The Extraterrestrials of Indian Stream

Welcome to New Hampshire's North Country, where America is considered a foreign power and alien spacecraft have been dropping in for years

by Ellen Barry

Across the flat white expanse of Lake Francis, ice-fishermen's shacks are scattered like thrown dice. They are tiny and solitary and not built for comfort. As she bumps along Route 3 in her grandmother's battered Dodge Dart, Sandy Black looks out at the shacks and smiles.

"They think my hobby is silly," she says.

Black is a flatlander -- in other words, she was born well south of the 45th parallel -- and it is perhaps because of this that she can hold forth about what is, in the North Country, the only way of life imaginable. The people who live here don't notice things about themselves, but five years after moving up here from Virginia, Black still notices. The winters. The isolation. The extraterrestrials.

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MUFON on the California suicide

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As she drives along Route 3, she reels off five years of local anomalies -- mostly nocturnal lights and UFO fly-bys, but some close encounters and a few instances of direct contact.

This past winter, a woman saw a spacecraft light up the whole side of Magalloway Mountain, then sweep toward her and land in a cove on First Connecticut Lake. In Stewartstown, one man reported aliens in his home, though Black has doubts about this story. ("His wife, who is deceased, offered to make them nachos.") In February, a well-respected 73-year-old woman reported that 12 alien beings sat around her kitchen table for hours, taking notes and talking among themselves. Over in Canaan, a teenage boy saw a nine-foot yeti.

Most of it is the UFOs, though. So far this year, in her capacity as investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) -- the country's only grassroots UFO investigative organization -- Black has reported some 14 different UFO sightings, which is a record for this area and has drawn national attention. She doesn't pry stories out of people, because she doesn't have to. On a recent Saturday morning, Black -- a large blonde in sweatpants and an E.T. lapel pin -- demonstrated her information-gathering method by surveying a series of waitresses; before noon, she had leads to an alien base in North Hill, as well as a reported sighting of a cricket the size of a man.

Black, who is 47, had always believed in UFOs, but when she moved up here, she stumbled into a gold mine of anomalies. It was only a few miles south on Route 3 that Barney and Betty Hill reported the first famous alien abduction case, in 1961, and that was by no means the region's first brush with the supernatural. Peggy Cheries, 40, a cashier at George's Pizza, in Colebrook, estimates that "a couple hundred" locals have seen UFOs -- she can actually recall a cookout that was interrupted by several hovering crafts -- but adds that before Black came to town, people didn't talk about it.

Not so now. Once they are collated and mailed to MUFON headquarters, in Texas, these reports will constitute what UFO experts call a "flap" -- in other words, a notable upsurge in localized sightings.

All of which has brought an abnormal amount of national attention to these small towns in the North Country, where looking for alien spacecraft is one way to spend a Saturday night -- something like going to the movies, but less of a drive.

"We've been watching them for 10 or 15 years now," says one 63-year-old convenience-store owner, who has never spoken publicly about it and asks to remain anonymous. "When I go out at night, that's what I look for. I look for things in the sky." And sometimes not in the sky. One of his neighbors, he mentions, "had 14 of them over for breakfast."

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.