PROJECT: Jackalope 003 - The Exeter UFO Incident

0:33 Welcome to Project Jackalope. My name is Jeremy, and this is where we document the cases that refuse to be explained away, the encounters that survive scrutiny, the witnesses who don't back down, and the questions that the most powerful institutions in the world can't answer. For File 003, we're heading to the quiet seacoast of Southern New Hampshire, to a single field off a dark stretch of Route 150. In the early hours of September 3rd, 1965, an 18 year old kid, 2 veteran police officers, and an entire community came face to face with something that the United States Air Force eventually had no choice but to officially label unidentified.

1:22 From the pulsing blood red lights over the dining farm, to the Pentagon's rare and reluctant admission of the unexplained. This is Project Jackalope, file 003. The Exeter UFO Incident The first Muscarillo Encounter At 2:24 in the morning on September 3rd, 1965, eighteen year old Norman Moscarello burst through the front door of the Exeter Police Station, looking by all accounts, like he had just seen something that had no business existing. He was white as a ghost, shaking and barely holding it together. Patrolman Reginald Tolin, nicknamed Scratch, was on desk duty that night and knew the kid. Muscarello was only three weeks out from shipping off to Navy Boot Camp at Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago, IL. Tolin offered him a cigarette, lit it for him, and waited while Muscarello tried to collect himself enough to get the words out.

2:21 And what came out wasn't clean or linear. It came out in pieces, fragments of something that the more Muscarello described it, the less it sounded like anything that belonged in the world he had walked out of an hour earlier. So here's what happened. Norman had recently enlisted in the Navy, and boot camp being only weeks away, he had sold his car for some extra cash before he left on the night of the second, he'd hitchhiked about 10 miles South to Amesbury, MA, to spend a few hours with his girlfriend. Because when you're 18 and about to leave for the military, that's kind of what you do. The plan was to catch a ride back to Exeter, but the later it got, the fewer cars that were on the road.

3:01 And before he knew it, he was walking on foot, alone, somewhere around 2:00 AM, walking north on Route 150 through the dark stretch that cuts through Kensington, New Hampshire, just South of Exeter. That's when he saw the lights. At first, he figured it was an accident. Maybe a cop had pulled someone over, red lights flashing on the side of the road. But as the tree line broke open and field came into view between two farmhouses, the explanation evaporated. The lights weren't on the road. They weren't attached to a car. They were in the air. A ring of brilliant, pulsing red lights wrapped around the edge of a circular object, hovering silently over the clearing.

3:47 No sound, no engine. Just this thing sitting in the sky, glowing. And then it moved towards him, completely silent. It began drifting directly at him, deliberately, almost like it had noticed he was there. Muskarella stood frozen in the road until the last possible second, then dove off the shoulder into the shallow ditch near a Stonewall that lined the farm. The craft drifted past them, close enough to make the chimney of one of the nearby farmhouses a near miss, slowly yawing as it went, that lazy, wobbling rotation that witnesses would describe again and again throughout this case. When it moved far enough away that Muscarella felt like he could breathe, he ran to the closest farmhouse and pounded on the door hard. For several minutes, too.

4:36 Nobody came, and while he stood there hammering away, he watched the object drift E toward Hampton and disappear. And that's when he saw headlights. A car was coming down Route 150 from the direction of Hampton, heading towards Exeter. Muscarella didn't wait. He ran straight into the middle of the road and waved it down. The couple inside could have kept going, but they didn't. They drove him directly to the Exeter police station, where he walked through the front door and into the beginning of one of the most well documented UFO cases in American history. Now, most people who know the Exeter incident know this part of the story. But as we move forward, we're going to get into the details that most people don't know. The pieces that aren't in the highlight reels that got buried in the pages of a 1966 book are simply lost to time.

5:24 Before we get there, though, there's one more piece of the commonly told story that we need to cover. And that's what happens when Officer Tolan gets back on that dispatch radio. The Muscarello, Bertrand and Hunt encounter. As soon as Officer Tolan heard Muscarello's full account, he got on the dispatch radio and called for Cruiser 21 to swing by the station. Within 5 minutes, Officer Eugene Bertrand walked through the door. Bertrand wasn't just any cop. He was a Korean War Air Force veteran who had spent his service conducting air to air refueling operations on KC Takers. This was a man who knew aircraft, what they looked like, what they sounded like, how they moved. He sat down and listened carefully as Muscarolo told the whole story for a second time.

