Aliens in the Hudson Valley? ( Times Union )

                                        

 

Pine Bush doubles down on its decades-long UFO history with a new museum

 

When Domanie Ragni moved to the Orange County hamlet of Pine Bush with her husband in 1990, it didn’t take long for the rumors about blinking lights in the sky and massive boomerang-shaped spaceships to reach her.

“At first, it sounded so outlandish! But as time went on, I heard similar stories from people I knew and respected and it all began to sound pretty fascinating,” she recently recalled.

Though it may be surprising to some, the Hudson Valley has long been known as a hotbed of UFO activity, with locals reporting unidentified objects in the sky since the opening decades of the twentieth century. And if you were to pinpoint the epicenter of these extraterrestrial events on a regional map, you’d land in tiny Pine Bush, in the town of Crawford on the western edge of Orange County.

“I’ve got newspaper articles from the 1950s and people who grew up in Pine Bush as kids giving accounts of seeing that classic saucer shape in the sky,” says C. Burns, who runs the Pine Bush Anomaly Archive, an ongoing oral history project with a mission to collect any and all information about Pine Bush’s unique history.

Since 2008, Pine Bush — which is located in the Orange County town of Crawford — has expanded its annual gathering of ufologists into an all-out festival celebrating the area's history as a hub of paranormal activity. Seven thousand people attended the Pine Bush UFO Fair in 2019.

Courtesy of Pine Bush UFO Fair

 

 

Burns — who prefers to go by his first initial due to the stigma sometimes involved in chasing the paranormal — has recorded hundreds of first-person accounts over the years. He points to the 1991 publication of the book Silent Invasion as the catalyst that really put Pine Bush on the map for the UFO obsessed. Full of photos and vividly detailed personal experiences about author Ellen Crystall’s encounters in and around the Pine Bush area, the book caused a whole generation of amateur skywatchers to make their way there. 

In fact, that’s how Burns, who grew up and lives in New Jersey, found out about the tiny town and its outsized reputation. “After I read Ellen’s book, I looked up Pine Bush on a map, and realized, ‘Hey, that’s not too far from where I live,’” says Burns. “So I jumped in the car and headed over.”

Armed with low expectations and a map, Burns says he showed up at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Pine Bush on a night in 1993. “When I started asking people in town where to spot UFOs, the responses I got were all over the spectrum, from are-you-crazy looks to ‘Oh yeah, you go up Hill Road and take a right.’”

Over the next five years, Burns began regularly visiting the area and fell in with a core group of locals who came out West Searsville Road, ground zero for skywatching in the 1990s, every night.

“I came away not understanding what exactly was going on in Pine Bush but knowing there was something unusual — mind-blowing really — happening up there,” he says.

So what’s so special about Pine Bush?

What stargazers have witnessed in and around Pine Bush has changed over the years, from stories of traditional saucer shapes in the 1950s and 60s, to boomerang-shaped vessels and football field-sized triangles hanging directly above the trees in the 1980s, to intricate and unexplained lights that characterized sightings in the 1990s.

“Some of the hallmarks of UFO sightings in the Hudson Valley are that they're very close, very large objects seen for prolonged periods of time,” says Linda Zimmermann, a Hudson Valley local and expert on paranormal activity who has written and lectured extensively on the Pine Bush phenomena.

“Growing up, there were always stories about UFOs but it wasn’t until I had a couple of sightings myself that I realized something was going on,” recalls Zimmermann.

“Stories about little disks zipping across the sky for five seconds make an impression,” she says, “but imagine a triangle the size of a football field seventy-five feet over your head for 20 minutes.”

Zimmermann, who has interviewed hundreds of people about their extraterrestrial experiences over the years, says in the late 1980s and early 1990s, on any given night, there would be hundreds of people lining the old farm roads surrounding the Pine Bush area and waiting for something to happen.

“And often,” says Zimmermann, “it did.” 

So what is it about Pine Bush that has made it so attractive to generations of extraterrestrial visitors?

Despite decades devoted to documenting the area’s paranormal goings-on, Burns and Zimmermann aren’t quite sure how to answer that one. But you can’t be submerged in this world for so long without throwing a few theories at the wall. And these run the gamut, from alien-attracting mineral deposits on the banks of the nearby Shawangunk Kill, to the region’s large deposits of magnetite — a highly magnetized iron — and quartz.

