The Wanaque Reservoir 1966 Ufo Pictures

THE WANAQUE RESERVOIR 1966 UFO PICTURES By Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos FOTOCAT Project (Valencia, Spain) [email protected] In January and then again in October 1966, a UFO flap b roke out over the Wanaque Reservoir, New Jersey. There is abundant (yet poorly organized) information from newspaper and UFO journals available online. Over the years, there have been contradictory and misleading reviews of data about the pictures taken during this period. My main purpose with the present article is to clarify, to the best of my knowledge, when, where and by whom purported UFO photographs were taken in this location and in these timeframes. Any published images will accompany this text. My second intent is to request from my peers any additional information that may improve this report. The January 1966 wave of sightings did generate some pictures of the alleged phenomena observed. The October uproar, on the contrary, did not. On the night of 11 January 1966, hundreds of residents of Wanaque, New Jersey reported observing a strange, large white light which maneuvered over the local Reservoir, wrote The APRO Bulletin reporting about the phenomenon. In fact, there were many eyewitnesses, including Mayor Wolfe, Councilmen Hagstrom, Barton and Shutte, Civil Defense Director Spencer, and a number of patrolmen. In addition to many local residents, of course. The phenomenon was also seen from Oakland, Ringwood, Paterson, Totowa, Wayne, Butler and other nearby towns. Reportedly gliding oddly and changing color from white to red and back to white, as a very brilliant light like a star except that it didn t flicker. There are many press and UFO magazine articles on this sighting but the information is so confused and the case so inappropriately investigated that it is difficult to assemble a clear, detailed, accurate and sequential picture for analysis. Probably the clearest chronology of the course of the January 1966 events is in an article published in the October 1966 issue of FATE magazine. Incidentally, I am wondering if this release could have triggered the October UFO revival in Wanaque (of course, this would depend upon when the magazine arrived in the mail). January 11, 1966 Roberts According to FATE, a magazine devoted to paranormal phenomena since 1948, i t all began at 6:20 p.m. when an initial report of something in the sky came into Ringwood and a flurry of reports followed between 6:30 and 9:00 p.m. [All times EST-Eastern Standard Time]. UFO reports arose from many cities in the northeast of the Garden State. Photographer and UFO buff August C. Roberts, living in nearby Wayne, NJ took a five-minute time exposure of the light at 11:30 p.m. on the first day of sightings. The photographs caption informs that it clearly shows object brighter and larger than stars. The magazine reports that Roberts captured the UFO as it vanished straight up from a position above Raymond Dam...the object...leaving a trail of light, yet this description does not fit what the actual image shows, a simple dot of light in the upper left-hand section of the picture. A much better reproduction of this photograph was printed in a booklet coauthored by UFO writer Brad Steiger and August Roberts. Here, the surprisingly brief information provided about the picture merely says that the glowing object in the snapshot simply appeared, hovered a few minutes, then shot off once more into space. As veteran ufologists are aware, the reliability of Roberts is in question because of a number of suspicious pictures he produced or with which he was Left: picture taken by August C. Roberts, January 11, 1966, Wanaque, NJ. Right: photographer August C. Roberts. Brad Steiger & August C. Roberts. Yet a truly remarkable revelation about this picture is provided by journalist Lloyd Mallan, who included the above photo in the series of three articles he wrote for a known magazine. Only when photographer...was printing the shot did he notice bright white light above hills. Thus, according to this source, the point of light in the picture was never observed visually. In a later recollection of the Wanaque incidents, Roberts confirmed it. He wrote about this particular shot: when I was taking pictures of the area, I took some pictures of the sky, and my pictures have star trails...but in one of the pictures, there is a definite glow way up in the sky. Something lit up and went out. I don t know what it was in there with the star trails. The white spot labelled UFO could just be a developing flaw or a stain on the negative or print. Three reasons support this hypothesis. Firstly, nothing strange was optically seen during the photography. Secondly, the shot presents many other similar white dots all over the frame, typical of faulty processing and/or handling of the film. Thirdly, another time-exposure photograph taken by Roberts eleven days later also shows this type of spot and this one passed unnoticed by the photographer (see the relevant entry below). January 12, 1966 Theodora 20-year-old reservoir policeman Charles Theodora first spotted an object from the Reservoir Station a few minutes after seven o clock on January 11, 1966, the size of a street light...it raced about six miles up and down the dam at supersonic speed. At one point, it flashed a ray of light on the ice. When Patrolman Al Campana and I rushed to investigate, we found a hole in the ice about 40 to 50 feet in diameter. The January 1966 spate of sky visions comprised a lot of misstatements and false information. If it was due to the observer or the reporters imagination, I do not know, but the hole in the ice canard was one of the most conspicuous. Both the chief of the reservoir police force (John Casazza) and newsman Howard L. Ball vigorously denied it to Lloyd Mallan, special correspondent sent by Science & Mechanics to the area: we checked that whole area where the thing was supposed to be...there was no