6:15 And by 3:00 AM, Bertrand and Muscarolo were back in the cruiser heading out to Route 150. When they pulled up to the site, Bertrand noted how clear the night was. No clouds, the stars were sharp and unobstructed from one end of the sky to the other. He parked on the shoulder next to the telephone pole number 668 and radio backed. Tallinn, before they got out, told him there was nothing visible at the moment, but that the kid was still rattled and he was going to walk him out to the field just to look around and help calm him down. The two men climbed out and started moving through the field toward the farmhouse Muscarella pounded on earlier. Bertrand swept the tree line with his flashlight, saw nothing. He knew this property.

6:58 It belonged to the Dining family. Karl Dining kept horses about 100 yards back, behind the tree line that split the field in half. Bertrand was still trying to talk Muscarella down, suggesting that what he'd seen was probably a helicopter out of Portsmouth Naval Base in Maine, maybe 20 miles to the northeast. It was the kind of explanation A rational man offers to a scared kid at 3:00 in the morning. But then the horses started screaming, the barn erupted, hooves kicking the walls, the dining farm dogs barking and howling in a way that wasn't normal. Bertrand turned toward the commotion, and that's when he saw it, completely silent. A large, roundish object rose above the tall Pines behind the corral, and the entire area was instantly bathed in a brilliant red light. Bertrand's hand dropped to the grip of his 38 service weapon. He didn't draw it.

7:51 What he did instead was grab Moscarella by his shoulder. The kid had gone completely rigid and he pushed him back toward the cruiser as fast as he could move. Both men piled in and Bertrand grabbed the radio. My God, I see the damn thing myself. Back at the station, Officer Tolan heard those words come out of the dispatch speaker from a man who knew as one of the toughest, most level headed officers on the force. That had to be a strange few seconds. At the front desk. From inside the cruiser, the two men watch the object hold position roughly 100 feet above them. It rocks slowly back and forward while it's lights pulsed in a rotating sequence. 5 lights firing in order from left to right, then reversing right to left. 1234554321, each full cycle taking about two seconds.

8:42 The red light washed over everything around them, brightening and dimming with each pass, and the whole landscape took on this slow, pulsing red glow that Bertrand would later struggle to find words for. After several minutes hovering above the cruiser, the object began to drift back out over the field, and that's when it opened up. It started moving in tight, jagged patterns, Breakneck acceleration in One Direction, a dead stop, a sharp 90° turn, then hovering again with that same slow wobble. It was simultaneously erratic and precise, like nothing either man had a reference point for. That's when Cruiser 20 pulled out Officer David Hunt.

9:25 Hunt had been monitoring the radio and drove out to see for himself. He pulled up alongside Bertrand, got out, walked to the edge of the road and just stood there watching. Author John G Fuller in his book Incident at Exeter, Unidentified Flying Objects over America. Now both Hunt directly on what he saw. Quote. It was going left to right between the tops of two big trees. I could see those pulsing lights. I could hear those horses kicking out in the barn there. Those dogs were really hailing. Then started moving slowly across the tops of the trees. Well, just above the trees. It was rocking when it did this. After it moved out of sight toward Hampton, toward the ocean.

10:07 We waited a while and AB 47 came over. You could tell the difference and there was no comparison. That last line is worth sitting with for a second. Eugene Bertrand, Air Force veteran aerial refueling specialist, is standing next to another officer watching AB 47 cross the sky. Immediately after watching this thing performed and his colleagues take away is there was no comparison. These aren't civilians guessing at what they saw. These are the men who know what aircraft look like in the dark. At 4:30 AM, both officers drove Moscarella back to his mother's apartment. Misses Dolores Gazza met them at the door.

10:47 She'd been up worried sick, of course. She said later that the story her son told her was hard to accept. When she looked at him and looked at the two police officers standing behind him who had seen the same thing, she knew that whatever had happened to her son that night, he hadn't made it up. Now, before we move on, I want to leave you with something. At the end of the first chapter of Incident at Exeter, Fuller quotes Officer Bertrand reflecting on the whole experience. I think it's one of the most honest things ever said by a witness in a UFO case. Not because it draws A dramatic conclusion, but because it doesn't. This is a man who went out to the field to debunk a scared teenager and came back without an answer. And here it is in full quote.

