The 1974 New Hampshire Wave

For about two weeks in August 1974, the towns around Lake Winnipesaukee in central New Hampshire reported a run of night-time lights, and the local papers ran the reports almost day by day. The witnesses were not a single group with a single story: they were town police officers, a county sheriff and his dispatcher, state boat inspectors, a touring stage actress, and a group of teenagers with a telescope. The Laconia Evening Citizen carried most of the coverage, and its reporter Roger Amsden followed the wave from the first night to the sketches that closed it.

The first reports came from Tilton. On the night of 12 August, patrolmen Michael Alden and Mark Payne watched a light that shifted between white, red, yellow and green move over Lake Winnipesaukee and Paugus Bay at around 3:40 in the morning. Belknap County Sheriff Donald Alden and his dispatcher said they saw it too, and described a triangular outline. By 13 August the paper reported it was the third night running, that photographs taken at Tilton were being processed, and that UFO Central in Chicago might send representatives to investigate. Residents around Varney Court, Southgate Terrace and Brickyard Mountain described round, dome-shaped objects hovering low.

On 14 August the sightings reached the water and the mountains at once. Boat inspectors from the New Hampshire Division of Safety Services reported a light near Eagle Island on Lake Winnipesaukee, and the Mutual UFO Network investigator John P. Oswald examined the case. The same day, the actress Barbara Bel Geddes, in the area for the summer playhouse season, reported a green-lit object from a ski chalet on Mount Gunstock with a companion; they notified the Sheriff's department and Strategic Air Command, explaining that they would have reported it sooner but were "stuck up on the mountain without newspapers."

The image that came to stand for the wave was a drawing. On the night of 15 August, sixteen-year-old Diane Champoux of Gilford watched a domed object through a telescope from Liberty Hill with about fifteen other young people, and sketched a saucer with a fixed light at the front and a yellow-white light at the rear. Amsden published her sketch in the Evening Citizen.

Not every report stayed unexplained. On 23 August the paper carried four more sightings and an officer's judgement that one low object he had responded to was a helicopter. The wave then faded, until a coda that November: on 18 November, in Franklin to the south, a hospital orderly named Philip Cain and others watched six objects cross the dawn sky around 5:30 in the morning. One of them, looking back, said it was "probably an airplane." The local press had recorded the whole arc, and the clippings below are that record.

The wave also left a trace in the parts of the paper that are not sighting reports. In an undated letter to the Evening Citizen, Wanda Wells of North Main Street in Belmont answered the ridicule that followed the reports: she had seen many UFOs herself, did not claim they were all "flying saucers," and hoped the people who "scan the skies for moving stars" would not be discouraged by the disbelieving. Belmont sat at the centre of the wave, the first Route 106 sighting in 1973 and officers dispatched there in 1974, and Wells wrote from inside it.

UFO material had reached Laconia readers well before 1974. Around 1967 a second local paper, the Laconia News, ran a review of Frank Edwards' Flying Saucers, Here and Now! under the headline "Flying Saucers Will Contact Man," quoting the Air Force consultant J. Allen Hynek that the objects "constitute a scientific problem and should be dealt with as such." Hynek's name was in the Lakes Region press years before his Mutual UFO Network colleague John Oswald examined the 1974 reports.

The Lakes Region papers were carrying UFO material well before August 1974. In September 1965 the Evening Citizen reproduced Rex Heflin's California photographs under the cautious headline "Well, Is It?". In 1973, the year before the main wave, three Belknap College students in Center Harbor reported a pulsating red sphere from the college observatory in April, and that November the columnist Dick Pennington gave "Of UFOs and Such" over to the subject. The collector also kept an undated piece needling witnesses who came back from a sighting without a photograph.

The reports did not stop with 1974. A few years on, the same papers carried a run of 1978 sightings from the towns around the lakes. In March a couple near Bean Road in Holderness watched a clam-shaped object change colour while a neighbour's television failed. That July a sighting near Franconia and the Old Man of the Mountain was looked into by the investigator John Quinn. In August a bright, irregular light over the Pemigewasset River at Plymouth drew an explicit comparison to Betty Hill's White Mountains sightings. And in October, at Campton, the contract archaeologist Kate Chmurney and her sons watched a large triangular craft move slowly and without sound over Interstate 93.

Witnesses named in the coverage: Tilton patrolmen Michael Alden and Mark Payne; Belknap County Sheriff Donald Alden; the actress Barbara Bel Geddes and her companion on Mount Gunstock; Diane Champoux and the group of young people at Liberty Hill; and, in November, Philip Cain, Phyllis Tripp and Linda Bordeau at Franklin.

Investigation: the Mutual UFO Network (through investigator John P. Oswald), UFO Central in Chicago, the New Hampshire Division of Safety Services, the Belknap County Sheriff's Department, and the Tilton and Laconia police. Strategic Air Command was notified of the Mount Gunstock report.