Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s); An Overview with Particular Focus on the Southern Tier

By Ed Nizalowski, historian —

(This is part five, the final portion of a series on the same topic.)

March 27, 2001: Lowman, New York 

Stephen Caulkins (from an email dated April 16, 2005; reported to MUFON), 

“I was taking my daughter to catch her ride to work at 8:45 a.m. on March 27, 2001, when she saw the  craft approaching from the southwest heading across our car. She screamed, ‘Stop the car, Dad; it’s a UFO!’ 

“No sooner than she got those words out, the car sputtered to a stop along the dark country road. I leaned over and looked out the passenger side window, and there it was, not more than 100 feet above us. It was disc-shaped, the top was slightly curved (dome like), and the bottom was even less curved, almost flat. 

“As it was going over us, I got out of the car and could feel something like a strong static pulling on me.  After all this, it proceeded across the farm field and up the side of a hill and stopped over a Revolutionary War monument. At that time, it changed to a white light that grew in intensity until very bright, then all at once, poof, it was gone. It just vanished. The car started right up, and we drove to where my daughter’s ride was already waiting.”

Early 2000’s (?): Newark Valley Middle School 

Kelly Weed-MacInnis: “Hey all, it’s all real. Walking across the middle school field at 8 p.m. at night after girls’ basketball intramurals, I’m telling you, a UFO came out of nowhere. I was with a classmate; you could see the whole vessel clearly. We started to scream and ran as fast as we could home. No one believed us; it was fall, it got dark early, and it was cold. 

“We were in sixth grade. That summer, playing hide and seek, I witnessed a huge light above my neighbor’s house that was quickly gone. Out of all of the kids playing, I was the only one who saw it. These experiences have never left me; I was scared beyond belief.” 

Fall 2004 

Newark Valley: [Name Withheld] 

Two individuals were on an early morning walk. They were near the bridge on Bridge Street when they saw some very unusual lights off to the east. This would put it in a similar place to the encounter that Walt Stevens and Don Parsons had in April 1964. The phenomenon did not last too long, but I was told that “it was out of the ordinary.” 

Junction of Owego Creek and Susquehanna River (c. 2008)

Joe Onofrio, Jr. [Related to me at my Endicott Library presentation Feb. 18, 2023]: “Around 15 years ago, I was fishing at sunset on a cloudy evening at the mouth of the Owego Creek in Owego. I looked up towards the power lines that reach across the Susquehanna River. I saw an orange glowing orb, around the size of a basketball, floating near the power lines, about 70 feet above the middle of the river. Shortly after I noticed it, smoke came out of the bottom of it, and it floated up into the clouds and disappeared not far from Montrose Turnpike, where that other couple saw a UFO.” 

August 2, 2011: Lockheed Martin Owego 

Taken from the NUFORC Database: “My wife and I spotted a triangle hovering over the Lockheed Martin site on Route 17c on August 2,  2011, at 9:25 p.m. The whole bottom lit up as the craft hovered and then took off. Funny part is it didn’t show up on my cell phone camera. It had three white lights, with one on each corner, and a solid red light in the center of the bottom. After hovering silently, it moved slowly toward Hickories Park in Owego and then took off very fast, moving south with the entire bottom lit up in white light.” 

2019: Various reports from upstate New York 

According to the website Upstate New York, UFO reports increased from 65 in 2018 to 89 in 2019 with multiple sightings reported from Utica, Clayville, and Syracuse. The following places had at least one report: Binghamton, Endicott, Interlaken, Ithaca, and Walton. “UFO Sightings Grew in Western New York in 2019. Where Were the Most Reports?” (newyorkupstate.com/western-ny, Sunny Hernandez, Feb. 28, 2020.) 

February 14, 2024: Endicott, New York 

Witnesses described the sighting as a “bright light with a hazy glow around it” with a smaller star-like object following it. These formed a single object and gradually faded away. A report was filed with the National Unidentified Flying Object Reporting Center (NUFORC). (Unidentified Flying Object Over Endicott, New York Sparks Curiosity” WNBF — Tracy Taylor. March 7, 2024.) 