11:36 It's a startling thing and you think about it because you wonder what it is. Your mind imagines the impossible. The world is going so fast and that it could be something from outer space. It makes you wonder, It really does. Dave and I talk about it often. I get the feeling from him that he doesn't think it belongs to the Air Force. I want to keep my mind open, look for a reasonable explanation. But then as I look back, my mind again, I can't help but wonder. When I first heard the kid tell about it, I thought it must have been a plane. But the more he talked I knew it couldn't be 1. Then I was sure he was talking about a helicopter. I did ask him on that four mile ride out to the place, did you feel any wind? I know from a helicopter he's bound to feel some wind from it, but he said he didn't.

12:25 I thought he might have got scared and mistaken. When we watched it, Dave and I and the kid tried to listen to hear a motor. We did everything to check it out. We weren't believing our eyes. Your mind is telling you this can't be true, and yet you're seeing it. So you check out your eyes to make sure you're seeing what you're really seeing. We just couldn't come up with an answer. I kept telling Dave, What is that, Dave? What do you think he'd say? I don't know. I had never seen an aircraft like that before. I know damn well they haven't changed that much since I was in the service. False claim. In the 60 plus years since that night in Exeter, a lot of people have taken a swing in explaining the Muscarella, Bertrand and Hunt saw, and the first one came fast.

13:14 A news report out of Amesbury, MA hit the wire and spread across New England almost immediately claiming that the whole thing was a case of mistaken identity. The terrifying silent red pulsing object that had paralyzed an 18 year old and rattled a Korean War veteran. Well, it was just an advertising plane. A small fixed wing aircraft from something called the Skylight Aerial Advertising Agency carrying a lighted sign. Nothing to worry about, go back to sleep. And for a moment, people did. There was a collective exhale across the Seacoast region. A rational explanation had arrived, and a community that had been quietly unsettled for weeks grabbed onto it. But it didn't last long.

13:58 The most immediate problem with the skylight theory wasn't a matter of opinion. It was a matter of paperwork. Joseph Budina, the owner of the agency, didn't just deny the claim. He produced flight logs and maintenance records showing that his aircraft had been completely grounded for nearly three weeks leading up to September 3rd. The plane wasn't in the air that night. It wasn't in the air of the week before. The story was dead on arrival, but even if the plane had been flying, the physics just didn't work. Skylights advertising aircraft uses banks of bright white lights to spell out letters, not high intensity blood red pulsing lights rotating in A5 point sequence.

14:39 A fixed wing plane has to maintain forward airspeed to stay aloft, which means it cannot hover. It cannot wobble silently in place above a police cruiser for several minutes. It cannot accelerate to breakneck speeds, snap into a 90° turn, and come to a dead stop. It also has an engine, and engines make noise, something every single witness that night specifically noted was completely absent. The skylight theory collapsed almost as fast as it appeared. But it said a pattern that would repeat itself throughout this case, and honestly, throughout the history of UFO investigations in general. Reach for the most comfortable explanation first, push it out to the public, and hope the details never catch up. In Exeter, the details always caught up. What the false claim actually accomplished in the end was the opposite of what it intended.

15:30 Because when the witnesses, Muscarella, Bertrand and Hunt, watched a tidy explanation fall apart under basic scrutiny, it only hardened their position. They knew what they saw didn't fit inside the box of conventional aviation. Now they had proof that people were trying to put it there, and they hadn't done their homework. The Air Force shows interest. By 8:00 AM on the morning of September 3rd, the overnight shift had turned over at the Exeter Police Station. Lieutenant Warren Cottrell came on duty, went through his morning pass down, saw the blotter entry from the night before, and did what any reasonable watch commander would do. He picked up the phone and called Pease Air Force Base. By 1:00 PM, the Air Force had two men on the ground. Major Thomas Griffin and Lieutenant Alan Brandt drove out to the field off Route 150 in Kensington and conducted interviews with all three primary witnesses, Muscarello, Bertrand, and Hunt.

16:30 They were professional, they asked their questions, and then they left without offering a single explanation for what 3 credible witnesses had observed less than 12 hours earlier. That was just the beginning. The Air Force's formal involvement ran through Project Blue Book, the military's official program for investigating UFO reports. And from the outside at least, it didn't look much like an investigation. It looked like a cleanup operation. The institutional goal seemed less focused on identifying the craft and more focused on finding a way to close the file. The witnesses picked up on that quickly, and it didn't sit very well. Then came the official explanation.

