot of the Grand Union grocery store. Sgt. Gillen decided to flash the blue lights on his police cruiser. When he did, the lights on the craft grew brighter. Almost as if responding to the police lights.
RAY: As stories of these encounters circulate, soon even more people come forward. Like John and Denise LaCroix who had a strange sighting about a year ago along Route 7 just south of Burlington, Vermont. Denise described the craft as something as big as airplane with square windows all around the bottom. She said there was one bright light that seemed to be flashing in sequence from one window to the next, and one steady light coming from the central window at the bottom. The top of the craft they described as dome-shaped.
JEFF: The LaCroix’s kept quiet about their encounter for fear of ridicule, but when they saw police officers and firefighters coming forward, they wanted to share their story too. As the newspapers run articles on these sightings, witnesses soon learn that they’re not alone, and everyone else is left to ponder if WE are also not alone. And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: What’s interesting to me is how there were noticeable differences in the descriptions of the UFOs. Some were dark triangles. Some were dome shaped. Some had intricate lights. And one was just three strange lights.
JEFF: We can’t stress enough that nobody is claiming these are craft from some distant galaxy. The short answer is: we don’t know what they are or where they came from. But this was clearly a UFO flap – a rash of sightings in one region with multiple credible witnesses. And here’s another point: if these are some secret government aircraft, you wouldn’t think the government would like them up like Christmas trees for all to see. It draws a lot of attention.
RAY: Good point. Clearly a bunch of people witnessed something up here in northern Vermont. These are people who lived here a long time and know what they normally see and don’t see in the sky. They know various airplanes, hot air balloons, helicopters, ultralights, and things like that. They also know when something doesn’t look like anything else.
JEFF: Sometimes we need to put ourselves in the shoes of the witnesses. It’s easy to tell another person they were mistaken. But what if it was you? You know what you saw. So did they.
RAY: Like any UFO flap, eventually the frequency of sightings died down for a while and become a memory until something stirs up those memories again.
JEFF: Something like a rash of drone sightings, spy balloons, and U.S. military pilots sharing camera footage of UFOs or UAPs on national television news shows and telling America we don’t know what that is or where it came from. Something is surely… out there.
[OUTTRO]
RAY: Something is out there and something is giving a lot to talk about and think about. And that takes us to After the Legend where we continue the discussion and sometimes veer off course.
JEFF: After the Legend is brought to you by our patreon patrons! This group of insiders helps us out each month with our hosting and production costs, our marketing, and everything else it takes to bring you two podcasts each week. We can’t do it without them. It’s just $3 bucks per month and for that they get early access to new episodes plus bonus episodes and content that no one else gets to hear. Just head over to patreon.com/newenglandlegends to sign up. We’d be grateful.
To see some pictures related to this week’s episode, you can click on the link in our episode description or go to our web site and click on Episode 379.
We should mention that most of what we know about this rash of UFO sightings around Richford, Vermont back in 1982, came from the April 4, 1982, Burlington Free Press coverage.
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We’d like to thank our sponsors, thanks to our patreon patrons, and our theme music is by John Judd.
Until next time remember… the bizarre is closer than you think.