Page Content (OCR)
yet the weird phenomenon that he described to me seemed more like the wildest fantasy of a science- fiction writer's imagination than it did as an actual object observed by an experienced police officer. In fact, Thompson didn't want to talk about the object at all. For three days he gave me quite a hard time, agreeing to an interview and then ducking out of it in one way or another. Originally I had phoned him from my home in New York City and convinced him that I wanted to write an honestly objective story about his sighting. My purpose, I told him, was not to ridicule him but to report exactly what he had seen. "All right," he said. "Then there’ sno problem. Tl talk to you.’ " But after I arrived at the Wanaque Reservoir Police Headquarters, he was somehow too busy to talk. He said that he would see me earlier the next day before he went on duty and we could discuss his sighting then. He was very reserved and did not seem too friendly. The next day I softened him up a little bit by informing him that his Chief of Police had not only agreed to talk into my tape recorder but that the Chief had highly recommended that I interview a certain Sergeant named Ben Thompson. Still he found an excuse not to sit down and describe his experience. But he was becoming a little more friendly. During my wait to interview Thompson I talked with several other members of the Reservoir Police Force who had seen UFOs in the past. They were all reluctant to talk about their sightings. When I asked them a question about UFOs they would invariably reply with the same phrase. Some said it with a smile, others with no change of expression. The phrase was: "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." It was obvious that there was an unwritten policy among the Reservoir Police officers to remain silent about the UFOs that had "plagued" their area. I was puzzled by their reluctance to talk. Later I discovered the reason from a statement made to me by Sergeant Thompson. "You know," he said, "I've personally been ridiculed right down to the end on this thing. Sometimes," he added bitterly, "I've almost come to blows with people who'd say to me, 'What were you drinking last night, Ben?' Or they'd say, "You can see the funniest things when you have a snootful, Sergeant.’ The boys over at Headquarters get the same treatment. It's aggravating." Furthermore, the U.S. Government had apparently played a role in establishing their policy of silence about UFOs. This had occurred during the earlier sightings. In the words of Ben Thompson: "We notified said Government. And they sent an investigator to Lakeland High School where he interviewed us. He came right out and said we were 'seeing things.' Swamp gas, a star - things like that. He as much as told us that we didn't know what we were seeing. So we figured it would be a waste of But I finally persuaded the police officers, including Thompson, to talk about their experiences at length. Before I left Wanaque, Sergeant Thompson was calling me "young man" and "buddy." His boss, the Chief of Police, said: "It was a real pleasure to meet you." And the others were all friendly and pleased that their story would be told without bias. I finally pinned down Sergeant Ben Thompson to a tape-recorded interview. Prior to that moment I'd had the impression that he was a hardboiled, hard-working cop. I felt that he would brusquely go through a quick interview and then dismiss me. Instead I found him actually to be a warm person with breath to talk to anybody, official or not, from then on."