And A Mystery Solved—

Flickering Lights

Over Newtown

By Nancy K. Crevier

It was an “other worldly” experience for New York City residents Annika Pergament, Michael O’Looney, and their two small children, on their drive through Newtown from Ms Pergament’s sister’s home in Westport to their weekend home in Southbury last Saturday night, January 15. The phenomenon, however, had earthbound origins on Pilgrim Lane, off Toddy Hill Road. It turned out to be a memorial birthday celebration of Chinese Lantern Wish Balloons. But until multiple readers of The Newtown Bee’s January 18 website provided that insight, many observers of mysterious bobbing lights in the sky were wondering if Newtown was an alien observation site.

Driving near Turnberry Lane off of Toddy Hill shortly before 9 pm, Ms Pergament and Mr O’Looney spotted a series of strange lights processing across the sky.

“At first,” said Ms Pergament, “I thought they were lights on top of radio towers, but then we realized there was nothing beneath them.” The lights, which moved from one side of the horizon to the other, all in the same direction, were peculiar enough that the couple decided to record them. Ms Pergament tried to capture the mysterious lights on her Blackberry phone, but because of the darkness was unsuccessful. Then she remembered she had her new Canon S95 camera with them, which has a video mode. “I was surprised at how well it worked, since it was so dark,” she said.

(See the YouTube video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAlQSFtvPY8).

The flickering orange lights moved in a steady stream, in groups of around five, she said. Mr O’Looney, who was driving, pulled into a driveway and the couple watched the lights for about 15 minutes.

“I was more stunned than scared,” she said. But because the lights did not appear to be the familiar lights of airplanes, nor was there any sound that could be associated with helicopters, they decided to call local police. “They were completely silent,” said Ms Pergament.

Two cruisers from Newtown responded, said Ms Pergament, and the police officers seemed as baffled as the couple as to the source of the lights. Several other drivers also pulled over to watch and take video. “No one could figure out what they were,” said Ms Pergament in an e-mail Tuesday, January 18, to The Newtown Bee.

The police disqualified choppers, as well, and one officer told the couple that aircraft comes across as green or blue, not orange. “He said they were checking with Danbury Aviation and Oxford Airport. We could hear the police dispatcher say over the radio in the officer’s car, ‘Oxford had nothing on its radar,’ and said nothing was scheduled to be flying over,” Ms Pergament said. One officer also mentioned, she said, that the town is usually notified if there is a military exercise going on.

According to Newtown Police, multiple calls were received from the Toddy Hill Road/Route 34 area on Saturday night, beginning at 8:19 pm, reporting what appeared to be low-flying aircraft.

Officer Rich Monckton of the Newtown Police Department was on duty Saturday evening. “We received a call and were sent to check on it,” he said. “They were not flying really low; they seemed to be at a pretty high altitude,” said Officer Monckton, and added that he had not seen anything like this before.

An Army veteran, Officer Monckton said that while the lights did not appear to be the normal flashing red or green lights of aircraft, a military exercise could not be ruled out. “It could have been military aircraft at a high altitude, but I can’t say.”

But floating Chinese lanterns are not the first thing that come to mind when odd lights fill the night sky, to either experienced officers or lay people.

The lanterns were launched to honor the late Gennaro Prete’s 40th birthday, said one anonymous friend of Mr Prete’s, and added, “I’m sure he is in Heaven, hysterical with laughter.”

Mr Prete’s sister, LeeAnn Prete Browett, explained further the story behind Saturday night’s light show. “I was one of 13 family and friends that sent 40 Chinese Lantern Wish Balloons up to my brother on his 40th birthday this past Saturday, on January 15. My brother, Jerry Prete, unexpectedly passed away approximately two months ago. Jerry was only 39 and his loss has been very difficult for our family and friends to accept and deal with. We miss him more than I can express in words. Rather than mourn his loss on what would have been his 40th birthday, we decided to celebrate his life and send him the message how much we love and cherish him. We had no intention of it receiving so much attention,” she said.

The large glowing lanterns were sent aloft from the property on Pilgrim Lane, off of Toddy Hill Road, where the family grew up, said Ms Browett.

Ms Pergament and Mr O’Looney were relieved to read a January 19 posting on the YouTube site, providing a reasonable explanation for the lights that on Saturday evening eventually “petered out, and we all went on with our business. The fact that no one knew what they were was a little creepy,” said Ms Pergament.

“It was just so out of the ordinary, the way they were just streaming silently across the sky,” she said.

The “sighting,” incidentally, occurred almost exactly 100 years after a sighting of unidentified, flickering lights that anchored over Hattertown. That incident, reported in the January 13, 1911, issue of The Newtown Bee, took place Christmas Eve, December 1910.