Beyond the Sightings

The New Hampshire scrapbook that holds the 1974 Lakes Region wave was not only about lights over Lake Winnipesaukee. The same collector clipped the wider strange: a psychic prediction, a piece of national UFO lore, and the hard science of the space age. The three cuttings here sat in the file beside the local sighting reports, and they map the reach of one reader's curiosity.

The psychic clipping anchors the group. A National Enquirer celebrity-ESP feature has the comedian Red Skelton describing how he wrote "President Kennedy will be killed in November" in a notebook in the summer of 1963, months before the assassination. Beside it the collector kept Jim Aylward's light syndicated column on Leonard Stringfield's claim that crashed craft and their occupants were held at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and Henry J. Taylor's science column on the Viking landing on Mars and Pioneer 10's run to Jupiter. None is a sighting report. Together they show a reader following psychic claims, UFO rumour, and space exploration in the same years and the same pile of newsprint.