The sightings at Exeter began with a young man named Norman Muscarello, who was hitchhiking home to Exeter on Route 150 in the wee hours of September 3, 1965. At about two in the morning, near Kensington, NH, he was startled by an object that suddenly came out of the clear sky towards him. He described it as about 90 feet in diameter, with bright, pulsating lights around what appeared to be a rim. It silently wobbled and floated towards him, and when it seemed about to hit him, he dropped to the ground on the shoulder of the road. The object then backed away, and Muscarello jumped up and ran to a nearby house and pounded on the door without results. He then ran out into the middle of the highway and flagged down a car. The middle-aged couple inside drove him to the Exeter Police Station, where he excitedly told his story to the officer on duty. The officer called in Patrolman Eugene Bertrand, who was out on patrol.

Bertrand was amazed when he heard Muscarello's story, because he had talked to a woman about an hour before who was pulled over on Route 101. She had reported that a large silent object with red flashing lights had followed her car all the way from Epping, a distance of twelve miles,until it had suddenly shot up into the sky at the place she had pulled off the road. Patrolman Bertrand had not made a report of the incident because he had not believed the woman. At 3:00 a.m., Bertrand had become convinced that there was something worth investigating, so he took Muscarello back out to the spot on Route 150 where he had seen the object.

There was an open field at the site, and a house and a horse corral. At first, they saw nothing, so they walked out into the field towards the corral. Suddenly, the horses began to stir and whinny and dogs began to bark, and from behind two pine trees rose a bright, silent round object that lit up the whole area with a brilliant red light. It moved toward them with a motion like a falling leaf. They retreated to the police car and Bertrand radioed in that he saw the object. The object hovered about fifty yards from them at an altitude of about a hundred feet. It was so bright that it was difficult to tell if there was a shape behind the lights,and the lights seemed to dim and then brighten in an odd pattern from left to right, then from right to left. It then began to move off toward Hampton with the same fluttering motion that it had shown previously. At that time, another policeman who had heard Bertrand's radio report, David Hunt, drove up. He, too, saw the object as it moved off towards Hampton and finally went out of sight. The object was then seen in Hampton, and was reported to Pease Air Force Base.

This was just the first of the Exeter sightings. There were many more, and many, but not all, of them, seemed to occur near high-tension power lines. John G. Fuller, in an article in Look magazine and later in a book titled Incident at Exeter, theorized that the UFOs were somehow drawing power from the lines, since some witnesses reported that this seemed to be the case.

In the summer of 1966, a former electrical engineer for General Electric named Phil Klass, happened to pick up Incident at Exeter. Klass was a technical writer for Aviation Week magazine. After he began reading the book, noting that many of the sightings occurred near high-tension power lines, he began to formulate a theory that the sightings were caused by "ball lightning". Klass wrote an article about the Exeter sightings that would be the first of his many articles and books debunking UFOs, and Aviation Week published it. It became widely accepted as a good explanation for the Exeter sightings. So broadly accepted, in fact, that you will barely see mention of the Exeter sightings in UFO lore these days.

But IS "ball lightning" a good explanation for UFO sightings, and in particular the one above? We did some investigating of the phenomena, and here's what we found:

1) There is a great deal of controversy over whether ball lightning exists at all. Some scientists think that ball lightning is just an afterimage of ordinary lightning seen after a normal lightning flash. Others say that it is an "optical illusion" or that people have mistaken meteors for ball lightning. The only evidence that exists for ball lightning is "anecdotal accounts", and not a lot of those. Anecdotal accounts are just witness accounts, the same type of evidence we have for UFOs...

2) Reports indicate that observed "ball lightning" can be white, yellow, orange, red, or blue. It is usually less than 50 cm in diameter, and it usually lasts only a few seconds. Witnesses report a strong smell of sulfur when it is nearby. Almost all reported appearances of ball lightning have followed an ordinary lightning strike and have occurred during a thunderstorm.

None of this seems to fit the Exeter sighting. The sky was clear, there was no thunderstorm. The object seen was 90 feet in diameter and lasted quite some while, possible even long enough to follow a car 12 miles. Plus, although Klass' theory relies heavily on the high-tension power lines, ball lightning is not associated with power lines, but with normal lightning.

Perhaps, rather than "ball lightning", another electrical phenomenon known as "St. Elmo's Fire" was meant instead? The first time I heard of St. Elmo's Fire was when I read Moby Dick by Herman Melville:

All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.

There was a great scene in the movie when Gregory Peck, as Ahab, held up a harpoon and the green fire glowed at the tip. But St. Elmo's Fire is a green or blue glow above a pointed object on the ground, like the masts and lightning rods of the Pequod. St. Elmo's Fire is created by a positive electric charge reaching skyward in response to an area of negative charge in the clouds or air above. Instead of generating a lightning strike, the corona discharge, as it's called, causes millions of tiny sparks to radiate from objects like the masts of ships, utility poles, antennas, the wings of aircraft, or a harpoon, causing the green glow.

Does that sound like the Exeter sighting? The Exeter object didn't stay in one place over a utility pole, it moved around quite a lot. It wasn't a soft green glow, but a brilliant red, brighter than a car's headlights.

There is a type of corona discharge that causes a glow around high tension power lines. It occurs when the air around those lines becomes highly ionized. However, the glow follows the cloud of ionized gases or air, and would not tend to move in a horizontal direction. Besides, it requires something to cause the cloud of ionized gases, and in the Exeter cases, there was no evidence of such a thing. Any other type of corona discharge from high-tension power lines would require a significant discharge of electricy from those lines, and the engineers at the Exeter and Hampton Electric Company reported no unusual voltage losses recorded at the times of any of the sightings. Once again, there was no evidence of any cause for such a discharge and no evidence that such a discharge occurred.

Whatever the Exeter objects may have been, the "rational" explanation proposed by debunkers rivals the extraterrestrial one in improbability. Brilliant red corona discharges from power lines are as rare as hen's teeth, if they occur at all, yet we are expected to believe that they occurred not once, but numerous times in and around Exeter within a short time. Where is the cause-and-effect? What conditions occurred to create these "coronas" in the fall of 1965 in New Hampshire that have not been duplicated there since and have not been reported anywhere else?

This article was previously published in 1998. It has been revised slightly by removing dead links and adding new ones as needed.

Loy Lawhon

Due to past abuses, I do not allow articles to be reprinted on other sites. You may use the first paragraph and provide a link to this page for the rest of the article.

Print References: • "The Nature of Ball Lightning" (c)1971 Stanley Singer Plenum Press, 1971 • "Incident at Exeter" by John G. Fuller • "Out There" by Howard Blum • "Watch the Skies" by Curtis Peebles