17:12 The Air Force concluded that Musgarella, Bertrand and Hunt had misidentified aircraft involved in a Strategic Air Command exercise called Operation Big Blast High Altitude B-47 bombers running a training drill in the area that night. Bertrand didn't just disagree with that, he was offended. This was a man who spent his military service refueling aircraft in the air. He knew what AB 47 looked like from the ground. He knew what 6 jet engines sound like at altitude and at treetop level. The noise would have been deafening. The object he and Muscarello had watched hover silently 100 feet above their cruiser made no sound at all. Not a hum, not a rumble, nothing. 47 cannot hover. It cannot wobble in place.

18:05 It cannot snap into a 90° turn and stop dead. The explanation wasn't just wrong, it was an insult to the professional judgement of every officer involved. So they pushed back. Bertrand and Hunt, backed by the Exeter Police Department and the broader community, launched a letter writing campaign directed at the Pentagon and Project Blue Book headquarters at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The message was straightforward. Retract the misidentification conclusion because labeling their report as pilot error was the same as calling them incompetent at their jobs. For two officers who had put their names on official police reports, that wasn't something they were willing to let stand.

18:50 And the pressure worked. On February 9th, 1966, in the move that almost never happens, the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force put it in writing. They had been unable to identify the object observed on the night of September 3rd, 1965. The case status was officially changed from identified to unidentified. They didn't say it was extraterrestrial. They were careful about that, but they said they couldn't explain it. And in the language of government institutions, that's about as close to an admission as you're going to get from Muscarello, Bertrand and Hunt. It was validation, the kind that comes on official letterhead from the most powerful military in the world, confirming what they saw on that dark stretch of Route 150 was real, it was physical, and nobody could tell them what it was. John G Fuller If the Exeter incident had stayed inside the walls of the police station and the pages of a local blotter, it probably would have faded the way most of these cases do, quietly, without resolution, remembered only by the people who lived it.

19:59 What kept that from happening was a columnist from New England who almost stumbled into the story by accident. John G Fuller wrote a regular column for Saturday Review, a well read American weekly called Tradewinds. In the fall of 1965. He was behind on his deadline and looked for a topic when he came across a piece in the August 3rd edition of the New York Times covering a mass UFO sighting that had stretched across 4 states, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Kansas. Civilian witnesses, police officers, meteorologists, radar operators, military installations, the kind of multi source cross jurisdiction report that's hard to wave away. Fuller got hooked.

20:39 He reached out to Richard Hall, the then assistant director of NICAP, or the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon, based in Washington DC, looking for anything more recent than the four state sighting. Hall mentioned 2 incidents that occurred on the exact same night. One was out of Houston, TX where two police officers had fled back to their cruiser when a purple lit object they were investigating made a sudden move toward them. The other involved 2 police officers and an 18 year old kid in Exeter, NH Fuller was from New England. He didn't have to think about it long. Hall connected him with Raymond Fowler, Nightcap's New England subcommittee member, and Fuller called him the same day. It turned out Fuller had just returned from Exeter and had already mailed an 18 page report to Nightcap. Headquarters signed statements from both officers and Muscarello included.

21:33 When Fuller asked him what he thought of the case, Fowler didn't hedge. Quote. I can't find any holes in it. Both officers are intelligent, capable and seem to know what they're talking about. The sighting was near, and it was low. Bertrand's experience in the Air Force refueling of all types of aircraft makes him capable of discriminating between a UFO and anything else in the air, commercial or military. Fuller kept making calls. He reached Lieutenant Warren Cottrell at the Exeter police station, who told him that both Bertrand and Hunt were extremely level headed men and that Bertrand, who Cottrell described as the toughest officer on the force, had been visibly shaken after that night.

22:14 Then Cottrell said something Fuller wasn't expecting. The station had been getting too many reports from too many reliable people to question the fact that something was being seen regularly. They're still coming in from all over, and either you believe these people or you call them nuts. Well, I know a lot of them, and they definitely are not nuts. They're good, quiet, respectable people who wouldn't be inclined to go around making up yarns like this. Then he called the Hampton Police Department. Next, same story. Quote, We've been getting an awful lot of calls lately, and they seem to be responsible people. I don't really know what the heck is going on, but something is on a long shot. Fuller called the public information office at Pease Air Force Base.

