UFO Skywatch – December 26-27, 1963

NJAAP PENNSYLVANIA-NEW JERSEY SKYWATCH PRODUCES NO SIGNIFICANT RESULTS

But, Undaunted, We Begin Preparing For Another

It’s a (deservedly) forgotten bit of UFO history: the “skywatch” organized for December 26-27, 1963, by the New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena, the small investigative group of which I’d become Director in the fall of 1963 when my predecessor, Edward J. Babcock, Jr., retired from the field to go to college.  Still, as part of my personal history, I remember it fondly.  Indulge an old man his nostalgia.

The headlines above are from Volume II, No. 3, dated January 1964, of our mimeographed publication, The N.J.A.A.P. Bulletin.  It was the second issue of the Bulletin published under my auspices, No. 1 having appeared while Ed was still Director.  My first issue (No. 2) is posted to the Web; its front page news was UFO’S SEEN OVER PHILADELPHIA, DETECTED ON TWO SEPARATE RADARSCOPES: Cover-Up of Reports.

The best I could come up with for No. 3 was the skywatch.

“From 6:00 A.M. on December 26, 1963, to the same time the following day, an NJAAP-sponsored skywatch, organized by John Nove’, of Hackensack, New Jersey, was held in New Jersey and the eastern counties of Pennsylvania.  However, although notices were sent to dozens of individuals, and it is believed that a large number of the over forty newspapers to which press releases were sent printed them, only two sightings were reported to us, and both of these were identified by NJAAP as conventional phenomena.

“For these observations, we are deeply indebted to Richard Henderson, 19 West Ridge Road, West Chester, Pennsylvania.  Mr. Henderson, a 16-year-old student, is President of the Freedom 7 Amateur Rocketry and Technological Research Society, ‘which has been recognized and supported by the United States Army.’  On the evening of December 26, Mr. Henderson and two other youthful members of his group, Darth Turner and Tom Weir, began their watch, from separate locations in the vicinity of West Chester.”

The “separate locations” were important.  We scientific UFOlogists knew well that guesses as to the absolute size and distance of an object seen in the sky were useless unless the object was very close, or unless it passed in front of or behind some identifiable landmark like trees or a cloud.  But two separate observers, making precise observations of the object’s position and elevation (in degrees of arc) above the horizon, would permit “trigonometric calculations” of its altitude and location.  I was in eleventh grade that year, doing trigonometry; that was how I was able to identify one of Richard Henderson’s observed UFOs as being in a position suitable for a military plane.  (The other was an unusually bright meteor linked to the Ursid shower.)

“Mr. Henderson’s account is a model of UFO reporting,” I wrote, “and it is probable that if all UFO reports contained as many exact pertinent details it would be a good deal easier to weed out spurious UFO’s from actual ones than it is now.”

Of course I took entirely for granted that there were “actual UFOs” from which the spurious ones had to be weeded.  Didn’t we all?  Three years earlier, staring up into a frigid but dazzlingly clear night sky, fresh from the reading of Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, I could see with my mind’s eye as vividly as though it were actually there: a blazing red disk, impossible to confuse with any meteor, passing leisurely through the stars.  Such things were in the sky, if only we would look up toward them.

But how many of us ever do?

In the press release that I think I must have written, although it went out over John Nove’s name, we NJAAP-ers asked for “thirty minutes of watching–or, if even that is impossible, frequent glances skyward” from skywatch participants.  I gave it about two hours.

It was no hardship.  December 26, 1963, was a Thursday, but we were on our Christmas vacation.  The ground held the remains of a recent snowfall but the afternoon was warmish, almost balmy, silvery clouds crossing a deep blue sky.  My friend Larry and I sat in my back yard in aluminum folding chairs intended for summer evenings, gazing up into it.  We had a camera on hand; if a UFO appeared, this would be one time it wouldn’t vanish without photographic proof of its existence.  A dog ambled over to us, sniffed around us.  Then it walked away.

Like me, Larry was Jewish.  Was this our Christmas celebration?

No significant results, I admitted a month afterward; but “NJAAP is presently beginning preparations for another skywatch, probably to be held in April.”  That “other skywatch” never materialized.  The mild December was replaced shortly after the New Year by a spell of bitterly cold days, sunny but with a bone-chilling wind, which I kept telling myself couldn’t go on forever but which sure seemed to.  My personal life also turned frigid that January, an inner winter that persisted long after warmth came to the out-of-doors.  By April, I was too physically and emotionally drained to organize things like skywatches.

The UFOs weren’t waiting for NJAAP to “skywatch” them, anyway.  On April 24, 1964, a New Mexico patrolman named Lonnie Zamora reported a close-up encounter with a landed UFO just outside the town of Socorro, and the first of the great UFO waves of the 1960s had begun.  With us on the sidelines.

Even then, that spring, I looked back on December 1963 with nostalgia as a time of since-vanished hope and enthusiasm.  I treasured the article announcing the skywatch that appeared in the Doylestown Daily Intelligencer of December 19.  This was the only published article that I actually saw, of the “over forty newspapers to which press releases were sent,” although a briefer piece was supposed to appear in the Trentonian of December 26.  I don’t know if the Trentonian actually ran the article, and my notion that “a large number” of newspapers printed something similar was probably wishful thinking.

Still, the Intelligencer article wasn’t exactly chopped liver, considering that we were a bunch of kids.  It was headlined “Look Up Young Man – Skywatch Planned To Identify UFO’s.”

“The watch is sponsored by the New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomona [sic],” said the newspaper, “a group of 15 high-school-age boys with a bent for science.”  Was NJAAP really that small?  (I remember us as having at least 25 members.)  But it was true: we were all boys, although a year or so later one girl did sign up.  UFOlogy was not a pursuit that did wonders for a fellow’s social life.

Still, I relished that “bent for science”; it seemed to confer a benediction on us and our work.  I didn’t notice that the writer misspelled my name variously as “Haperin” and “Halpern,” or if I did notice I didn’t care.  What mattered were the UFOs: that they be recognized as an arena for scientific inquiry.

When you’re on a mission as we were, the little stuff falls away.

by David Halperin
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