James Everell's "great light" over the Muddy River, Massachusetts Bay Colony (1638/39)

John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, kept a journal of colonial life. One entry begins simply: "In this year." Popular accounts date it to March 1, 1639, probably from where the entry sits in the journal. Winthrop's year began in March, so the colonial year 1638 ran into what we now call March 1639. That is why the date is often written 1638/39.

The place was the Muddy River. In 1639 it ran through marsh into the tidal flats of the Back Bay, part of the Charles River estuary. The farming settlement along it was known as Muddy River Hamlet. It became Brookline in 1705.

Winthrop's words: "In this year one James Everell, a sober, discreet man, and two others, saw a great light in the night at Muddy River." It did not behave like any light they knew. "When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine."

"It ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton," meaning Charlestown, north across the Charles. "And so up and down about two or three hours." The men had come down in their lighter about a mile. When it was over, "they found themselves carried quite back against the tide to the place they came from." "Divers other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place."

Winthrop did not see the light himself. He recorded it without comment, and there was no inquiry. The manuscript volume that held the entry is gone. Volume 2 of the journal burned in the 1825 Boston fire while the editor James Savage had it on loan. His transcription survived, and the text also survives through the 1790 Hartford edition, edited mainly by Noah Webster.

Retellings have drifted. Some say the men rowed upstream. Some add that they had no memory of how they got back. Neither detail is in the journal.

The most common explanation is ignis fatuus, the will-o'-the-wisp of marsh gas. The river did run through marshland. History.com, Ripley's and Fox News all note that it does not fit a light moving fast across about two miles for hours, and it does not explain the boat being moved. The blogger Sarah Angleton lists other ideas: drunken hallucination, marsh gas reflecting Venus, a demonic reading. No source alleges a hoax.

Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck, in Wonders in the Sky, read the moved boat differently. The men, they suggest, were "unaware of part of their experience." They add: "Some researchers would interpret this as a possible alien abduction if it happened today." Nick Pope, a former UK Ministry of Defence UFO desk officer, called the account "pretty stunning." "Most UFO witnesses, like Everell or Winthrop, are serious, sober individuals."

Winthrop's journal records more strange lights. On 18 January 1644, three men in Boston saw "two lights arise out of the water near the north point of the town cove, in form like a man." About a week later a light "like the moon" rose over Boston and "shot out flames and sometimes sparkles."

Today the Everell entry is often billed as America's first UFO sighting. History.com, Ripley's, Fox News, Yankee and Boston Magazine have all retold it. In 2019 it inspired an art installation, "Winthrop's UFO." The light over the Muddy River has never been explained.