It Was Unidentified, Flying, And

An Object. But Was It A UFO?

By Steve Bigham

Susan Nerich says she’s not sure what she observed in an overcast sky last week as she drove along Route 25 near the Monroe border. It was like nothing she had ever seen before.

Was it a UFO?

Ms Nerich, a Taunton Press employee, thinks it may have been. She was traveling southbound in her Subaru Legacy at around 7:30 pm on the night of January 16. As she passed the former Art’s Liquor Locker building, she spotted the unidentified object passing over the trees.

“Something caught my eye to the right of me, just over the tree line,” she said this week, returning to the site. “At first I thought it was a jet that was coming down and I thought, ‘holy cow, I’m going to be really close to it if it crashes.’ It was coming across the road as I was approaching. It was a six-sided thing, like a hexagon. It had four or five ridges on the bottom, five turquoise lights and one small red light. It was going slow.”

Ms Nerich, a Waterbury resident, passed under the massive object and as she continued southward, watched as the object disappeared over the horizon.

“I looked to the left and it headed over into the trees. As I drove up, I looked back and it was gone,” she recalled. “It was really low, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Five minutes later, I realized that it wasn’t making any noise.”

Shocked and shaken, she called her boss, who lives off Bears Hill Road, which is not far from where the sighting took place.

“I said, ‘Guess what I just saw right near your house,’” Ms Nerich recalled. “Forty minutes later, he called to say there were little planes flying around doing a grid pattern.”

Were these planes searching for the same unidentified object that Ms Nerich saw? According to Newtown police, they did not receive any reports of UFO sightings. However, a 1999 document by Philip J. Imbrogno, distributed widely on the Internet, reports that UFO sightings in this part of the state have increased dramatically in recent years.

For years, the report states, there were numerous sightings over the Hudson River Valley in New York State. In recent years, however, the Interstate 84 corridor area in Connecticut has become a bit of a hotbed for UFO sightings. And on May 26, 1999, between 9:30 and 10:15 pm, according to the Imbrogno report, more than 200 people phoned local and state police to report a huge object with bright lights flying over the highways near Newtown and Southbury. Those witnesses that called state police in Southbury were told it was nothing more than a group of ultraviolet aircraft from Candlewood airport flying close formation and hanging colored lanterns from the bottoms of the planes. It was an explanation Mr Imbrogno found hard to believe.

Ms Nerich is now combing the Internet to see if anyone else saw what she saw.

“I hesitated on saying anything to people at first, but then I said, ‘You know what, I saw the thing, and I’m not nuts,’” she said this week.

Ms Nerich has contacted a handful of UFO Web sites, including MUFON, to report her story.

This week, she joked with friends about the experience.

“I told them I lost an hour and I think I’m pregnant, but other than that…”