I thought my brother had been dipping a bit too heavily into the cooking sherry at work that night in the summer of 1986 when he says he saw something in the sky.
Rob Levine, then a recent graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, was driving home after closing the St. Andrews Cafe for the night. He saw what he first thought was a low-flying airplane or helicopter. Its size seemed to vary and colored lights were moving around it, he remembers.
He pulled over and watched for a while.
“I looked up and down the river valley, staring at this,” he said. “It seemed to get bigger and smaller, closer and farther, in the blink of an eye. The lights were moving in a V or triangle shape, and colors would change into shapes that looked like unknown letters, like it was trying to communicate something. And there was no sound whatsoever. There was light coming from it, but it appeared to go from the ground up instead of from the object down. I was, like, this isn’t a helicopter.”
I no longer think he was having a tipsy vision. In the 1980s and ‘90s, the Hudson Valley was a hotspot for unidentified flying objects. More than 5,000 people — including police officers, professionals and other highly reputable sources — report seeing essentially the same thing my brother saw between 1982 and 1986, making these sightings one of the biggest clusters of UFO reports in history. On March 24, 1983, there were more than 300 reports alone, all describing a V-shaped craft adorned with colored lights that hovered slowly and silently in the sky. The sighting became known as “the Westchester Boomerang.”
Hellbound and Down 