The Stonehenge Incident: the North Hudson Park Landing

On Boulevard East in North Bergen, New Jersey, across the Hudson from Manhattan, stands the Stonehenge, a 34-storey apartment tower opened in 1967. Beside it lies North Hudson Park. George O'Barski was 72. He co-owned a liquor store in Chelsea, Manhattan, and one of his long-time customers was the artist Budd Hopkins.

Sunday, 12 January 1975. Around 3 a.m. O'Barski was driving home through the park when static filled his car radio. He leaned forward to adjust the dial. That was when he noticed a light to his left.

It was a dark, round object about 30 feet long. A ring of evenly spaced vertical windows ran around it, each about a foot wide and four feet high, glowing amber-yellow. His driver's window was partly down, and he heard a low humming, a drone. The object moved in the same direction as his car, entered a playing field and hovered, settling from about 10 feet to about 4 feet off the ground. It never touched down.

A narrow panel opened between two windows. A ladder-like device came out. About ten small figures climbed down, 3.5 to 4 feet tall, in identical light one-piece suits with hoods or helmets that hid their faces. Each dug a hole with a spoon-like tool and emptied the soil into a small bag with a handle.

Then they hurried back aboard. The craft rose quickly and flew north. The whole thing took under four minutes.

Bill Pawlowski, night doorman at the Stonehenge, reported ten to fifteen bright, evenly spaced lights about 10 feet up in the park and a high-pitched vibration. As the object left, a plate-glass window in the lobby broke. North Bergen police responded, according to Lt. Al Del Gaudio. Another doorman, Frank Gonzalez, described a sighting six days earlier. Local residents Robert and Alice Wamsley said they chased a craft down the street on foot.

O'Barski went back the next day and found holes at the spot, about fifteen of them, four to five inches deep. He kept the story to himself for months. Then he told Hopkins, who tape-recorded his account and brought in Ted Bloecher, New York State director of MUFON, and Gerald Stoehrer, also of MUFON. At a re-enactment on 23 November 1975, Stoehrer's timing supported the figure of under four minutes.

Bloecher found the field thick with grass, except for about 15 bare circles roughly six inches across, with no grass roots in the soil. He took soil samples. No results were ever published. No government agency looked into the case. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969.

No hoax finding or detailed sceptical study has been published. Dogs for the holes and vandalism for the window have been suggested, but neither has been shown. Critics point to the months of silence, to the way the corroboration runs through Hopkins, and to small differences between tellings: 2:45 or 3:00 a.m., nine to eleven figures, the hover height. Jim Moseley's site reprinted Geneva Hagen's 1976 account under the title "The Night the UFOs Didn't Land in North Hudson Park." Hagen also reported a second sighting at the same spot on 15 January 1976.

Hopkins told the story in The Village Voice on 1 March 1976, under the headline "Sane Citizen Sees UFO in New Jersey." It became a key chapter of his 1981 book Missing Time. North Bergen has carried a reputation as a UFO hotspot ever since.