UFO news can show up in an unusual places:
Travelers Insurance magazine, Protection, April 1957, page 17:
IT HAD TO HAPPEN, sooner or later. It happened a few weeks ago in New Jersey, where a state Workmen's Compensation referee upheld a night watchman's claim under a Travelers policy for medical expenses attendant on the shock of seeing what he’s certain was a kind of “flying saucer.”
According to the watchman, at 3:45 A.M., while he was making his rounds on a construction project, a huge "cigar-shaped” object, "between sixty to a hundred feet long and about fifteen feet in diameter,” emitting "nauseating odors” and giving "a hiss like escaping steam,” swooped down from the sky and skimmed over the Delaware River within fifty yards of him. The experience — real or imagined — upset him thoroughly. Because, as the referee asserted, "this man thought he saw something and he took it as his duty to investigate,” the watchman's claim was allowed. He is recovering satisfactorily, saying, "It was the first time I've ever been scared. I want to forget the whole experience.”
The incident is cited in files at the Pentagon. In studying UFOs, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP) produced 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs). Only one explicitly referenced UFOs, the 2009 paper by Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green, “Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects On Human Biological Tissues.” Appendix B was a list of 96 historic UFO injury cases, which included:
“36 1956/10/02 NEW JERSEY, TRENTON”
The entry referred to the encounter of Harry James Sturdevant (1890-1965), who was 66 when it occurred. His story was sensationally depicted in the 1978 paperback, Ripley's Believe It or Not: Stars, Space & UFO's.
After the initial publicity, two other witnesses surfaced. They’d seen something bright in the sky, which seemed to confirm at least a portion of Sturdevant’s account.
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| The Herald-News (Passaic, NJ) Nov 26, 1956 |
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| The Trentonian, Nov. 27, 1956 |
Emil Slaboda, the primary reporter for the case, wrote a 4-page article on the story, published in Fate, June 1957, "He Collected on a Flying Saucer".
Here’s how the case was described in Flying Saucers magazine, Feb. 1961, "The Flying Saucers are Hostile," by George D. Fawcett:
Like with the above, most subsequent citations of the case failed to mention that the Workers Compensation claim was overturned on April 21, 1958.
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| The Canberra Times (AU) April 23, 1958 |
One account that got it right was Strange Effects from UFOs by Gordon Lore, 1969:
“…about a year and a half after the sighting, the Division’s Deputy Director, Roger W. Kelly, overruled Willits, calling the encounter an ‘hallucination.’”
Project Blue Book had no file on the encounter, just a single page that stated, “No Case, Information Only,” with a few typed lines and a clipping from Len Springfield’s saucer newsletter.
The people investigating the case felt Sturdevant was sincere, but there was never any tangible proof his discomfort was caused by an aerial phenomenon. If it was a hallucination, it was a powerful one. Not much else is documented about Harry Sturdevant. He died at the age of 75 on December 18, 1965.
For more news items and documents on the 1956 case, see the X post by Jeff Knox: Today in UFO History -Night Watchmen Injured By Cigar Shaped Object?
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1967: Another Night Watchman
Years later, on the other side of the county there was another UFO-night watchman encounter. No injuries were involved but it involved the use of lethal force.
In the pre-dawn hours
of July 18, 1967, at Wilmington, California, security guard Jack Hill reported to
the police that he’d fired shots at a UFO in an effort to bring it down. He said the bullets just bounced off of it, and
he’d collected the slugs as evidence.
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| Long Beach Press-Telegram, July 18, 1967 |
The Hill case was one of those examined by the University of Colorado UFO Project, and the Condon report stated:
“A [64]-year-old security guard, on night duty at a lumber yard, reported firing six shots at a cigar-shaped UFO, and later, finding four of the flattened bullets which he said had fallen to the ground after ineffective impact with the UFO. Faced with police evidence, the guard admitted that the bullets were ones fired at a steel drum and that the ‘sighting’ of the UFO was fictitious.”
A columnist for the (Long Beach, CA) Press-Telegram, July 20, 1967, commended Jack Hill for coming clean about the hoax. “If Hill had chosen to stay with his falsely embellished story, another rather convincing UFO report would have stayed on the records to be cited with awe and head-shaking.”
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