The Newfield UFO and the Great Ithaca Flap

Newfield is a small hamlet southwest of Ithaca, in Tompkins County, New York. In 1967, residents reported lights in the sky through the summer and fall. One regional paper listed "stationary red lights, flashing green lights, white glows and lights in triangular pattern." On the night of October 23, Stanley Orr was driving to Ithaca on Route 13. He saw "two large, stationary red lights". He "at no time thought they were a flying saucer". Then he heard what two boys had seen.

Tuesday, October 24, 1967. About 9:30 p.m. Donald Chiszar, 12 or 13 depending on the account, and Pat Crosier, 10, were sitting on the Crosier front porch. A bright disc-like object approached them. Its leading edge was tilted toward them. It came closer and hovered over a house 50 yards away, about 130 feet above the ground.

On top was a knob with an antenna. Hanging beneath was a "square box" full of red, green and white lights. Then the boys saw the windows. Two big, square windows separated by a bar, with strange lettering beneath. Inside were two humanoid figures, "rough-colored and brownish" with "big, wide hips", and control panels with lights and knobs.

Then it was gone. "But then all of the sudden it leveled off real fast and disappeared." Other Newfield residents that night saw lights "red and white, or green and white, flashing in some kind of sequence".

By October 30, more than 100 sightings were claimed by local residents. People described erratic flight high in the sky, low lights hovering over the hills, lights in a triangle, and lights in a rim around a circular craft. On December 4, a Newfield couple saw two round silver discs with windows around the rim. On December 12, a woman driving with a child between Ithaca and Auburn reported a disc with a dome and red and green square windows.

November 9, 1967. Lt. Gerald White of the 35th Air Division at Hancock AFB in Syracuse came to Newfield. About 45 citizens and investigators spent four hours with him at a private home. His view was that the reports "sounded like airplanes", following one of the major air corridors in and out of New York City that ran over Newfield. William Donovan, a private investigator, set up shop on Newfield's Main Street. One account says he found no proof. Another quotes him saying the sightings would "still have to be classified as unidentified". He was later charged with fraud in an unrelated matter.

Cornell astronomers were sceptical. The porch encounter went into the APRO Bulletin, and Richard Hall filed it in The UFO Evidence, Vol. II as a case with two occupants. NICAP also cites the Condon Committee report for it.

In 2007, ufologist Robert Barrow published the account of an anonymous Cornell engineering student. He had sealed a dry-cleaning bag, held its bottom open with a frame and fuelled it with a Boy Scout "Heat Tab". He lit it in the "dust bowl" between the University Halls dorms while about 100 freshmen watched. "Within a few minutes, the bag arose and began a journey, sailing out of sight to the southwest direction." Others copied him. Students launched laundry bags carrying burning fuel. A local pilot fitted a strobe light to his plane.

Barrow stayed cautious. The magnitude of official interest, he wrote, "was just too extraordinary to dismiss via the launch of a homemade 'UFO.'" Local rumour blamed Cornell's synchrotron. The balloons may explain distant drifting glows. They do not obviously explain two boys describing windows, lettering and occupants at 50 yards.

The Great Ithaca Flap lives on in local retrospectives and blogs. Stanley Orr later described the sightings on camera. The porch encounter itself, with its two figures behind the glass, has never been explained.