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before that time to the end of World War II, or a matter of more than 20 years. In a few cases, women have become hysterically frightened by what they saw. One of these, a housewife from West Milford, N.J., frantically phoned the Paterson Morning News and told Ball: "Look, I thought I was flipping my wig. Going crazy. Until I read that you and the Mayor had seen these things too. That made me feel better." Pompton Lakes Police Sergeant Bobby Gordon told me: "Our Headquarters receives calls about UFO sightings from all over. One night I was on the desk during the midnight shift. It must have been about one-thirty or two o'clock in the morning when I received a phone call from the Mother Superior up at Mt. Calvary Convent in Ringwood. Ring-wood borders the reservoir area. And she asked if we would send a police car over to the Convent because a bright object was flying around the Convent. So I radioed one of the Ringwood patrol cars to go over and take a look. I never heard anymore about it, however. That was in March, after the original January sighting." Sergeant Gordon then turned to Howard Ball, who was present. "It was after your sighting and prior to mine," he said. But he actually didn't mean this as a joke. His mathematics teacher when he was a boy in high school, Martha Dockery, still teaches at the same school where he now teaches English part-time. One day recently, after his classes were over and they were alone in the teachers’ room, she confided to him that she had also seen a mysterious bright light in the sky. She described its actions to him. "It was the same kind of thing I had seen - exactly," he told me, "but she had sighted it at a different time." The Mayor of Wanaque Borough, Harry T. Wolfe, his son and two of his Councilmen also saw a UFO on the same evening and shortly after Newsman Ball had made his sighting. But this object, although it was seen over the Wanaque Reservoir, did not impress the Mayor or his party. The Mayor himself considered it extremely unusual - but not spectacular. His description of the object and what he thought of it will be detailed in Part III ... along with descriptions of really strange encounters with UFOs by the Chief of the Wanaque Reservoir Police Force, John Casazza, and the young electrical engineering student already mentioned, John de Giacomo. Also included in the next part will be a summary and surprising evaluation of the weird UFO phenomena that seem to have made the Wanaque, N.J., Reservoir area their home base of operations. Part III Much fuss has been made in the public press about the fact that the Mayor of Wanaque Borough had also sighted one of the strange UFOs over the Wanaque Reservoir that supplies water to industry and homes in Northwestern New Jersey. The widespread implication was that if the Mayor himself, certainly a reliable man, saw it, the UFO had to be more than a natural phenomenon - and was probably a space ship of extraterrestrial origin. Ball looked at me and smiled. "That's kind of the way people date things around here," he quipped. A new theory may possibly explain the weird sightings at the reservoir.