Exeter incident
A teenager and two police officers saw a silent object with pulsing red lights rise over a field near Exeter, New Hampshire.
1965 CE · 42.95, -70.96 · status: disputed
The account
At about 2 a.m. on 3 September 1965 Norman Muscarello, hitchhiking home, saw five flashing red lights over a farm in Kensington; he reported it, and officers Eugene Bertrand and Hunt then watched the object rise from the trees as horses panicked. Journalist John G. Fuller's book Incident at Exeter made it famous.
The sceptical view
The Air Force first blamed stars and a temperature inversion, then a SAC exercise. In 2011 Skeptical Inquirer argued the lights matched the flashing pattern of a KC-97 tanker from nearby Pease AFB during air refuelling.
The researched reading
Credible, prompt, multi-witness testimony that most likely describes a refuelling tanker seen low and close at night. A smaller share stays open because a trained witness rejected that answer.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Something known, misidentified | 50% | Nickell and McGaha showed the five flashing red lights match the light pattern of a KC-97 tanker from Pease AFB during low refuelling practice, and the Big Blast air-defence exercise was under way that night. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 20% | Officer Bertrand had flown with KC-97s in the Air Force and said it was not one; silence and the low hover over trees remain hard to fit. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 8% | A frightened hitchhiker primed the officers, and Fuller’s book shaped later retelling. |
| Secret human technology | 8% | Strategic Air Command was running an exercise; an unusual military aircraft is plausible. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 4% | The Air Force first suggested stars twinkling through a temperature inversion, which fits poorly with a close object. |
| Undetermined | 4% | The share a generic explanation had beyond what has been shown for this case: it fits many cases like this one, but has not been demonstrated for this one. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 3% | No poorly understood phenomenon is known to produce sequenced flashing red lights. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 3% | Three witnesses, two of them police, reported at once; no motive or sign of invention. |
Official position: The Air Force first blamed stars and an inversion, then aircraft from a SAC exercise, before admitting it could not identify the object.