Great Barrington Draws the Intergalactic Jetset

53 years ago, a cluster of UFO encounters took place in Berkshire County, MA.

So the story goes…

On a balmy late summer evening in the Berkshires Thom Reed and his family were driving, summertime sadness seat belted in, from Ski Butternut in Great Barrington through the Covered Bridge in Sheffield, when they noticed a bright, floating object in front and above their car.

Then, a change in air pressure like suddenly finding oneself in an electromagnetic field.

Next, an eerie dead silence fell. The light grew brighter and brighter until it encompassed the family who found themselves somewhere else.

“We remember being in what looked like an airplane hanger,” Reed said. “We didn’t stay in the car. We were removed from the station wagon. that’s true. Where we were, I don’t know.”

Three hours passed by without explanation —

At 9:49PM, the moon rose over the corn field, an oval waning gibbous; a lollipop being licked by the starry sky.

After coming to, Nancy, Thom’s mother, had switched seats with his grandmother.

Dozens of witnesses called into WSBS, our local radio station, to describe some sort of bright foreign object.

Several other encounters occurred in the area that evening: Tom Warner was at a friend's house, where he was supposedly taken by a beam and then disappeared momentarily. Nearby, Melanie Kirchdorfer had just gotten ice cream with her family and went to Lake Mansfield, where she saw a bright light and started levitating. She recalled coming onto a ship with other children and being laid out. Eerily, Warner said he had seen her in the craft crouching in a corner. They had not known each other before but felt an immediate connection when they finally met.

Smoking a Farnsworth Classic with the Covered Bridge from 1854 in the background.

Netflix's reboot of Unsolved Mysteries chronicles the events on the evening of Labor Day 1969 in Berkshire County.

Reed's account of his family's encounter has gone where few other UFO reports have gone before: it into the historical record books. The Great Barrington Historical Society formally inducted the story in February 2015, describing it as "significant and true" after reviewing contemporaneous news coverage, witness statements and polygraph results.