I Saw a UFO Once

By Greg Evans

I saw a UFO once, March 24, 1983, from my bedroom window in Croton on Hudson,  New York. It was nighttime, my mother was in the room and she witnessed it too. Even at 6-years old I got the sense that what I was witnessing was straight out of The Deadly Spawn. Weird colored lights, moving silently and slowly over the treetops. Even the air felt different that night. I can see it today, 40-years later like it was yesterday. In the years 1982-1986, there were an abnormal amount of recorded UFO sightings around the Hudson Valley area. It was a special time to be alive, in that part of the country.

The Times Union out of Albany, New York, published an article on the subject on July 2, 2024. They said, “On March 24, 1983, there were more than 300 reports alone, all describing a V-shaped craft adorned with colored lights that hovered slowly and silently in the sky. The sighting became known as “the Westchester Boomerang.”

Retractors and non-believers can say what they want, I was there. I felt like I could reach out and touch it. My mother was a mix of vexation and fear. “What do you think that is?” She asked me.

“Aliens come to destroy us, kill all the men, take the women and candy somewhere far away in the universe never to be heard from again.”

She, along with hundreds of others called the police. But they were as clueless as us. The event was made into numerous television shows including, A Current Affair and Unsolved Mysteries, both of which I watched. The government gave us some backwater jive about how it was a dark-ops, Special Forces parachute-wearing, hang glider training mission, or something to that effect. Others claimed it was a prank put on by amateur pilots. I didn’t buy it.

There were many other eyewitnesses including Ed Barnes, a computer engineer at IBM who happened to be driving home on the Taconic Parkway when he had his experience.

“Out of nowhere, I got a lot of static on the radio. I thought maybe I was on the wrong number, and then I went over to turn the dial again and that’s when I looked up and saw this craft. It was a triangular ship. And the back had to be as large as a football field at least. And there was no noise.”

Down at the Handy Stop Convenient Store on Riverside Drive, over the next few days, my buddies and I, over a bag of banana Laffy Taffy’s, assessed the immediate danger posed by a potential alien invasion. I hid my G.I. JOE’s on the branches of the Japanese maple tree in my front yard. “Those green space pirates will never find them here!”

I never saw anything like that again. Years later I would begin to wonder if the visitors weren’t aliens at all, but instead a tour group from the future who paid good money for tickets to travel back to 1983.

If they did come from a few thousand years in the future, I wonder how much a ticket might have cost, $100,000,000 plus tax? The equivalent in today’s money to an allegiant flight from D.C. to West Palm, not including the cost of a carry on.

And flying over the suburbs at night wouldn’t offer the grandest of views. However, if you travel a few thousand years back in time, you take what you can get. I only surmise half the passengers were asleep. Can you imagine the jet lag when they returned to the future?

If I lived in the future and traveled back in time I’d like to go see the dinosaurs but I imagine it would be like going to the zoo to see the tigers and standing in front of the enclosure staring at artificially planted shrubbery. You’d fly over thick canopy and see nothing because all the T-rexes would be sleeping.