The Pine Bush UFO flap and the West Searsville Road skywatches

Pine Bush is a hamlet in Orange County, New York, west of the Hudson River and less than an hour from New York City. In 1980, a local couple's reports of nightly activity drew the attention of Harry Lebelson, "the sole person at the UFO desk" at Omni magazine. Early that year Ellen Crystall, a New Jersey musician and writer, went to meet him in the fields beside the town.

July 1980. Crystall stood in a field with her companions. Then the craft came. At least a dozen large triangular ships surrounded them, flying about, landing in the field and taking off again. It was "like Grand Central Station at rush hour," she said. Afterwards she found burned areas and deep impressions in the soil.

She was 21 when she saw her first being. "The being had a very large head and a rust-color stretch-knit jump suit," she told the New York Times in 1987. In her book, its huge eyes "wrapped around the sides of its head to its ears."

By the mid-1980s, sightings were almost a nightly occurrence. Hundreds of enthusiasts lined West Searsville Road each night, a spot some skywatchers called a "portal." The craft most often described was a large boomerang with lights along its "arms," as big as one, two, or three football fields. It was completely silent. It could hover, or move as slowly as 15 mph. Some witnesses said that when they wished for a better view, it "moved quickly towards them and hovered in front of or over them."

Others saw circular craft, cigar shaped objects, dancing lights and bright orbs in formation. Jim Smith, a corrections sergeant, spoke of "Tesla globes" on film and of angel hair like white Christmas icicles. "I've seen so many of the beings, I know how they move," he said. John DiTuro said he was abducted at age 11 and described "grays" 3 to 4 feet tall. Susan Mann said her husband drove into angel hair and lost time.

No official investigation is known. Crystall gathered photographs and some video, using an infrared scope someone sent her for night viewing, and published Silent Invasion in 1991. Geologist Bruce Cornet arrived in the early 1990s. His five-year study included a three-year proton-magnetometer map of 24 square miles of the Wallkill River Valley. It reported a "magnetized tree" beside a buried magnetic source.

The debate that followed offered aircraft, including from nearby Stewart, and the light-plane formations blamed for the wider Hudson Valley wave. Others suggested mass hysteria, an elaborate hoax or government mind control. Author Hunter Shea weighed them all and concluded: "I simply have no idea." No specific debunking of Crystall's photographs has surfaced.

Then it faded. New housing covered the old viewing fields. In 2000, after an altercation between a developer and skywatchers, police began enforcing a no-parking rule on West Searsville Road. Crystall died in 2002. Activity slowed to a trickle.

The legend stayed. In 2003 the Times Herald-Record called Pine Bush the "UFO capital of the Northeast." Charles Lear revisited the case in 2021. A UFO and Paranormal Museum opened in June 2021. The story runs beside the Westchester Wing boomerangs east of the river, chronicled in Night Siege by Hynek, Philip J. Imbrogno and Bob Pratt.