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The Carteret Sightings
By Patrick Huyghe
FATE :: July 2002

Fifty years ago, UFOs rattled officials in the nation’s capitol. In July of 1952, UFOs were seen by qualified observers and repeatedly tracked on radar at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base. Over a two-night period, on the 19th and 20th, jets were scrambled after the mysterious objects—but to no avail, as the objects either outran or disappeared in the presence of the jets. The activity on one night was blamed on “temperature inversions,” but on the other the sightings are still officially regarded as “Unidentified.”

The sightings alarmed the Truman administration, and the press, seeking answers, swooped down on the Pentagon, tying up communications channels at the Defense Department. The following year, a concerned CIA convened a secret panel to consider the threat posed to national security by the hubbub raised over this disturbing “invasion” of the skies over Washington, D.C.

Last summer, UFOs were seen over Carteret, New Jersey, a small town just southeast of Newark International Airport. These sightings didn’t attract the same press attention or draw the same official concerns as the UFOs over the nation’s capitol a half century ago—but they could have, had they occurred just 60 days later. And therein lies a tale that may foreshadow the future of UFO investigations in the United States.

But first, what exactly happened over Carteret?

Right after midnight on the morning of July 15, about 75 cars pulled over onto the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike to watch a cluster of strange lights move slowly over Carteret. The turnpike is not a place where people normally slow down or stop for anything—especially in the middle of the night.

One of the witnesses who pulled over was a former Navy man, who had worked on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and was experienced in identifying planes from their light formations. He observed the strange lights for about ten minutes before they disappeared one by one.

“They just faded out,” he said. “Next thing you know, the skies were pitch black and silent.” The Navy man insisted the lights “didn’t look like flares.”

Several Carteret police officers also saw the lights. One was Lt. Daniel Tarrant, who observed the lights as they passed over his home. “I saw 16 golden-orange colored lights, several in a V-type formation,” he told news reporters. “Others were scattered around the V.” Tarrant, who sees airplanes passing overhead all the time from Newark Airport, was certain that these lights were not airplanes.

But the person with the best view of the lights, no doubt, was a man with a 25- year career in military special forces. He watched the lights through a pair of night vision/infrared binoculars. The range finder on the binoculars, which had not been calibrated in some time, immediately locked in on solid objects about 1,800 feet away, close enough to see the outlines of an object, if there was one.

As the witness continued to observe the lights through the binoculars, he saw puffs of smoke as each object seemed eventually to “flare out.” The objects reminded him of “anti-surface-to-air missile (SAM) flares,” though he had never seen such flares stay airborne and maintain altitude for such a long time. He guessed that the lights were either “area flares” or “some kind of pyrotechnic display” gone haywire.

Meanwhile, almost as many people viewed the lights from Staten Island, just east of Carteret across the Arthur Kill River. Patrons of the Waterloo Café had a particularly good view of the lights. Sometime before one o’clock in the morning, a federal fugitive enforcement agent reported looking west toward Newark Airport and seeing a half dozen bright round lights coming directly towards him. The lights were also observed by the café’s bouncer, almost a dozen Coast Guard servicemen, and other patrons gathered at the café’s front door. Still more witnesses saw the bright lights from the West Shore Expressway and from the Goethals Bridge that connects New Jersey and Staten Island.

All told there were probably hundreds of witnesses to the Carteret event—a major event considering its proximity to New York City ...

Read the rest of this article in the July 2002 issue of FATE

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