The Official Guide to UFOs-pages

Page 70 of 161

Page 70 of 161
The Official Guide to UFOs-pages

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Part II The mystery of these strange UFO sightings deepens as the author attempts to track down the source of the planes that witnesses saw on the scene. On the same night that Sergeant Ben Thompson of the Wanaque, N.J., Reservoir Police Force was temporarily blinded by the brilliance of the strangest UFO thus far reported (see Wanaque Part I), a young student of electrical engineering was "fooling around" with a Geiger counter about a mile away from the reservoir where the UFO was sighted. What he and a college classmate discovered that night accentuates the mystery veiling the UFO seen by Sergeant Thompson. The student is John de Giacomo, a Junior at Newark College of Engineering, Newark, N. J. Young Giacomo lives in Ringwood, N.J., a town adjacent to Wanaque Borough. He is also Chief Radio Operator for the Ringwood Borough Civil Defense organization. At the time that he and a friend were testing radiation levels near the Wanaque Reservoir, he hadn't the faintest idea that a UFO was about to be sighted. In fact, he joked about it. Here's how he told me the story: "Well, it all started one night in October (1966). It was the 11th of October. One of my friends from school, Jim Bonney, and I were fooling around with some radiation equipment - mainly with a Geiger counter. This was at the northern end of the town. And we started getting some abnormal radiation readings. It was nothing to warrant any concern. But it was about four times above the background radiation that you would normally pick up in that area. This was about 8:30 in the evening. "You know, there have been so many UFOs sighted around here that we started joking and I said: "Well, the UFO is going to be flying again tonight!’ And this became my famous quote around school. Because sure enough, when Jim and I were driving back to school next morning, we turned on the car radio to WABC and heard a news announcement stating that a UFO had been spotted the night before "That same night, back at Ringwood, I tested the identical area again at the northern end of town - and the Geiger counter read normal. "The high radiation count that we had recorded previously seemed to occur only at the northern end of the town. This led us to the theory that possibly the latest UFO sighted at Wanaque Reservoir might be the result of a series of American nuclear experiments. Because we do have a nuclear research installation up here - Union Carbide Nuclear Research - in Sterling Forest. In a straight line, it's only about a mile-and-a-half to two miles from where we were located that night with the Geiger counter." Not that I doubted this theory of John de Giacomo - he is a sharply intelligent young man with a deep interest in science and technology - but I felt that I ought to check it out with the people at Union Carbide's Sterling Forest installation. They have a big nuclear reactor there, built into the side of a mountain near Tarrytown, N.Y. If John de Giacomo was correct in his theory, a radiation leakage from the reactor might cause an ionization of the air in pockets that could be blown by the wind and produce moving manifestations of over Wanaque Reservoir.