10.02.2025

September 20-21, 1962 - Hawthorne, New Jersey

Sept 20 -- Early in the morning, a watchman, William Stock, of Hawthorne, reported a saucer-shaped object which hovered and moved from side to side as it shone bright enough to illuminate a huge area.

Sept 21 -- At 3:40 a.m., William Stock and four invited policemen spent a half hour watching a round object with two apparently revolving body lights. At 4 a. m., two policemen, between Hawthorne and North Haledon, watched a bright light revolving and moving up and down and from side to side for about 35 minutes. That night, 4 young persons in Hawthorne reported seeing a bright star-like object with tight beams coming from it.

On page 12, there is a table concerning reaction cases. They list the September 20 Hawthorne event as:

Hovered over quarry; watchman approached in jeep to investigate, UFO maneuvered out of headlight beams.

On page 152, in a table listing “maneuvers” cases, there is this entry for the September 21 Hawthorne sighting:

Circular UFO (apparently a disc) hovered, began moving when spotlight shone at it, sped away rapidly.

There are no references in the document for these sightings. The entry in the document mentions many sightings. to address those by Mr. William Stock and his police officers.

Sources

lue Book had no case for this specific sighting. There is a Newark, New Jersey sighting but it is a general collection of all the UFO reports. NICAP’s UFO investigator of October/November 1962 mentions the sightings but does not get into any specifics not mentioned in the UFO evidence document. This led me to look at Gross’ UFO history. 4 He documents the case(s) from some local newspaper clippings. It seems that NICAP simply collected the clippings and used them with little or no investigation.

Analysis

The newspaper clipping does not give us a lot of information for analysis. However, it does provide an address and a description to where the witnesses were looking based on topography. They state the object appeared over a hill near the property. If one looks at Google Earth, the high ground is to the west of the business. This implies that they probably were looking in a westward direction.

Another important point is the witnesses saw the same UFO around the same time in that direction on both mornings. That makes me wonder if there wasn’t an astronomical source for the UFO. Using Stellarium, I found a good candidate for the UFO.

The planet Jupiter had just past a close oppositions and was shining at magnitude -2.8 in the Southwestern sky at 3 AM EDT. It set around 4:50 AM on the 21st.

Jupiter is bright in the sky and can take on the appearance described by the witness. The key factor is that it was in the direction described and it was visible on both mornings around the same time.

Conclusion

Like much of what is in the UFO evidence, the information about the sighting is based solely on a news clipping and no detailed investigation. The information about the sighting is limited because of this but there is enough to suggest that what was seen was the planet Jupiter. It should be labeled “probably Jupiter” and be removed from the “UFO evidence” category.

Quelle: SUNlite 5/2024