Rutgers Rarities and Unexplained Phenomena

The house on the left is where the UFO encounter occurred - outside the bedroom window on the right side of the house.

UFOh-No: Alien Encounter in New Brunswick

By Jessica Teal

Late one hot July evening in 1968, two young women crouched in fear under their blankets in their beds as an object hung in the air outside their open bedroom window and emitted a rising, piercing mechanical drone that scared them beyond speech or action. The encounter lasted approximately 10 minutes as far as the women could ascertain- however, they are not absolutely sure of the time frame and are even uncertain as to if their memories are purposely blocked due to an alien abduction experience. This is a true story recounted in-person to the Rutgers Rarities Team by both of the two sisters who lived in New Brunswick at the time of this incredible experience. We are now posting their account & interview in the hopes that anyone with a similar tale may feel interested in sharing their experience as well.

New Brunswick, Edison, Dunellen, Carteret and many other small towns & cities in Central Jersey have been cited online as areas where UFO sightings occur regularly. In July of 2001, a massive amount of sightings along the NJB turnpike were reported in the media, including the part of the turnpike that runs along the city of New Brunswick where the sisters experienced the alien craft. The year 1968 was also a prevalent year for UFO sightings and encounters according to the National UFO Reporting Center which lists over 660 New Jersey sightings in the NUFORC database and shows a spike in the NJ sightings data for June, July & August of 1968. Janet and Peggy, the two sisters in this account, gave us the house address in New Brunswick, so that we could see the exact location, between two closely spaced Victorian homes on a side street in downtown New Brunswick, where their encounter occurred. Janet told us that "it seemed impossible that no one else heard this noise, the house next door was so close and this object literally hovered between our bedroom window and theirs [the bedroom of the people next door]." Both Janet and her sister checked with their grandparents the next morning, whom also lived in the same house, and also with their neighbors, none of whom had heard anything at all that strange summer night. "We don't know what it was but I will never forget the noise - a relentless, high-pitched whine that just got louder and louder- we both hid under our covers for what felt like forever and then it was just gone, the object just took off, straight into the sky and we stayed in our beds too scared to move until morning."

Both Janet and her sister Peggy were reluctant to even talk about what they both experienced that night until they both saw a show about alien abductions on tv one night and called each other, each thinking the same thing. "What we experienced was an alien entity, I'm sure of it now. I know it's unbelievable but my sister and I both were there and we do think it's a possibility that we were abducted", Janet recounted to the RR Team. It was the noise that the spacecraft was emitting that both Janet and Peggy remembered most about that night. Janet felt that the noise was very similar to the spacecraft noise made famous in the 60's science fiction series "The Invaders", which focused on a world invasion from another planet. "As soon as I heard that sound, I was like "that's it!!' It sounded a lot like that, but maybe with a little less of that higher "pitched metallic noise at the end" Janet said. The sound file can be heard on an "Invaders" fansite under the sound bank page which features the noises of the fictional aliens and their crafts. Both Peggy and Janet concur that the encounter was "the scariest experience of their lives" and they also wonder if anyone else in New Brunswick could have possibly heard or seen anything on that late summer night in 1968. While the Rutgers Rarities Team has not yet had an encounter with anything similar to Peggy and Janet's experience in New Brunswick, on the NUFORC website there is a March 2004 sighting of "a noiseless, rotating cluster of shiny metal-like objects seen floating at a slow steady pace over a chapel on my university campus". From this account, it sounds like either above Voorhees Chapel on Douglass Campus or above Kirkpatrick Chapel on College Ave something really strange was seen in the skies. Just keep your eyes open and be sure to let us know if you encounter anything yourself- we're sure there's more out there...

We'd like to sincerely thank Peggy and Janet for sharing their encounter with us. It is our hope that the answers to what happened on that long ago night will be found and that the memory will rest easily in any case.

The site of the alien encounter and possible abduction in New Brunswick in 1968. One year later, the New York Mets win their first World Series under the tuteledge of Gil Hodges.