12 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • OCTOBER 2018
IN THE NEWS
UFO INVESTIGATOR:
LI SIGHTINGS SOAR BY JOSEPH FLAMMER
Editor’s note: Joseph Flammer is
a field investigator with the Mutual
UFO Network (MUFON).
Attendees to my lectures usually
want to hear about Unidentified
Flying Object events that allegedly
occurred decades ago, but I like to
steer their attention to more recent
sightings, especially around Mount
Misery on the Nassau-Suffolk border.
The haunting UFO incidents that
typically make people in my audiences
shudder include the reputed
spaceship crash in Suffolk County’s
Southaven County Park in Shirley
in 1992, the alleged shoot-down of
an alien craft over Moriches Bay
off Center Moriches in 1989, and
the supposed secretive UFO-linked
Montauk Project thought-projection
experiments at Camp Hero
in Montauk in the 1970s and early
1980s. But I stress to people that UFO
activity on Long Island is ongoing.
It’s especially pronounced in the
Melville-West Hills area, where
new UFO cases are reported every
year to the Mutual UFO Network
(MUFON) as UFO sightings, and
where ghost are known to haunt
unabashedly — a common trait of
UFO hotbeds.
“The UFO was triangular with
three bright lights, one at each tip,
and it was moving towards Mount
Misery,” recalls Emily Blinder, 64,
of South Huntington, revisiting the
exact spot where, she says, she saw a
UFO on West Hills Road, after filing a
sighting report about seeing the craft
on a cold, dark January 2017 night.
The report she filed with MUFON
comes to me because I was one of the
licensed MUFON Field Investigators
covering the area.
“It was moving slowly over the
trees,” Blinder continues. “It was only
about 55 feet away.”
Curiously, Blinder says she
spotted the unidentified aerial
phenomenon near Walt Whitman’s
birthplace in West Hills. The location
is near the infamous West Hills
Nature Preserve on Sweet Hollow
Road, a place where Whitman often
A Long Island driver took this photo of what they believe to be a UFO.
walked and where trails are named
after him.
The preserve is located at the base
of storied Mount Misery, a hill with
a summit nearly 400 feet high and a
base covering an area of about a mile
in any direction. It is a place where
UFOs were allegedly seen so regularly
in the woods in the 1960s that John
A. Keel devoted a whole chapter to the
sightings and high strangeness in his
1975 book, Mothman Prophecies, and
where ghosts and strange creatures
reportedly appear to this day.
“I sat in my car at the stop sign and
just watched the UFO,” says Blinder, a
retired insurance customer service
representative who admits feeling
uneasy whenever she is near Mount
Misery because, like a lot of people, she
believes the woods are haunted. “Then I
followed it as best I could, but it moved
off to Mount Misery and was gone.”
Blinder describes the craft she saw
for at least 30 seconds as having “no
exhaust signature nor wings — and
was silent.”
According to Cheryl Costa, who
cowrote UFO Sightings Desk Reference:
United States of America
2001-2015 with her wife Linda
Miller Costa, Suffolk County
led New York state in the number
of UFO sightings during
the 2001-2015 period, with a
total of 554. Nassau County
ranked fourth in the state,
with a total of 276 reported
sightings.
“An area with a larger population
tends to have more
sightings than a less populated
area,” says Costa. “That’s how it
usually works.”
Last year’s U.S. Department
of Defense (DOD) release of
three videos of Navy F/A-18 Super
Hornets pursuing UFOs in 2015 may
be the most alarming of all reported
sightings. The DOD admitted that
more than a dozen such UFO chases
have occurred over the East Coast
since 2015, and nobody knows what’s
flying the objects or why.
People ask me if these UFOs are
secretive government craft or alien
in nature.
I tell them, “It’s not my job to say
what they are, only to report that
they’ve been seen.”
I’m hoping the government soon
discloses the truth about what it
knows so we can know, too. Not
knowing is getting old.
Suffolk County led New York State in the
number of UFO sightings reported during
the 2001-2015 period. Nassau County
ranked fourth.
A Long Islander’s sketch of their alleged
UFO sighting.