On January 31, 1978, three young
boys were "bootskating" on the ice-covered playing field of the
Montvale Memorial Elementary School in Montvale, New Jersey. Eddie Hargrove, his
brother Michael, and their friend John Cummings watched as a flying object
approached and hovered overhead.
Since it remained stationary for
almost five minutes, the boys got a good look at the object. It was square with
rounded corners and appeared to have a dome on top. It had a yellow light at
each corner and a light underneath, which cast a red beam that stopped just
short of the ground.
Eddie, Michael, and John quickly
realized that they were seeing something strange. As the flying object moved
away, they became frightened and ran to the dugout by the school's baseball
diamond. By then, the object had disappeared. Before they could discuss what had
happened, they noticed what looked like a man in a yellow jogging suit across
the road from the field. Michael thought it was a neighbor who frequently jogged
in the evening.
"Mr. Johnson," Michael
called to the man, "did you see that UFO?"
Immediately the man turned toward
the boys, and Michael gasped. The man was not Mr. Johnson. His head was shaped
oddly, and had a crease down the forehead; he looked more like a hawk than a
man. Then, before he could answer, ten other creatures, all in yellow jogging
suits, joined him. Each one was bald and had large, dark, square places where
his eyes should have been; their skin was light yellow. They walked stiffly,
like Nazi soldiers, according to John. "Have you heard of Hitler's
army?" John later asked a UFOlogist who interviewed him. "You know how
they walked kind of stiff, with their arms straight? Well, that's . . . how they
looked."
But the joggers weren't the only
strange thing that the boys saw after the UFO. All three noticed that the
surroundings had grown eerily silent. They also smelled the odor of burning
sulfur.
Mustering their courage, they left
the dugout to get a better look at the Yellow-suited creatures. Some were
walking back and forth, while others headed down a nearby road. Then the boys
noticed another figure - a woman, they believed.
She was wearing a short dress and
had no facial features. As Eddie's said, she just had skin on her face. She
walked down the road to a low fence, where she sat down. She pointed at the
three boys, as if to signal them, then raised her arm skyward. Eddie, Michael,
and John looked up and saw the squarish object flying toward them. The woman
stood up and began to walk away. A police car drove toward her, but as it
approached, she disappeared. After it had passed the spot where she had been,
the boys saw her reappear and continue walking.
As she got farther away, something
even stranger happened. "Parts of her," the three boys later reported,
"kept going away - disappearing - and coming back again." Finally the
woman walked through the rear wall of a building and disappeared completely.
So did the creatures in the yellow
suits, but the boys had concentrated so much on observing the woman that they
did not see what had happened to the men. Now everything was normal again -
almost.
The boys hurried to John's house and
banged on the door. John's brother, Hilton, looked out the window to see what
was the matter. He saw the boys at the door, but he also saw a spinning object
in the sky. It had yellow and red lights exactly where the three other boys had
seen them earlier. Hilton let his brother and his friends in. After a few
minutes' discussion, they decided to telephone the police. As it turned out, no
other UFO reports had been made that night. But the boys didn't doubt for a
moment what they had seen.
By now you might be wondering if the
boys really saw a UFO. They said that they saw something in the sky. Could it
have been an airplane? After all, they lived on the flight path for Newark
Airport.
You might also wonder if the boys
saw the yellow-clad UFOccupants. Perhaps they were so frightened by the flying
object that they turned ordinary people into aliens.
And what about the strange woman?
Why was she pointing at the sky, and did she really disappear? Maybe she was a
ghost. Or maybe she was just a tired woman walking home from work who happened
to stretch her arm a moment.
Were the boys playing a prank? Or
were they so scared by a passing plane that they imagined a spooky UFO? Were
they trying to get some attention? Or could they have been telling the truth?
Three UFO investigators, Budd
Hopkins, Ted Bloecher, and Patrick Huyghe, decided to study the case. First,
they called the boys' parents and arranged to investigate the encounter. On
February 5, five days after the initial sighting, they arrived in Montvale. The
men inspected the playing field and surrounding area. They also interviewed each
boy privately.
The investigators had two questions
in mind: Were the boys lying, or had they seen something? If they had seen
something, could it be explained by normal circumstances?
In the course of their questioning,
the men tried to trick the boys into admitting that they hadn't really seen a
UFO or any strange creatures. They questioned the boys about Star Trek, Star
Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But they learned from
Eddie and Michael's father that his sons had never been interested in science
fiction. The boys stuck to their story. As Budd Hopkins wrote in his report,
"It became clear to all three of us by the end of the day that the boys
were not perpetrating a hoax."
If the boys had actually seen
a UFO, the men wanted to know whether it was something ordinary (like an
airplane or a helicopter) that had caused the boys to jump to conclusions about
every person they next encountered. When the New York Air Traffic Control Center
and Newark Airport reported that no flying object had been picked up on radar in
the vicinity of Montvale that evening, the investigators decided to center their
inquiry on the creatures.
Could they have been joggers?
Officer Pelsang of the
Montvale Police Department reported that he had been on duty that evening and
had seen no group of joggers. In fact, he had never seen more than two people
jogging together in Montvale and never after dark. No one jogs after dark.
They'd have to be crazy." Officer Pelsang was certain that he would have
noticed a large group of joggers.
If they were not joggers, could the
creatures have been employees of the Department of Public Works (DPW)?