Last week of August 2024: Corn field across the creek from the Bement-Billings Farmstead 

Ed Nizalowski: On Thursday, Aug. 29, I was doing some work at the Bement-Billings Farmstead with a group of people. I was told that the cornfield next to one of our nature trails had a lot of corn that had been flattened. Another friend of mine said that the field was fine about a week before. 

My first thought was that some hooligan (young or otherwise) had gone for a joyride. The flattened area was unusual in a variety of ways. It was about 20′ to 25′ wide going in a westerly direction and started about 30 yards down from the entry to the field. It then took a turn to the south for about 300 yards, subsequently making a jog to the left and to the right. Most of the corn was flattened, but many of the stalks had snapped off. Certain rows were pointing in odd directions, which made it difficult to imagine some type of vehicle doing the damage. There were no tire tracks. 

I had two sheriff’s deputies investigate the damage that morning. They were also puzzled but concluded it was some vehicle or possibly some kind of wind shear/ phenomenon. I took some pictures and walked back along what we call the “Red Trail” which loops in and out of a floodplain. There was a significant amount of Japanese bamboo that had been trampled. I also found a sycamore tree at the south end of the field that had been knocked over. Later in the day, I went to see if there was any evidence of damage to vegetation from the entry to the field from Tappan Road. There was none.

Conclusion (for now)

The study of UFO/UAPs has veered off into the areas of psychology, mythology, parapsychology, the paranormal, and so on. These theories, propositions, etc., are above my pay grade to understand, but I’m throwing them out there for those of you who have enough brain cells to intelligently digest such speculation. Carl Jung, one of the big brains of the 20th century, wrote a book on the subject. 

Here is a pertinent passage: “All of us gaze into that ‘dark glass’ in which the dark myth takes shape, adumbrating the invisible truth. In this glass, the eyes of the spirit glimpse an image which we call the self, fully conscious of the fact that it is an anthropomorphic image which we have merely named but not explained. By ‘self’ we mean psychic wholeness, but what realities underlie this concept we do not know. In religious experience, man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other.” – Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth (104, 39) 

Other scholars and writers have pursued the idea that there is some parallel universe out there, maybe more than one, and certain people, for no particular explainable or rational reason, have suddenly entered some completely different dimension. John Keel uses the concepts of interdimensional hypothesis and ultra-terrestrials. Two other individuals who have taken a deep dive into these matters are J. Allen Hynek and Jacque Vallee. In their book Edge of Reality, they speak of interlocking universes.  

As it has for centuries, strange phenomena in the sky, speculation of life on other planets, and the prospect of interplanetary travel will continue to fuel our minds and imaginations for centuries to come. Even if civilization collapses and our existence and survival become subsistence-level enterprises, these speculations will continue.  

I’ll end with part of the analysis of Dr. Berthold Schwarz (1924-2010) who did an extensive psychological analysis of Wilcox. This was part of his study of individuals who claimed to have some  kind of UFO/UAP experience. 

In 1968 Dr. Schwarz was the Assistant Attending Psychiatrist at the  Montclair Community Hospital in Montclair, New Jersey. [I actually had a brief conversation with him way back when.] Here is a passage from his book UFO Percipients: 

“It is ironic that billions are spent to put men on the moon in order to probe the  secrets of space, yet apparently little attention is paid to the possibility that forms of life  – ufonauts – from somewhere in the universe, possibly outer space, may have already  landed on earth.

“In summary, Gary Wilcox, almost twenty-eight years old and a farmer of  Newark Valley, New York, claimed he had a close-range experience with a UFO and two of its occupants. From the psychiatric evaluation of Wilcox and interviews with various members of his family, neighbors, and friends, it would seem that he is a truthful person with no emotional illness and that his experience was ‘real,’ even though the interpretation of his encounter is a complicated and uncertain matter.” [Schwarz,  Wilcox, p. 84]

(You can contact Ed Nizalowski at ed.nizalowski@gmail.com with any comments or thoughts on this topic.)