The blackout began in the Syracuse area at 5:15 P.M. At precisely that moment, there was a UFO sighting in the area. Pilot Weldon Ross was approaching Syracuse when he and his student pilot saw a huge red ball “of brilliant intensity” appearing over the power lines at the Syracuse substation. Ross estimated it to be about one hundred feet in diameter and determined that the fireball was where the New York Power Authority’s two 345,000-volt power lines at the Clay substation passed over the New York Central’s tracks between Oneida Lake and Hancock Field. At least three other people corroborated this sighting. One of them was Robert C. Walsh, who was the Syracuse area deputy commissioner for the Federal Aviation Agency. Walsh reported that he saw the same phenomenon just a few miles south of Hancock Field.
At 5:25 P.M., a teacher in Holliston, Massachusetts, saw through binoculars an intense white object in the sky moving slowly toward the horizon; a man from the same town reported an identical object. At the same time in New York City, two witnesses declared separately that they saw unusual objects in the sky. “It was different from anything I had ever seen,” said one.
So, did UFOs cause the blackout? The possibility received widespread discussion during the aftermath but was never offered as a serious explanation to the public. President Lyndon Johnson ordered an investigation to determine the cause. Early on, it was announced that a line break near Niagara Falls had done it. A quick check, however, ruled this theory out. Next, the announcement pointed toward a remote-controlled substation at the power authority’s transmission lines at Clay, New York, about ten miles north of Syracuse. This did not stand up to scrutiny, either. The Niagara Mohawk men who looked into it found the substation in fine condition, with no sign of any failure or damage. The final, and official, conclusion was that backup relay #Q-29 at the Sir Adam Beck generator station in Queenstown, Ontario, was the source of the failure. Even so, this relay went right back into operation, and the line it protected was completely undamaged.
On the other hand, circumstantial evidence existed to show that some sort of electromagnetic condition existed that caused the blackout. The fact that stations outside the main power grid were affected suggested this. In addition, after the episode, Con Edison quietly installed expensive magnetic shielding devices around key equipment. Bell Telephone Company also switched from overhead lines to more expensive, heavily shielded cables buried under the ground. Beyond the somewhat suggestive UFO connections, however, hard evidence is lacking.73
The great northeastern blackout was the most publicized of a series of major blackouts during late 1965. On November 16, a series of power blackouts hit Britain, affecting dozens of sections of London. On November 26, NICAP learned of unexplained power failures in St. Paul, Minnesota, coming at the same time as UFO sightings in the area. From December 2 to December 5, 1965, a series of major blackouts began in Mexico, western New Mexico, and Texas, including an El Paso blackout affecting 700,000 people. Other areas affected included Alamogordo, Las Cruces, and Juarez, Mexico. A month later, on December 26, the entire city of Buenos Aires, and towns as far as fifty miles away, were also blacked out, with many trapped in subways and other enclosed places. On the same date, four major cities in south and central Finland were hit with blackouts. In all cases, the cause was said to be a single insulator.74
THE KECKSBURG CRASH
Less conspicuous than the Roswell crash of 1947, the event at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, on the evening of December 9, 1965, has caused its own share of rancor among UFO researchers. Officially listed as a meteorite in the Blue Book files, the object that crashed may have been several things—but certainly it was not a meteorite.
That night, a brightly glowing object streaked eastward across Canada, Michigan, and Ohio before striking ground at 4:47 P.M., near the small town of Kecksburg. Thousands of people saw the object, which left an intense vapor trail that was visible for more than twenty minutes and was filmed by several people. Debris fell in many places. Many people, including pilots, who saw it thought it was an aircraft on fire. Pilots recorded shock waves from it.