“My theory is they're fascinated by us and studying us,” says Zimmermann, “We study all sorts of species that we’re curious about, so that’s my best guess — they’re curious about these strange humans.”

Yet for many locals, the area’s history is an almost mundane part of life in Pine Bush.

“I always thought this was normal,” says Zimmermann. However, she’s come to understand that what’s normal for some, can be a very powerful and emotional experience for others.

“In many cases, I’m the first person people have told about their UFO experiences because there is still a stigma that hangs over it all,” she says. “'I’ve had big strong grown men burst into tears because of the emotion, the fear, and the anxiety that wells up when they're recounting their stories.”

Town sets sights on a new kind of visitor

These stories are a big part of the town of Crawford’s history.

Since 2008, the town of Crawford has doubled down on its UFO heritage by steadily expanding what started as an informal annual gathering of ufologists into an all-out festival. Though the Pine Bush UFO Fair was canceled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2019, seven thousand people showed up to revel in all-things alien.

“To put that in perspective, we only have a population of nine thousand,” says Ragni, who now serves as the town’s director of tourism.

This year Ragni is expecting an even bigger crowd when the fair returns over Labor Day weekend. And on June 4, the Pine Bush UFO & Paranormal Museum, a year-round exhibit highlighting the extraterrestrial activity of the Hudson Valley, New York, and New England, will open right downtown.

 

Pine Bush's annual UFO Fair in September, pictured here, will now share the paranormal tourism spotlight with the new Pine Bush UFO & Paranormal Museum, which is scheduled to open this year in June.

Courtesy of Pine Bush UFO Fair

 

The museum’s opening, which has been in the works for over a year, was also delayed by COVID-19 restrictions. However, the delay may have been a strike of good fortune. The New York Times recently reported that UFO sightings around the country have increased dramatically over the last year, as people found themselves with an abundance of free time and a desire to turn their eyes to the sky once again.

What’s more, the opening of the museum comes shortly after a highly anticipated deadline snuck into last year’s $2.3 trillion appropriations package, which requires the Defense Department to coordinate with U.S. intelligence agencies on a declassified report detailing any information they possess about the national security threats posed by UFOs.

Despite the publicity the report has created in major media outlets, those who have been swimming in these waters for decades are skeptical that the government will disclose any revelatory information. For Burns, it’s quite a role reversal.

“Aliens and UFOs — all that stuff is so popular nowadays to the point where I’m talking with people I work with about it and I’m the skeptic,” he says. “That really blows my mind.”

UFO support group helps residents cope with paranormal past

In 1993, a tiny article appeared in the local paper, the Times Herald-Record. “It said, ‘Have you ever seen a UFO? If so, call this number,’” recalls Bill Wiland. “Well, I cut that out and pasted it on my desk.”

Wiland wasn’t the only one.

The response to that simple query was so overwhelming that soon a monthly meeting formed, creating a forum for people who had experienced a UFO sighting to compare and share their experiences with others and find support.

Nearly 30 years later, the group, which calls itself the United Friends Observer Society, still meets pretty much the first Wednesday of every month. Over the years, the number of attendees has waxed and waned with the frequency of sightings in the area. Wiland, who now leads the group, says the dynamic has changed over the years too.

“In the early days, there was barely enough time each month to make it through everyone’s experiences,” he says.

Nowadays, those who show up are more likely to engage in theoretical discussions, like, for example, who might represent the citizens of Earth if the chance to join an intergalactic federation ever presented itself or even more terrestrial matters like the coronavirus.

After being forced to cancel several meetings due to the COVID-19 pandemic, attendance in recent months has dwindled so much that Wiland’s not convinced the group will last much longer.

Today, if you take a drive down West Searsville Road, it would look almost unrecognizable. The empty fields once edged with the cars of eager stargazers have been replaced with dozens of new houses, transforming the countryside landscape that captured the imaginations of so many into a pretty standard picture of suburbia.

It’s this somewhat inevitable development that many believe has helped close the door on Pine Bush’s most prolific chapter of alien activity.

“Whatever this phenomenon is, it needs open space,” says Burns, who has studied other areas around the country — from Missouri to Washington — that have witnessed similar waves of UFO activity diminish after transforming from countryside to suburbia.

For her part, though, Zimmermann’s not ready to shut the book on Pine Bush’s illustrious past.

“If someone were to ask me where in New York they could go to try to see a UFO today, Pine Bush would be the first two words off my lips.” 

Caitlin Cafaro 

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