22:59 He didn't expect much, and what he got was Sergeant Robert Savarez, who was just barely more forthcoming than expected. Quote About the only thing I can do is confirm the fact that there have been a large number of sightings reported to us. Some of them come from important and influential people, and there's no doubt about that. That was enough for a column. Fuller published his Tradewinds piece in the October 2nd, 1965 edition of Saturday Review, covering the four state flap and giving the Exeter incident a significant portion of ink. He got it out on time, but he wasn't happy about what he'd had to cut. There was just too much story for a magazine column. So he tried Look magazine next.

23:44 Same problem. More story than the format could hold. And it had gotten bigger. Because somewhere in the middle of this Exeter research, Fuller had pulled on a thread that led him 100 miles north to a case from four years earlier. A case that didn't just involve an unidentified crap, but actual reported contact with its occupants, a married couple from Portsmouth, NH, named Betty and Barney Hill. That discovery made the decision easier, Fuller wrote. A book, Incident at Exeter, Unidentified Flying Objects Over America Now, was published on January 1st, 1966. In October of 1966, he followed it with The Interrupted Journey, the full account of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case. Both books are still in print.

24:29 That's not nothing. There were others. There's something that tends to get lost in the way the Exeter incident gets told. Muscarillo's report wasn't the first of the night. It wasn't even the first encounter Officer Eugene Bertrand had personally been called to that evening. Somewhere between 1:30 and 1:45 in the morning, about an hour before Bertrand showed up at the station to hear Muscarillo's story, he was on a routine patrol when he came across a woman pulled over on the side of Route 101 near an overpass about two miles outside of Exeter. She was visibly shaken, barely holding herself together, doing her best to stay composed in front of the officer. Her story was this For nearly 12 miles from Epping to Exeter, a massive, completely silent object with pulsing red lights had followed her car. Not at a distance, but close.

25:17 Close enough that she was convinced for most of the drive that it was only a few feet above her. It had stayed with her the entire way until she approached the overpass, at which point it shot upward at what she described as a tremendous speed and disappeared into the sky. John Keel covered this encounter in his book Operation Trojan Horse, describing Bertrand finding the woman trembling on the side of the road. Bertrand listened, calmed her down, and then, as he later admitted, the Fuller didn't radio it in his exact words. Quote. I thought she was a kook. She didn't file a report. The encounter officially doesn't exist, but here's why it matters. When Bertrand arrived at the station a short time later and heard Muscarello describe what he'd seen and went pulsing, red lights hovering enormous, he turned to the kid and asked if it sounded like what the woman on Route 101 had described. Muscarello's answer was immediate. Sounds exactly like it.

26:14 That connection is what changed the trajectory of the night without the woman's counter fresh in his mind. There's a real argument that Bertrand drives Moscarello home, writes it off, and the most documented UFO case in New England history ends right there at the front desk of the Exeter police station. A man in a phone booth almost immediately after the object departed the dining farm field, leading E toward Hampton. Officer Tolman received a call at the station from a nighttime phone operator in Exeter. She was relaying a report from a man calling from a payphone in Hampton, roughly 6 miles in the exact direction the craft had just gone. She said the man was frantic, struggling to get his words out. What she was able to piece together was that he was claiming a flying saucer and nearly hit him. And then the line went dead.

27:04 That was it. Toland thanked the operator, immediately called the Hampton Police Department and Hampton notified Pees Air Force Base the official Hampton Police bought her entry from the night, reads this quote. September 3rd, 1965 3:00 AM Exeter Police Department reports unidentified flying object in the area. Units 24 and Pees Air Force alerted at 317 AMI received a call from Exeter operator and officer. Toland advised that a male subject called and asked for the Police Department, further stating that the call was in response to a large unidentified flying object, but the call was cut off. Call received from Hampton Pay phone location unknown. Nobody ever identified this man.

27:49 Nobody ever found what he saw. The call was cut off and he was never heard from again, but the timing and the location put him directly in the path of the object that had just left the field. Ron Smith About 3 weeks after the Muscarello incident, 17 year old Ron Smith had his own encounter roughly half a mile from the dining farm. Smith worked at the grocery store across from the police station, which made him easy for Fuller to track down. The interview took place in the small courthouse next door. Smith had been driving late at night with his mother and aunt when his aunt told everyone to look at the sky behind them. He describes an object with a bright red light on top and a white light on the bottom, appearing to spin, or at least giving off that sort of effect. It passed directly over their car. Smith hit the brakes.

