Sighting record / 1966
Patchogue, Long Island. October 1966. Something hung in the sky over the village and would not move. Witnesses said it was shaped like a giant hot dog. A huge sausage, covered with multi-colored blinking lights. Three policemen watched it. So did James Mooney, a photographer for the New York Daily News. It hovered without moving for about an hour. Then it disappeared. Mooney said he had shot a roll of film. It would be developed that morning. No picture ever surfaced. The New York Times counted five Suffolk policemen. The wire story counted three. Sixty years later, the giant hot dog over Patchogue is still a light without an answer.
1966 was a restless year in American skies. A wave of sightings that ran from 1965 to 1967 produced the Michigan "swamp gas" reports in March and the Portage County police chase in April. Long Island had its share. That spring, people on the East End reported "a brilliant white light in the shape of a 50-to-75-foot-long torpedo" hovering over Napeague. In October, the story moved west. To Patchogue, a village in the Town of Brookhaven on the south shore.