The Exeter Incident

In the early hours of 3 September 1965, Norman Muscarello, 18, was hitchhiking home along Route 150 near Kensington, New Hampshire. According to his account, a large object with a row of bright red lights pulsing in sequence rose from behind trees and moved toward him, silently hovering over a nearby farm field. He threw himself to the ground, then made his way to the police station in the town of Exeter.

Officer Eugene Bertrand drove Muscarello back to the field. Bertrand had reportedly met a woman in a car earlier that night who said a red light had followed her. At the field, both men said they saw the lighted object rise from behind the trees and move over them. Bertrand said he considered drawing his gun. Officer David Hunt then arrived and also reported seeing the object before it moved off toward the coast.

The officers filed reports, and the sighting was sent to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. Local and national newspapers covered it, and journalist John G. Fuller went to Exeter to interview the witnesses and many other local residents who described similar lights.

The case rests on the testimony of three named witnesses, two of them police officers, whose reports were written soon after the event and who stayed consistent in later interviews. Their accounts were documented at the time, which gives the case more weight than stories first told decades later.

There are no photographs, physical traces or radar records. Fuller’s book Incident at Exeter, published in 1966, collected many other local reports of lights from the same period. These reports suggest something was being seen repeatedly in the area, but they vary widely in quality and detail.

The Project Blue Book file is held with other Blue Book records at the U.S. National Archives. It shows the Air Force first proposed a conventional explanation and later received objections from the officers.

The Pentagon initially suggested that the witnesses had seen aircraft from a large Strategic Air Command exercise that night, combined with stars and planets distorted by atmospheric conditions. Bertrand and Hunt objected in writing, noting that the exercise had ended well before their sighting and that the object was low and close, not a distant star.

According to Fuller and later researchers, the Air Force eventually acknowledged it could not confirm the exercise explanation and recorded the case as unidentified. The details of how that change was communicated vary between accounts, but the case is generally listed among Blue Book’s unidentified sightings.

Sceptics have proposed several conventional sources. One suggestion is a military aircraft conducting air-to-air refuelling at low altitude, since tanker aircraft could carry bright lights, and bases were active in the region. Others proposed an advertising aircraft or blimp with lighted signs. Neither suggestion has been tied to a documented flight at the right time and place.

Supporters of the case note that the witnesses described a silent, rigid object with lights flashing in a set sequence, hovering and moving in ways they did not associate with aircraft. Bertrand, who had served in the Air Force, said he was familiar with military aircraft. The case also gained cultural weight because it appeared at the same time as the Betty and Barney Hill story, which Fuller wrote about next.