28:39 The object stopped, too, hovering just ahead of where the car had come to a stop. Then it drifted back, settled directly above them, swung forward again and then steadily moved off. Then Smith floored it. A few miles down the road, once the adrenaline had burned off a little, he made a decision That says a lot about the kind of person he was. He turned the car around and went back. Sure enough, the object reappeared and went through a similar routine before finally moving on. Three witnesses in that car, Smith, his mother and his arm all reported the same object, the same behavior, the same details. And it happened twice in the same night, in the same location, within minutes of each other.

29:20 Miss Pierce Miss Pierce had been watching these objects long before September 3rd. Her first documented sighting was July 15th, 1965, nearly two months before Moscarello's encounter near Hampton, where she witnessed a large glowing orange red object moving with an oscillating, unnatural motion. It wasn't a one time thing either. She had seen them repeatedly alongside her teenage daughter and several of her neighbors. She reported it to Pease Air Force Base, and when she got back was a rotating menu of dismissals. Weather balloon, Bright star. The pulsing lights from a flight line 10 miles away, each explanation more condescending than the last. Miss Pierce was not the kind of woman who took that quietly.

30:04 When Fuller came to Exeter to investigate, he knocked on Miss Pierce's door and walked into a living room full of people. She had organized it deliberately. Neighbors. Fellow witnesses, people who had been too intimidated to come forward on their own. She had essentially convened a town meeting in her parlor and handed Fuller the community story he didn't know he needed because of her. The Exeter incident isn't just a police report in a field in Kingston. It's a portrait of an entire region that spent months watching something move through their sky that nobody could explain. Fuller's own sighting. By the time Fuller was wrapping up his investigation, he had stopped being just a journalist covering the story and started going out at night to the areas where sightings were most frequently reported. One of those nights, he saw it himself. A brilliant orange red object, solid and luminous, nothing like the strobing navigating lights of a conventional aircraft. What made the encounter definitive for him was what happened next.

31:10 An Air Force jet appeared in the same airspace, and it was clearly chasing the object. Fuller watched as the interceptor attempted to close the distance and watch as the orange light simply left it behind, accelerating away with a kind of effortless, physics defying ease that made the jet look like it was standing still. After that, Fuller said he was done entertaining the operation. Big blast explanation. He had seen the object, he had seen the military's response to it, and he had watched the object make that response look completely inadequate. There are dozens of other accounts in Fuller's book, objects hovering over power lines over the Exeter Hospital, drifting through neighborhoods like they were on a slow survey of the area.

31:52 The witnesses span every part of the community, kids, teenagers, mothers, police officers, tradesmen. If you want the full scope of what was happening in that corner of New Hampshire in the fall of 1965, the book is the only way to get there. Incident at the Exeter Unidentified flying objects over America, now still in print and worth every page. Power lines. As Fuller mapped out the sighting reports coming in from across the Seacoast region, something started to emerge that had nothing to do with the sky. It had to do with the ground, specifically what was running underneath the flight paths. High tension power lines, the 345,000 Volt transmission lines that cut across the New England landscape, weren't just occasionally near these sightings, they were consistently near them. When Fuller started charting the paths described by Muscarello, the Dining Farm witnesses, Miss Pierce, Ron Smith, and dozens of others, the correlation was hard to ignore. These objects weren't drifting randomly across the sky, they were moving along the grid.

32:56 That realization changed the whole shape of the investigation for Fuller. This wasn't a collection of isolated ghost stories anymore. There was a geographical logic to it, and that logic pointed directly at the electrical infrastructure of New England. Witnesses had been describing the objects hovering just feet above the transmission lines, moving in a slow, deliberate way that looked less like flight and more like surveying. Several reported that the red pulsing lights seemed to intensify when the craft was directly over a transmission tower. Brighter, more aggressive. Others described a low frequency hum coming from the direction of the object. Something felt as much as heard, distinct from the standard electrical buzz of the lines themselves, and the electromagnetic effects kept showing up in the witness accounts. Rod Smith's car reacting as the object approached. Being one of the cleaner examples, Fuller brought this data to physicists and started asking a specific question. Could a physical craft extract energy from a high voltage transmission line without making direct contact? The answer, rooted in the principles of electromagnetic induction, was that it was theoretically possible a conductor moving through the external magnetic field generated by a high current line could, under the right conditions, have energy transfer to it without touching anything. Fuller latched onto this.

