The Amazing Story Of The WESTCHESTER WING UFO Sightings

The Amazing Story Of The WESTCHESTER WING UFO Sightings

by Bill Knell

Beginning in 1982 thousands of witnesses observed a silent, wing shaped UFO flying at low altitudes across the downstate area of the Hudson Valley which stretches from Albany down to Yonkers in New York State. A few also happened in nearby Connecticut. Most of the sightings occurred in Westchester County, just north of New York City, leading to the object being nick-named the “Westchester Wing”.

It all began a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve in 1982. A retired New York City police officer and his son stepped outside their house into the backyard and saw a bright array of lights above a nearby treeline. A V-shaped, huge object came into view moving towards them at a very slow speed. It was just a few hundred feet above their heads. The thing made no noise and had no obvious method of propulsion. It had a bright white light which shined down from its center and red, blue and green lights along its sides. They watched the center light as it illuminated their yard, until the craft drifted from view.

In addition to many other sightings, an officer with the Yorktown Police Department witnessed an identical UFO hovering low and moving slowly across the sky sometime later. After a few minutes it banked, made a 45-degree turn, increased speed and sped off. The officer called nearby Stewart Air Force Base in Newburgh (just 60 miles from NYC) to see if one of its large aircrafts had been airborne that night. None had been.

The next sighting was a mass witness event. The UFO hovered over a long stretch of New York’s Taconic Parkway. Dozens stopped to watch, backing traffic up for miles. Witnesses said it looked like a floating city with a white light beaming down from its center and colored lights on its sides. The object was silent and its speed of just 3-5 mph freaked everyone out.

During other sightings witnesses reported that the object was able to hover in place for extended periods and move very slowly, always noiseless. One witness reported being able to jog underneath it and keep pace. Others said it sometimes shot straight up into the sky at immense speeds. The UFO was always outlined in bright lights that changed colors of white, red and green.

Graphic depiction

One of the most concerning reports came from security guards at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant. In June of 1984 they observed a triangular UFO hovering over one of the reactors for ten minutes. The object was described as silent and "five football fields" in size. It caused security systems to malfunction and prompted guards to arm themselves with shotguns.

Other witnesses reported seeing a circular UFO with many lights hovering over the Croton Falls Reservoir. At some point it shot a red beam down which appeared to scan the surface of the water.

Actual photo

By 1988 thousands had seen the object including me. While driving to a speaking engagement in Westchester County during 1987, I was on a busy roadway and saw the UFO suddenly appear. It looked like a V-shaped city in the clouds decorated with Christmas tree lights. Everyone pulled over to take a look. I tried taking a photo, but it didn't come out and the sighting was brief. By that time calls to emergency services about the Wing were so frequent that the lines became jammed.

Then, a NY Times story came out in 1984 which called the Wing a hoax. The article claimed that several local pilots had been faking the object by flying ultralight aircrafts in a “V” formation. It had to have been the stupidest debunking attempt I have ever seen. The sounds, lights and speed of small planes could not even begin to produce or copy what people were reporting about the Westchester Wing.

A former military pilot with thousands of flight hours and plenty of formation experience in high-performance jets, called the hoax explanation “pure garbage”. He witnessed the UFO and claims there was no way ultralight pilots could have maintained their positions relative to each other in the way he observed, nor could they have remained in the sky at such slow speeds. He said, “A group of ultralights would have sounded like a sea of lawnmowers buzzing through the sky”. Additionally, the aircraft’s structure was clearly visible, appearing as a single, metallic mass.

Another possible explanation came from a call I received on my UFO reporting hotline. I lived in Queens, New York City. It came from Tony Gonsalves, a former Navy engineer who believed that the Westchester Wing was actually a secret version of the B2 Stealth Bomber he called the “American UFO”. Gonsalves claimed he had worked on it and said it employed alien technology gathered from crashed UFOs. Tony built a small model of it in his home using conventional technology and offered to demonstrate it for me. I went there and videoed his demonstration and explanation of how it worked. I brought along noted journalist Antonio Huneeus as a backup witness and we were equally impressed. However, he also said that the aircraft he worked on did not have all the capabilities ascribed to the Westchester Wing.

One witness said, “I saw something strange in the sky, but it wasn’t the same thing I saw a week before.” What he observed one night was quite different from what he observed a week later. On the first night, he watched as a single, rigid entity moved low and slow above him, while on the second night what he saw was quite obviously multiple aircraft attempting to move in unison. Others agreed. Many of the witnesses claimed that the earlier sightings were, without a doubt, a single UFO, while the latter were quite obviously a group of pilots trying to pull a prank.

Some still believe that what people were seeing was a military aircraft or several. It would be easy to look at military aircrafts like the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, the subsonic TR-3A Black Manta spy plane, the F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft and point to planes like those as examples of secret technology in aircrafts. But my question would simply be, “Why would they test fly super secret test planes over an area where millions of people live when they could fly them over desert or forest areas where few, if any, people live?" By the mid 1990s the sightings ceased and remained unexplained.

Fast Read Paranormal / UFO and other eBooks