A UFO had landed at Osceola Park and I was a witness to history! This was Absolutely Amazing, Astonishing and Awesome!
“Recollections of a Pittsfield Kid” is a series of vignettes exploring the author’s youthful days in the Osceola Park neighborhood of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, during the 1950s and early 1960s. At the time of these adventures, the author was between six and 14 years old.
We’ve all heard the utterance about our “lying eyes” and this tale is an “eye opener,” for sure.
Late one summer night in 1960, when I was 12 years old, I happened to look out my kitchen window at the dark, empty expanse of Osceola Park. It was a cloudy night with a slight wind. Suddenly, something caught my eye.
I observed an unusual display at the foot of the Park hill near the horseshoe pits, about 600 feet away from me. I discerned a stationary, eerily glowing object that emitted both a yellow and blue hue. It was shaped like an inverted saucer and about eight feet high and four feet wide. At varying times, it would slowly diminish in size while becoming dimmer in appearance. It made no sound at all and no human activity was observed near it.
As you may know, some objects purported to be UFOs are described as being quiet and motionless while displaying fluctuating lights. Some of you may remember the famous Washington, D.C. UFO “flap” in 1952 seen by scores of people.* My mind raced to the unscientific conclusion that a UFO had landed at Osceola Park and I was a witness to history! This was Absolutely Amazing, Astonishing and Awesome!
It was now about 1 a.m. and I was envisioning scary scenarios regarding who or what was inside this spacecraft and what their intentions were. Would they abduct me and my family and then perform medical experiments on us? I remembered Damon Knight’s 1950 short story “To Serve Man,” in which aliens were not altruistic, and humans were actually on their food menu!
I nervously called to my mother and younger sister Tricia to look at this breathtaking spectacle, and concur with my trepidations. They were surprisingly less excited and convinced than I was, but didn’t object when I called the Pittsfield police department to report this anomaly.
Later on, I noticed a patrol car slowly driving down Osceola Street, shining a searchlight toward the described area. Would this result in a confirmation that my theory was correct? I was holding my breath, waiting for an answer, when I received a call back from the police that this was actually a false alarm: “Nothing to see here folks, go to bed.”
Unconvinced, I decided to call my aunt Helen, who also lived in town, and she let all of us stay at her house that night as a precautionary measure vis-a-vis these extraterrestrial visitors. Whether she thought I was crazy or not, I don’t know. I slept restlessly that night.
The next morning I returned home and gingerly walked through Osceola Park and approached the purported landing site. I noticed the UFO had apparently departed. What a relief! I concurrently felt disappointed because I wouldn’t learn much about these cosmic visitors.
Upon reaching this propitious place, I expected to see spaceship indentations and/or radiation burns in the field, or maybe the grass would be singed. I was well schooled in what to search for since I was a member in good standing of the APRO (Aerial Phenomenon Research Association.) That said, what I did discover in the Park was a large sheet of clear plastic held up by four stakes forming a rectangular-like canopy, placed over a firepit now containing ashes.
The heat from the previous night’s fire rose up and inflated the plastic sheet, like a balloon inflated by hot air. This created a saucer-like shape. I realized the fire would have reached different heights below the sheet, forming pulsating light intensities. The smoke under the sheet would have distorted the light, making it appear that the entire object was the light source and not the fire itself.
The firepit, its smoke, and the likely human attendees were not discernible from where I stood the night before. Alas, a UFO never did land at Osceola Park at all. What I saw was merely an optical illusion. I was completely duped to say the least. Remember the song called “What Kind of Fool Am I”?
It’s speculated that when Spanish ships first arrived at the shores of the Aztec Empire, some natives perceived these “logs on water” as representing a long-foretold return of the gods of lore. My thought process about this alien visitation somewhat paralleled what these Aztecs thought.
It’s safe to assume this incident was not reported by me to the APRO. Maybe this tale would better belong on a TV show like Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone.”
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