Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I was 16 years old walking home on a warm, moonless clear Saturday night in July of 1964. The small town I lived in, north of Boston, was a working class town that had lots of Atlantic ocean views, and lots of marshland. At that time most of the houses viewing the ocean were only occupied in the summer, and boarded up in the winter.

As you can imagine, that has now totally changed. So I was walking the 4 miles home from town, and I was an hour late. I was supposed to be home at 10:00, but it was close to 11:00. My Mom was gonna be pissed. There were no street lights but I’d walked it many times, so I was trying to come up with a good story about why I was late. When I got about a half mile from home, I saw an unusual light in the sky. It was about a quarter the size of a dime held at arms length. It was about a foot above the horizon, if you know what I mean, and seemed maybe a half a mile away. It would move a few inches (as per my view) across the sky and then stop. And then move again. I was confused. But I realized I had my ‘why I was late’ story. I knew my Mom was also interested in ufos and the supernatural, so when I walked in and told her I was late because of the light I was watching, she was more interested in seeing it than yelling at me. Kids can be such liars! Our area was relatively sparsely settled, maybe a house every hundred yards at most.

So pretty soon my Mom, my 12 year brother John and I were standing in the back yard watching this strange light move across the marsh behind our house. It did weird things; it would move for a bit across the sky, and then stop for literally minutes, until we would be at the point of arguing about whether it had moved at all. But it did, not only horizontally, but vertically. My dad came out at one point around a time when it hadn’t moved for a bit and said, “that’s probably Venus” and went back to bed. He thought we were nuts. But then it moved again. I’m thinking that at about 1:00 in the morning, my brother and I saw a similar light in our neighbors back yard, directly to our left. We left to investigate it, while my Mom still watched the first one. We walked about a hundred yards along the edge of the marsh behind our neighbors house and stopped to watch it. But this light was different. It moved more quickly and soon it seemed to get bigger. It seemed like it was coming towards us. When it got to be about the size of a quarter at arms length, I put my arms around my brother (to protect him?) and said “we’re not running.” I was 16, and so far nothing had happened to be afraid of, so I wanted to see what it was. My brother and I have talked about what next happened many times over the years. The light got closer and brighter, almost a beach ball at arms length, and when it seemed almost on top of us, a beam, like a searchlight shone on us. Just when I was trying to make it seem like a helicopter, though it was utterly silent, the light quietly exploded into a number of equally large different colored lights.

They danced in front of us. If I had to guess I would say they were no more than 50 yards away and 45* up on the horizon. It was stunning, and we had no way to process it. A few years later I did LSD. It aged me emotionally. At the time I thought back to the lights when I was 16. That aged me too.
I don’t know how long it lasted. We think it could have been as short as 10 seconds or as long as a minute. But who knows. We were spellbound. I’ve often thought of getting some form of regression hypnotism to investigate the memory. All I know, looking back, is that it changed me. My younger brother too. So my was an avid late night radio listener, and a couple nights later she was listening New England based ufo investigating group being interviewed on the radio. The station was, and still is an AM station with a huge audience up and down the East She called them up and told our story, but minus what happened to my brother and I because, for whatever reason, we never told her about the light show we’d seen next door. Maybe it almost seemed too personal to relate. So two things happened in the next few days. First, the ufo guy who had been on the radio came by. I was there for that. His name was Edwin Fogg. An unforgettable name for a ufo investigator. He listened to my Mom’s story. John and I didn’t talk, maybe because we didn’t want my Mom’s tale to be discredited by our weird addition. Mr Fogg listened carefully and then looked sadly at the marsh and said, “they’ll call it marsh gas.”

Btw, in all my years living near the marsh, I never once saw, or heard of anyone seeing a lighted marsh gas thing. The second thing that happened was the next day was we got visited by a military person. I was working cutting lawns but my Mom and brother were there. He was apparently very polite, but assured them that they had seen both Venus and marsh gas. Wow a two for one. So that’s the story. John and I still talk about it.”