Nearly 60 years ago, a halcyon family outing turned into in unforgettable experience when a mysterious glowing craft suddenly appeared overhead, hovering in eerie silence before vanishing over the horizon without a trace, leaving a stunned family convinced they had witnessed something not of this world.
This month, the family reunited in the place they saw the strange craft to share three unique, yet extraordinarily similar, versions of that day in 1967 when they saw what they believe was an alien space craft.
Traveling in from far-flung locales, the Halsey family parked their cars earlier this month along the side of Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton. Donald, Suzanne, and Philip Halsey, who all lived in the hamlet at the time, have since moved away, but they clearly remember the day they were headed back from taking a swim in Noyac Bay in the family’s green woody wagon.
A third brother, Douglas, said he did not remember the incident at all but his three siblings said he was in the car at the time.
“It must have been about 35 yards wide,” Suzanne said, describing the object as being ringed in green lights with red lights in the center. To her, it was “clearly a round disc” but to her younger brother, Philip, it was more “like a bus with lights on the side.”
Donald, the eldest brother, who was around 17 at the time, said he had just gotten his learner’s permit and was driving down Brick Kiln Road when he heard his siblings yelling to chase something. He said being focused on the road as a new driver, he hadn’t seen the object at first,
and made a right turn onto Scuttlehole.
Once he had heard enough, he said, he turned, looked over his left shoulder, and caught a glimpse of the flying object. He turned the car around and headed toward Lumber Lane, following the route of the craft itself.
“Like a stupid teenager, I said, ‘let’s go check it out!’ “
His memory is of a rotating mass covered in red or pink lights.
Suzanne, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, said it seemed to be headed toward the beach, while Philip, sitting in the back, guessed it was heading in the direction of the East Hampton Airport. Either way, they both said it was slowly making its way over Bridgehampton.
“It was like it was taking in Bridgehampton . . . surveilling,” Suzanne said, likening it to “what a drone might do today.” She said it was low to the ground and would be grazing the tops of the trees growing in the spot there today.
“It was taking its time,” Philip agreed.
In the 1960s, the vast majority of the land south of the road was farmland, and vistas swept all the way down Lumber Lane to the train tracks and beyond. “It was all potato and corn fields,” Donald reminisced.
They followed the craft, they all said, while it hovered down the east side of Lumber Lane until it disappeared near the railroad tracks. Suzanne described it as slowly dropping over the rooflines of the distant neighborhood and out of their sight, while Donald said it was instantly “just gone.”
“The whole episode lasted less than five minutes,” said Suzanne, who was 18 at the time. The retired nurse practitioner continues to share her experience with a U.F.O.-enthusiast group she joined in Hingham, Mass., where she lives with her husband.
As it turns out, they were not the only ones who spotted a U.F.O. around that time on the East End. In fact, East Hampton was the scene of its very own U.F.O. flap, which is defined as a concentration of sightings reported over a short period.
Even much later, “UFO Sightings Desk Reference,” a county-by-county compilation of sightings, ranked Suffolk County as number one, with 554 U.F.O.s reported from 2001 to 2015.
The same year the Halseys saw something in the sky, 1967, several men reported a “vapor trail . . . turning into blue flame before disappearing” on Napeague in March with more reports coming in May. Two men told police they saw a black-and-orange flying saucer over Hither Hills in Montauk. They said they watched the object for 15 minutes before it “shut off” and disappeared.
On the north side of town the year before, in 1966, residents called police to report a “brilliant white light, between 50 and 75 feet in length.” A resident said it headed north toward Gardiner’s Island at a high speed. And an East Hampton man said he saw a flying saucer as he stepped out of the I.G.A. hovering near the railroad overpass on North Main Street “traveling very low” before it disappeared.
Two teenagers saw something they couldn’t explain in 1966 at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett. “The object, they reported, was huge (three or four times the size of an automobile), almost round, had windows on the bottom through which interior light could be seen, and had a red blinking light on top,” the teens told The Star back then. The lights disappeared into the fog of the ocean.
There were so many local sightings that year, that someone else took notice. A representative from the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a private U.F.O. research organization, visited Amagansett to meet with some of the witnesses.
Gordon Lore, the group’s vice president at the time — who went on several years later to play a large role in the first congressional U.F.O. hearings — said over a dozen sightings had been shared with him during a meetup at Roy K. Lester’s house on Main Street.
“There has been a wide variation in descriptions of what was seen in the published reports, with the unidentified objects differing greatly in size, shape, and color. No occupants or other beings have been reported, at least publicly,” The Star related.
Reports continued to come in, though more sparingly, over the next two decades.
Today, after several congressional hearings in the last few years, some say more and more credible sightings, including videos, have made their way into the public eye. The Pentagon studies them as unidentified anomalous phenomena (U.A.P.).
The Halsey family said they don’t talk about that day often — maybe every 10 years or so — but something unexpected sparked the latest reminiscence.
A bottle of wine, Donald said, prompted his visit back to Bridgehampton from his home in Northern California. Le Cigare Volant, a creation of Bonny Doon Vineyards in Santa Margarita, Calif., is the brand’s 1984 vintage and was inspired by a U.F.O. landing.
In 1954 in the Rhone region in France, the village government of Chateauneuf-du-Pape passed an ordinance banning flying saucers from landing in the region, a move they believed would protect their grape vines. The ordinance went on to declare that any U.F.O. that did land would be impounded.
The incident eventually inspired Bonny Doon to create Le Cigare Volant as homage to the Rhone region. The label depicts a U.F.O. shining a beam of light downward.
Donald said that bottle of wine led him to contact the winemakers at Wolffer Estate Vineyard in Sagaponack — hoping they might draw on the East End U.F.O. story just as vintners at Bonny Doon had drawn on the French U.F.O. sightings.
Roman Roth, a co-owner of the vineyard, was willing to meet the family, and did so while they visited. While Mr. Roth, who is also the head winemaker, did not promise the group a bottle named in their honor, he said there could be some yet-to-be-identified surprises in store for the winery’s 40th anniversary in 2028.
