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The Westchester Boomerang: New York’s 1980s UFO Wave That Shocked the Skies
- Damian Ali
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Before streaming and social media, one UFO story gripped New York and made national television.
This A.I.-generated image depicts a large V-shaped craft inspired by eyewitness reports from the 1980s Hudson Valley UFO: For editorial purposes only.
I came across something recently that sent me down a rabbit hole about UFO sightings in New York. In October 2025, scientists began talking about a strange interstellar visitor called 3I/ATLAS, a comet-like object passing through our solar system. Some experts say it’s natural; others, like Harvard’s Avi Loeb, wonder if it could be something made. The debate reminded me of another mystery much closer to home, one that filled television screens in the eighties.
Between 1982 and 1986, thousands of people across New York’s Hudson Valley reported seeing enormous, silent lights moving slowly through the night sky. The first calls came in just before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1982 in Kent Cliffs. Over the next few years, police, families, and commuters from Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess Counties kept looking up and seeing something they couldn’t explain. Officials eventually logged more than 9,000 sightings.
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V-shaped craft inspired by eyewitness reports from the 1980s Hudson Valley UFO: A.I.-generated image created for editorial purposes only.
Witnesses described the craft as V-shaped or boomerang-shaped, covered in red, green, and white lights that made it look like “a city of lights hanging in the sky.” County Clerk Dennis Sant said he saw “a very large object, very dark gray, metallic, almost girder-type looking.” He described it as motionless and silent, so quiet that he could hear crickets beneath it. The object moved so slowly that some people said they could walk underneath it, while others said it hovered completely still without making a sound.
In July 1984, a clear video was recorded in Brewster, New York. Fifteen minutes later, the same glowing formation appeared over the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. Twelve officers saw it hover above the Hudson River for several minutes before shooting straight up and vanishing. One guard later recalled, “It made no noise. It was huge, at least three hundred yards across, and the moment it moved, I knew it wasn’t man-made.”
(See YouTube Clip of Westchester Boomerang)
Families across the region began demanding answers. County Clerk Dennis Sant, accountant David Scarpino, and meteorologist Bill Healey all urged the government to investigate. “For them to say that I didn’t see anything without even talking to me means they were trying to hide something,” Scarpino told reporters. Newspapers called the object “The Westchester Boomerang,” and local TV crews captured crowds gathering in parks at night, hoping to see it again.
Image depicts the reported 1984 sighting at Power Plant, showing a large triangular craft hovering silently above the Hudson River: A.I.-generated image for editorial purposes only.
The story spread fast. The New York Times covered it, national networks aired interviews, and by 1984 the Hudson Valley hosted its first UFO convention. Programs like Nightline and Unsolved Mysteries turned the sightings into one of America’s biggest unexplained events.
Not everyone believed the object was otherworldly. A group of local pilots later admitted they had been flying small Cessna aircraft in tight formation, using modified lights to make a single large shape in the sky.
When they switched off their lights together, the “UFO” vanished instantly. The confession explained many of the reports, but not all. Some witnesses described silent hovering or impossible ninety-degree turns, movements that small planes simply cannot perform.
Lieutenant George Lowery of the New Castle Police Department was one of the officers who saw the lights. “It didn’t look like an airplane to me. I’m familiar with airplanes. I was an aircraft mechanic in the Air Force for three and a half years,” he said. “Planes, when they fly in formation, I don’t care how tight they are, have a tendency to move up and down, in and out. These lights never wavered. They stayed exactly even, as if it was one object making a slow turn.”
(Source: YouTube, Hudson Valley, New York UFO eyewitness accounts-1:11 mark)
1980s-style television broadcast reporting on the Hudson Valley UFO Wave, also known as the Westchester Boomerang: A.I.-generated image for editorial purposes only: Courtesy of TalkTeaV.
Researcher Linda Zimmermann, a chemist turned paranormal author, believes the mystery runs deeper. She calls the Hudson Valley “the number-one UFO hot spot in the United States” and has traced similar reports as far back as 1909, when newspapers described mysterious airships flying at night along the Hudson River, years before airplanes could even fly after dark.
Whether prank, misperception, or something else entirely, the Hudson Valley UFO Wave captured a nation’s imagination. It became more than a local story; it was a television phenomenon, replayed on news broadcasts and talk shows long before the internet could fuel such buzz.
TalkTeaV doesn’t just cover the next big show or movie; it also revisits the moments when television itself became the messenger for mystery. Stories like The Westchester Boomerang remind us why people everywhere still look to the sky and ask questions that science hasn’t yet answered.
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