CNY 1952
“It was bound to come,” a Herald Journal editorial said on July 21, 1952, shortly after the first sighting. “The surprising thing is that the flying saucers (or whatever they are) avoided the skies of Syracuse and Central New York so long.”
During the early morning hours of July 18, reports were made from all over Upstate New York, Buffalo, Massena, Oneida and Syracuse, of mysterious objects in the sky.
Dan Kelly, of 310 Hixson Avenue in Syracuse, gave this detailed report of what he saw from his porch to the Herald Journal:
“It was round and looked to be on fire. It seemed to whirl around and then disappeared after five or 10 seconds. It was a horrible, frightening thing to see and I nearly passed out after watching it. I sat on the porch for two hours after that waiting for it to return but it never came back.”
A group of boys saw something near Harmon Field in Oneida. Most of them were too afraid to talk to the press, arguing that “no one would believe us.”
But Joseph Medbury did, and he said that what he and his friends saw were not airplanes.
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“There was no sound of motors and their lights were not blinking,” he said.
From Utica came reports from Civil Defense observers that “flying discs” hovered in the sky for two hours before darting off to the northeast leaving a trail of “colored flames.”
The night would begin a two-week period when unidentified objects, “flying saucers, moving lights and shining balls,” were daily occurrences. A Syracuse newspaper editorial said that “seeing things at night” was becoming the “great American game.”
On July 22, a Brewerton man saw four “orange-red” spots in the sky at 10:30 p.m. A half-hour later a Liverpool boy saw several objects in the sky, “like stars, only brighter,” from his family’s car in North Syracuse.
The next day, Mrs. Fred Bishop of 223 North Edwards Avenue alerted her neighbors to an “awfully bright light” in the sky. It was noiseless, seemed to be rotating and about the size of a football.
On July 24, came one of the closet encounters yet.
Margaret Rebensky was driving on West Genesee at 11 p.m. when her mother, Julia Lindsey, called her attention to six bright lights in the sky.
“All of a sudden one dropped out of formation and came right at them,” the Herald Journal said.
“Mrs. Lindsey let out a scream. The saucer, about the size of a honeydew melon, dipped down, passed over the hood of her car and shot straight up and rejoined the formation. She said it seemed to be shaped like a quarter moon, gave a white intense light and was followed by a plume of smoke.”
There were sighting that night all over Northern New York, in St. Lawrence, Lewis and Jefferson counties.
By the beginning of August, Central and Northern New York had a full-blown case of what the Post-Standard called “Sauceritis.”
It seemed like everyone had an opinion on the phenomenon.
The military said the many of the sighting around the Syracuse-area matched up with flights by jets from Hancock Field. Or people might be seeing weather balloons.
One Post-Standard letter writer, “A. Layman, from Syracuse,” blamed the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission and their “’A’” and ‘H’ bomb” experiments as the cause of “our Flying Saucers and our present freakish record-breaking weather.”
Another letter said the flying objects were either “spaceships from some other planets” or “maybe they are controlled missiles from some enemy country.”
If that was the case, the newspaper should not be giving them so “much publicity.”
A letter from Wesley Kubackl of Syracuse asked readers to conduct a simple experiment with glass of water and a sun-filled window, which he said explain what people were seeing when they saw on an object in the sky.
“Taking the glass and moving it will give you a traveling saucer. In contrast the sun moves, and a similar situation is set up.”
Cornell professor of astronomy, Dr. S.L. Boothroyd, agreed and wrote that people were seeing a natural phenomenon, similar to the aurora borealis.
One Herald Journal editorial found a bright spot in the whole thing:
“One result of all the hubbub may be a stimulus to the study of astronomy. Dwellers among city lights forget what the stars look like. If the whole public constitutes itself a committee to inspect the heavens it will see its petty problems of the day in a new perspective.”
