The Everittstown "We Just Want Your Dog" Encounter (John Trasco)

November 1957 was a restless month. On 3 November the Soviet Union launched a dog named Laika into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The same weekend, the Levelland wave broke over Texas, part of a wider American saucer wave.

Everittstown is a small unincorporated village in Alexandria Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey. John Trasco lived there with his wife and their dog, King. Six years old. A "charcoal-colored, half-blind, bad-tempered Belgian police dog," tied up at the side of the house.

Wednesday, 6 November 1957. About dusk. Trasco had just come home from work. He went out to feed King.

At the kitchen window, Mrs. Trasco heard the dog barking wildly. She looked out and saw a "luminous egg-shaped object" in front of the barn, about 20 meters from the house, partly hidden by undergrowth. It was 3 to 4 meters long. It was "hovering while going up and down at a few feet above ground-level." King grew frantic, eventually frothing at the mouth.

Her husband faced something she never saw. A figure 2.5 to 3 feet tall, with a putty-colored face and "large, protruding, frog-like eyes." It wore a green suit with shiny buttons, a green hat, and gloves with shining objects at the fingertips. Its voice was "sharp and scary," its English broken.

"We are peaceful people. We don't want no trouble. We just want your dog." Trasco shouted "Get the hell out of here!" The being went back into the object. The object "went fast up into the sky, like a tatter of flame that breaks off an outdoor bonfire and goes up."

Trasco had reportedly tried to grab the visitor. His wife said he "got some kind of green powder on his wrist, but it washed right off. He found some under his fingernails the next day." No sample was kept. The next night she saw "two lights shone over the house" that "didn't move, as the lights of an airplane do." Then they vanished.

The couple told no one, because "we knew no one would believe us." The exception was a sister-in-law who had attended a lecture by the contactee Howard Menger. Through her, the story reached the Delaware Valley News, a weekly in nearby Frenchtown. It ran on 15 November 1957.

Journalist Dick Harpster interviewed Mrs. Trasco, though not her husband, and recorded the conversation. His account appeared in CSI Bulletin #10 in December 1957. No Project Blue Book file or police report is known. Patrick Gross, who compiled the case, noted a puzzle. Mrs. Trasco spoke of her husband grabbing "one of the beings," yet every account describes a single entity. His verdict: "An evaluation seems premature, an audition of the witnesses interview tape should precede."

No hoax has ever been alleged. Doubters can point to the Menger link in his home county, the delay before the story surfaced, and a single witness to the being. Still, the case endured. Coral and Jim Lorenzen included it in Flying Saucer Occupants. Jacques Vallée listed it in Passport to Magonia. And its strange request, made three days after Laika left Earth, still has no answer.