such thing as a hole burned in the ice, and Thats poppycock! Thats balderdash! they said, respectively. After hours of observation, at 2 a.m. (or 2:40) Theodora snapped a photograph of the object in which it appears as a light blur against the background of the dark He watched the object until 4:30 a.m. with other officers: Danced from side to side, blinked on and off, or at times ascended at such a fast rate that he couldn t track it, for 2 hours, after it headed into the north and disappeared into the rim of the dam. Theodora had a third sighting, at 8:00 on the evening of January 12. Officer Charles Theodora. In 2011, retired Officer Theodora confirmed to ufologist Anthony Bragalia took a photograph, the image looking as a very large bright white unnatural object floating above a hill in the distance. On a report that Michael Swords blogged in 2013, he pointed out that Theodora was in the company of two other policer officers, David Sisco and Jack Wardlaw and that the print showed only a small fuzzy light. If t he camera used was a Polaroid, loaned from the police department station, and it merely depicted a blob of light, it is difficult to believe the claim by A. Roberts that he wanted $200.00 for it. The Police Captain was trying to get him some money for publication. Roberts acts purely as a gossip-scatter, rumor-feeder individual. Wanaque Police Chief John Casazza met Officer Theodora and Sergeant Ben Thompson with a uniformed Air Force officer. Theodora was ordered to hand him the photograph, because it was Government property. However, after an exhaustive research, reporter Mallan could find no evidence whatever that any department of the U.S. Government has sent a UFO investigator to Wanaque. Sgt. Ben Thompson and Chief John Casazza. World Journal Tribune. In January 1967, writer John A. Keel released a press column quoting a statement by Col. George P. Freeman, Pentagon spokesperson for Project Bluebook, concerning police officers and other witnesses in Wanaque that were allegedly collected together by a man wearing an Air Force uniform. Freeman declared, We checked in the local AFB and discovered that no one connected with the Air Force had visited Wanaque on the date in question. Whoever it was, he wasn t for the Air True. There is not any Wanaque file for January 1966 in the files of the Project Blue Book. Merely a report raised by a newspaper editor from Wayne of a sighting at 6:20 p.m. on January 11, 1966, identified as aircraft. Actually, he was Howard Ball, suburban editor of the Paterson Evening News. The case documentation contains a second-hand report assumed to refer to two sightings at Wanaque. One was observed from 1930 to 2030 on 11 Jan 66, reappeared at 0220 on 12 Jan 66, and continued for the rest of the night. The sighting was not officially reported to the Air Force, and only a preliminary investigation was made, concluding that the sightings had astronomical origin. Because of the time and source (calls from Mayor and Sheriff from Wanaque), we can guess that the second sighting was Theodoras sighting. Blue Book explained it as Jupiter. If the sightings were not reported officially to the Air Force, was the uniformed officer acting on a personal basis? The Blue Book case index contains no other case file for New Jersey for that period. No photograph is mentioned either. Without a photograph to examine, no evaluation is possible. However, it is unavoidable to think of an astronomical explanation for a sighting that long, on a night when, for example, the planet Jupiter was prominently visible, very bright in the sky with a magnitude of -2.54 descending from 2 a.m. in the west (35 altitude) to 4:30 a.m. in the WNW (9.5 altitude) on January 12, 1966. Jupiter set at 5:30 a.m. This seems to be a reasonable working hypothesis for the picture event. The sky over Wanaque, January 12, 1966, Jupiter position at 2:10 (top) and 4:30 a.m. (bottom). O (Oeste) stands for West. (Stellarium software). Courtesy of J.C. Victorio Uranga. The multiple sightings in this NJ area developed in four basic periods, mainly over two days in the most intense moments, in the dusk and pre-dawn hours: January 12, 1966: from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. January 13, 1966: around 4:10 a.m. It is not my intention to analyze the events testing for mundane explanations, as the published database is a confusing mess, but for what its worth, I cannot avoid noticing that these time clusters matched the outstanding appearance of Jupiter. In those time intervals, the bright planet was located at various angular heights ascending in the evening from 37 to 67 and descending in the early hours from 35 to 10, while wandering from east (rising) to w est (setting). As consultant Wim van Utrecht has noted, "Sirius should not be ruled out either. The brightest star in the heavens is far more prone to atmospheric effects than Jupiter and Venus, and is often described as moving with incredible speeds up and down and from left to right and vice versa. Throughout the various sightings, the star was visible on the ESE horizon in the evening and setting in the WSW in the early morning hours." NICAP investigators went to the scene, assisted by Dr. John Pagano. Their final report, drafted by the end of January, asserts: the case appears to be about 25 per cent UFO; 75 percent excited people seeing planets. We have to ponder to which category the Theodora sighting belongs. January 11-12, 1966 Cisco (no photography) Patrolman Joseph Cisco of Wanaque had made similar photos at the time, though less clear than those by his colleague. This claim, surely made by August Roberts appears both in an article published by Probe and in the story printed in the front page of a Paterson, NJ newspaper in October 1966. The colleague alluded to is the police officer who allegedly took the beam photo to which I will refer later. The story repeatedly cites the flying saucers that plagued the Wanaque Reservoir in