A Curious Occurrence
in Anson
In an approximately one hundred square mile area of Somerset and Franklin counties, Maine, traveling west to east, you will find the towns of Farmington, Industry, New Sharon, Starks, Anson, Madison, Norridgewock, and Skowhegan, among others. You can get to these towns via Route 43 or an offshoot of it, which crosses the beautiful Kennebec River. Even if you have traveled this route before, or some of its offshoots (Routes 148, 2, etc.), you may not have known of the numerous reports of UFO activity in the area. These reports range from inconspicuous Close Encounters of the First Kind all the way to the complex Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (definitions for all Close Encounter classifications are provided at the end of this chapter). The witnesses who gave these reports range from retired Naval officers and sheriffs to local townspeople.
Between 1981 and 2009, the area that I have dubbed “the Somerset Triangle” has boasted over two hundred sightings, as reported by NUFORC, MUFON, the Somerset County Sheriff’s Department, the Portland Press Herald, the Morning Sentinel, and the Sun Journal. As discussed in the chapter “Only a Step Away,” if we are to also include an estimate of the sightings that go unreported, we may be looking at upward of eight hundred to one thousand encounters in just this area alone! I wrote about the towns in the Somerset Triangle in my first book, interesting stories from Starks and Industry that I suggest you read for yourself. Another noteworthy encounter, this one from Anson, I have included here. It occurred in 2007 at the home of Gheri Rinaldi and her family. I spoke with Gheri in June of 2016; this is her story.
The Valentine’s Day Blizzard of 2007 was in full swing in the Midwestern United States. This storm also affected the northeast, which caused an inordinate amount of ice to fall throughout New England. The town of Anson avoided the bulk of the storm, though fresh snow had fallen. But snow and ice were the last things on Gheri’s mind, since she was enjoying celebrating her son’s fourteenth birthday. After cake, Gheri went out on her deck for a cigarette when a light behind some trees caught her attention. She watched this light for a moment as it moved sideways through the woods. Confused by what the source of the light could be, she called out for her son to join her outside. “Honey, look over there,” she said as he walked outside. “What is that?!” She pointed to the area by the trees. He saw the light but had no explanation to offer his mother. After a few moments, the movement of the light became erratic, and though their view was obstructed by trees, they estimated that the light was about one hundred to one hundred fifty feet in the sky. They described the color as orange-yellow, with what appeared to be an aura-type glow around it.
The boy turned to his mother and noticed she still had the camera around her neck from taking pictures during the party. “Mom, take a picture!” he said. Gheri looked down excitedly at the camera and proceeded to raise it toward the sky. She focused in on the light and … nothing. The camera would not work. She tried again but the device failed. Frustrated, and assuming her camera had dead batteries, she went inside the house to exchange them for fresh ones. As soon as she entered her home, the camera went off! “Wow, I must have done something wrong,” she thought and went back outside. She raised her camera once more, but it still would not work. Both she and her son went inside this time and he went to fetch some new batteries. Once installed, he took a test picture; it worked just fine, so the boy took the camera back outside, hoping the odd light was still there. Gheri followed behind and was shocked to see that there were now four lights hovering behind the trees. Her son yelled, “Mom, there’s more of them!” He quickly raised the camera for a shot, but again it would not function, so they gave up on the camera.
Out of nowhere, the four lights shot out of the trees and into plain view, maintaining their altitude of approximately one hundred fifty feet. The four lights then went vertical, one on top of the other, and shot back into the trees. This is a similar description to the Stephenville lights that occurred in Texas in 2008 (a year after this sighting), which had numerous eyewitnesses who saw vertical lights. (A great telling of that story, including a reenactment of the lights, was made courtesy of the Alien Mysteries television program and can be viewed in full on YouTube.)
The pair could only watch in amazement, but it was just too weird for them, so Gheri told her son, “Go grab my phone, I’m calling 911, this is crazy.” The operator at the Somerset County Communications Center could hear the excitement and fear in her voice. “There’s something in the sky right now,” Gheri said. “Do you have any idea what it might be? Are there any military maneuvers happening?” The operator said they had fielded multiple calls about the lights from towns in the surrounding area. “So I’m not crazy?” Gheri said with relief in her voice. The operator told Gheri that she was not and that a Deputy Sheriff was on his way to the location.
The Morning Sentinel newspaper reported, in the article “They Saw Strange Lights in the Sky,” that Deputy Richie Putnam, who did not see the lights himself, did put a call in to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Brunswick Naval Air Station, which both stated that they did not have any flights in the area. Putnam did discover that the Vermont Air National Guard had conducted practice maneuvers that night in the vicinity. Marie Endsley, spokeswoman for the Guard, said in response to the Morning Sentinel’s inquiry, “We were conducting our normal training missions and were flying through there.” She did not confirm the towns or county where the maneuvers took place.
In my opinion, it seems odd that the FAA would not be informed of practice maneuvers by the Vermont Air National Guard. When speaking with me, Gheri was convinced that it was not jets that she had seen, and added, “They were silent, often just hovering, and lasted for about an hour. Jets and flares cannot do that.” In August of 2016, I called the Sheriff’s Department multiple times about this 2007 incident. Messages left for Deputy Putnam were not returned.
About a week prior to Gheri’s sighting, UFOs had been reported in the Farmington area, though described differently than the lights Gheri observed. Farmington is approximately fifteen miles from Anson and just about five miles south of Industry. Some witnesses to the Farmington sightings did comment that the lights were most likely flares from the often-seen military planes doing night maneuvers. Other witnesses said that while the color was similar to flares, their movements and duration of appearance were not like flares at all. According to the Sentinel, Marie Endsley informed them that F-16s “fly lower than seven thousand feet” and “flares might look reddish-orange, but would disintegrate well before hitting the ground.”
Somerset County Sheriff Barry A. DeLong, now retired, was involved with the investigation of the Anson sighting and takes the UFO phenomenon seriously due to having his own encounter thirty years prior. He explained to the Sentinel that the lights he saw in the 1970s “were hovering about 15 feet from my cruiser, late at night. … It had fixed lights that were spinning. It was huge, and oval-shaped. I knew it wasn’t a jet fighter. It slowly started backing off toward Sugarloaf, and then at a terrific speed.” While it is certainly possible that some branch of the military could have conducted practice missions, it most certainly cannot explain the multiple eye-witness accounts in which lights in the sky were observed hovering, and being maneuvered intelligently, for over an hour.
Ultimately, the explanation for the lights Gheri saw over Anson that evening was the National Guard’s practice maneuvers. Gheri wholeheartedly disagrees. My lasting impression from my discussion with Gheri is that she is a genuine person who never thought twice about UFOs before this event. She has a captivating personality that reinforces her believability. And I believe her story.
Before ending our interview, I asked her if she’d had any other encounters since. “No, but my eyes are always to the sky now!” Same here, Gheri. Same here.
How Close Encounters Are Defined
As scientific advisor to the United States Air Force from 1947 to 1969, J. Allen Hynek conducted UFO studies for them through Project Sign, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book. He created the original classification system for UFO and alien encounters, which he published in his first book, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. His colleague Jacques Vallee established the CE-4 classification in his Journal of Scientific Exploration article entitled “Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects.” A basic overview of the categories is as follows:
Dr. Steven Greer (The CE-5 Initiative), Michael Naisbitt (CE-6), and the Black Vault website (CE-7) have offered additional, lesser known classifications.