34:18 It became a cornerstone of his framework for the case, the possibility that these objects weren't just observing the power grid, but actively using it. Then November 1965 happened. Fuller was in the final stages of writing the manuscript when on November 9th, the Great NE Blackout knocked out power across a massive stretch of the eastern seaboard and into Canada. 10s of millions of people plunged Into Darkness simultaneously. Failure was traced to a transmission line in Ontario, and as the reports came in during and after the blackout, a pattern emerged that Fuller couldn't set aside. Glowing objects have been seen near key substations and along the specific transmission lines involved in the cascading failure in the hours surrounding the event. He didn't claim to know exactly what that meant, but he made the argument plainly.

35:10 The Exeter flap, concentrated along those same high tension corridors just months earlier, looked less like a coincidence and more like a reconnaissance, a testing ground, a preliminary Passover, the infrastructure before something larger happened to it. It's a framework that the Air Force's explanation never accounted for. Operation Big Blast doesn't explain why the objects followed power lines instead of roads or towns. Stars and weather balloons don't pace transmission towers at low altitude and make car engines stutter. Fuller's contribution to the Exeter case wasn't just documenting when people saw it, was documenting where they saw it and asking what that geography meant.

35:51 He never got a definitive answer. Nobody has. But sixty years later, the power line correlation remains one of the most unexplained and least discuss aspects of the Exeter incident, and one with the most interesting. The Exeter incident has lasted 60 years in the conversation for one reason. It's hard to dismiss, maybe even impossible. But people have tried. We've watched the attempts in real time across this file. The advertising plane that was never in the air, the B-47 bombers that can't hover, the official explanation that got officially retracted. Every off ramp the skeptics offered, the evidence closed off. What you're left with when you work through all of it is a case built on the testimony of people who had every reason not to come forward.

36:42 A teenager about to enter the military, a Korean War veteran with his professional reputation on the line, and a Police Department that went toe to toe with the Pentagon and won. That's what makes Exeter different. It's not a blurry photograph or story that only one person remembers. It's signed statements, official blotter entries, a letter from the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, and a community that refuses to be talked out of what it witnessed. Norman Muscarello saw something on Route 150 that changed the direction of his life. Eugene Bertrand stood underneath it with his hand on his weapon. David Hunt watched it move between 2 trees and watched the B-47 cross the same sky and said there was no comparison.

37:26 And underneath all of it, those power lines running through the landscape, connecting the dots between witnesses tying the Exeter flat to a blackout that darkened the entire Northeastern seaboard two months later. Fuller never claimed to have the answer. He just documented the question clearly enough that it hasn't gone away. That's the legacy of this case, not resolution, but credibility, the proof that when enough grounded, respected people stand up together and say we saw something that doesn't fit inside your explanation, the institutions designed to explain things away eventually have to blink. The Air Force blinked. The file stayed open. Whatever was moving through the skies above Southern New Hampshire in the fall of 1965, hovering over farms, following power lines, disappearing into the ocean at the edge of the coast, nobody has ever identified it.

38:16 Nobody has ever explained it. And 60 years later, the question that Norman Moscarello carried through the front door of the police station at 2:24 in the morning is still officially unanswered. This has been Project Jackalope Files 003, the Exeter UFO incident. If this is your first time finding Project Jackalope, every file we've released is available right now. Wherever you listen to podcasts under the Infinite Rabbit Hole RSS feed and on YouTube at the Infinite Rabbit Hole Podcast channel, hit subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. If you've been with us for a while and you haven't left a review yet, that is generally one of the best things that you can do to help the show reach more people.

38:57 It takes 2 minutes and it makes a real difference. We'd appreciate it more than you know. And if you want to stay connected between episodes, come find us on social media. We're out there. We post regularly, and that's where a lot of the conversation around these cases continues after the file closes. And until next time, we'll see you right here in the next fork in the path of the Infinite Rabbit Hole. I'm Jeremy Socia. I was your host for this file of Project Jackalope. Goodbye. Hey everybody, thanks for checking out the Infinite Rabbit Hole podcast. If you're looking for more of our stuff, head on over to infiniterabbithole.com where you can find links to all the podcast players that we are available on and even our video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. While you're there, make sure to check out all the links for our socials and hit that follow so you know when all the new stuff from our podcast comes out.

39:56 And until next time, travelers, we'll see you right here in the next fork in the path of the Infinite Rabbit hole. Bye.