February [sic] 1966. As the numerous observations of the January 11-12 night are not mentioned at all, I am confident that this is an error. Therefore, the supposed pictures by Cisco had to be taken in January 1966, probably the same night his buddy Theodora took his. In fact, Joe Cisco reported observing the UFO at about 6:45 p.m. on January 11. It looked light a star or a planet but the movement and intensity of the light made him question his own observation. From their house, Mrs. Cisco also spotted the object at the same time his husband did...until its disappearance at 4:15 a.m. on the following day. Nine and a half hours hanging in the sky! Certainly, it behaves like one or more astronomical bodies. In addition to Jupiter, we also have Sirius. The star visible both days around the SE (evening) and between SW and WSW (night and pre-dawn hours) at angular altitudes not higher than 24. Van Utrecht feels, however, that Venus is a better candidate for Joe Ciscos sighting: In the evening of January 11, Venus with magnitude -3.99 was very close to the horizon in the WSW. My guess is that Jupiter was responsible for the final part of the sighting. It is important to realize that stars and planets at elevations over 20 almost never generate UFO reports, being too high in the sky for them to be interpreted as "strange", even if they are brighter than stars that are seen close to the horizon. 30 years later, ex-cop Cisco, then a dispatcher for the Wanaque Reservoir police, does not acknowledge having snapped any UFO picture. He perfectly recalls that on the night of January 11, 1966 he was patrolling the zone when a call asked him to check out a light at the local sandpit. The police desk had been flooded with calls about bright lights. In a retrospective interview, Cisco says he just spotted a blue- white bright light, silently hovering. Cisco and some city officials watched the light for half an hour before it zoomed away toward Wayne. Nevertheless, Cisco looks at his memories from a skeptic mindset: There was no light beam [emitted by the object], he believes people were seeing a reflection from a barn light across the main dam. In the absence of any recognition of pictures taken by him, we can discard this police officer as a possible source for UFO photos at Wanaque. Officer Joe Cisco. January 13, 1966 Goodavage This time, the purported photo evidence of a UFO is presented in an article by Joseph Goodavage, American journalist, writer and astrologer, intended to review the UFO sightings around the Wanaque Reservoir in January 1966. Just the first sentence of his account states: I shook a little with excitement, but kept the lens of the camera fixed on that disc-shaped phenomenon flashing red in the cold night sky of northern New Jersey. Later on in the article, Goodavage explains that while he was taking snapshots: My fingers were numb and the shutter clunked dully in the cold as I sighted on the aerial object...I followed this apparently aimless movement, trying to get a decent picture. We can deduce that at 10 p.m. of January 13, 1966, he was standing in the open air by the Reservoir, while Patrolman Joe Cisco, who drove him to the site, was awaiting in the cop car. For about 20 minutes the object was pasted motionless against the sky. Then it fluttered-wobbled slowly off toward the west, Goodavage affirmed. He devoted the first part of his article to narrate this sighting, the deep impression it produced on him (the object...to me looked totally alien), and the associated physical reactions he claimed to feel after the sudden vanishing of the object. Joseph Goodavage. The witness took picture after picture during the observation. Got any pictures? Officer Cisco asked when Goodavage returned to the warmth of the car. I don t know, the journalist replied. Can we suppose they did not turn out? The only alleged UFO picture illustrating the piece (see following entry) has a caption that starts saying that the author saw but failed to film the thing. As in the Theodora unseen photographs, the event is difficult to assess. Size of about a quarter of the Moon. Motionless at first, then slowing and moving to the west until it turned off as you switch off a light. Over 20 minutes in view. What a sight! Celestial charts show a bright Jupiter very high in the sky (72) over the southern horizon (azimuth 185), moving westbound. Sirius was also present with magnitude -1.45 and much lower (30 altitude) in the SSE. The observer described periods of immobility as well as dramatic movements and changes in brightness. Fast movements over short angles and changes in brightness are typical of bright stars, not planets, which would make Sirius better candidate for this one. Autokinesis may also have been in play, but in the absence of a robust inquiry (we are not being told where the witness was exactly and what direction he was looking at), no definitive judgement can be advanced. January 13+, 1966 unnamed cameraman This is the story of a blunder, or a bloomer. Now, the purported UFO picture appears in the frontispiece of the cited article by Goodavage with only the shortest possible data: Author...was given this photo by cameraman who had better luck. Period. Okay, the journalist did not take the photo; he just used it to illustrate his article. Nevertheless, he is to blame for that. Why? In the following issue of the same UFO tabloid, the letter from a reader was published revealing that the picture in particular is a very familiar sight to most amateur astronomers...this is an underexposed photograph of Messier 31 (NGC 224) a spiral galaxy showing the inner portions of the arms and the central nucleus. The galaxy is better known as The Great Andromeda Nebula. UFO over Wanaque? There is a recent indication that the camera operator was with the Paterson Evening but no other details have been ascertained. What it is certain is that the image does not display a UFO at all. Tim Printy, skeptic researcher and astrop