Long Island’s UFO folklore includes an alleged spacecraft crash in a Suffolk County park, a strange beam of light over Fire Island, unidentified objects hovering above Patchogue’s Fourth of July fireworks and a WBAB radio personality who said mysterious callers ordered her to meet them at Mount Misery. None of these stories proves that extraterrestrial visitors came to Long Island, but each became part of the Island’s considerable collection of strange local lore.
Some of the accounts come from witnesses who filed reports with the National UFO Reporting Center. Others were investigated and promoted by UFO enthusiasts or appeared in paranormal books, which means the evidence behind them varies considerably. What they have in common is that witnesses believed they had encountered something they could not readily explain.
The alleged Southaven Park UFO crash
The most elaborate Long Island UFO story began on the evening of Nov. 24, 1992, near Southaven County Park in Shirley. According to accounts collected by the Long Island UFO Network, motorists traveling on Sunrise Highway reported seeing what they initially thought might be an aircraft descending toward the park.
John Ford, chairman of the UFO group, later publicized an account from a witness who described a dull metallic, tubular object with bright blue lights at either end and a white light in its center. According to that version, the object made a sharp turn, crossed the highway and descended into the woods, where the witness saw an intense flash.
Residents near the park were also said to have reported a fire, strange lights and rumbling sounds that night. In the days that followed, UFO investigators collected stories of electrical problems, unexplained telephone calls and military helicopters flying around the area.
There was one especially intriguing coincidence. Records showed that Southaven Park was closed to the public from Nov. 25 through Nov. 28, immediately after the supposed incident. Park officials said the closure had been scheduled for duck hunting, but UFO enthusiasts came to believe authorities were using the closure to conceal a crash investigation.
The Brookhaven Fire Department’s own historical timeline even notes that newspapers reported on Nov. 24, 1992, that the department had responded to the crash of an alien spacecraft in Southaven Park. That entry records the unusual newspaper coverage, however, not confirmation that any extraterrestrial craft actually crashed there.
Investigators later searched an area where trees appeared bent at unusual angles, but no independently verified wreckage or other physical evidence established that a spacecraft had come down in the park. The Southaven story nevertheless grew into one of Long Island’s best-known UFO legends.
The reputation of the investigation became considerably more complicated a few years later. Ford was arrested in 1996 in connection with an alleged plot to use radioactive material against Suffolk County officials whom he believed were involved in covering up UFO incidents. He was later found incompetent to stand trial and committed to a psychiatric institution. That episode does not explain what witnesses may have seen in 1992, but it is an important reason to distinguish the original reports from the much larger conspiracy theories that developed around them.
A strange light approaches Fire Island
A much more recent account came from Fire Island on Nov. 3, 2018. Five people were walking between Davis Park and Watch Hill when members of the group noticed an unusual yellowish light over the Atlantic Ocean.
According to the report filed with the National UFO Reporting Center, the light remained almost stationary and repeatedly grew brighter and dimmer. Eventually it became bright enough that witnesses said it illuminated the ocean below, almost like moonlight.
Then, according to the principal witness, the light suddenly moved toward the group. The witness described something silvery and shimmering that seemed to appear as the larger object passed overhead, comparing its shape to an incomplete vertical figure eight. Estimates of its distance varied among the people present, which illustrates one of the difficulties with eyewitness accounts of objects seen at night.
The group watched the object pass toward Long Island, where it appeared as a red light before eventually disappearing from their attention. Nobody photographed the encounter, despite all five people reportedly carrying phones, and no physical evidence accompanied the report.
That leaves the Fire Island encounter exactly where it began: as an unusually detailed account from people who believed they saw something they could not identify.
Two strange lights above Patchogue’s fireworks
On July 4, 2017, two witnesses watching a fireworks display in Patchogue noticed another light in the sky that did not behave like the fireworks around it. Their report provides an unusually long estimated duration for a UFO sighting: about 100 minutes.
The witnesses described a red illuminated object rising above the fireworks and then hovering at what they estimated was roughly 1,000 feet above the highest bursts. They said it could move in different directions and stop abruptly. A second similar object eventually appeared, and the lights on both reportedly changed from red to green.
After the fireworks ended, the two objects slowly traveled north until they disappeared from view. The witnesses never claimed to have seen an identifiable spacecraft itself, only the lights.
They also supplied their own possible explanation. In their report, they acknowledged that the objects could have been sophisticated drones. The timing, directly above a Fourth of July celebration, makes that possibility particularly relevant, although the witnesses remained uncertain about what they had observed.
Jaye Paro, Mount Misery and some very strange phone calls
The Mount Misery stories are older and considerably stranger. They come largely from paranormal writer John A. Keel, best known for his 1975 book “The Mothman Prophecies,” which devoted an entire chapter to bizarre reports associated with the wooded West Hills area.
At the center of Keel’s Long Island material was Jaye P. Paro, a radio personality at WBAB in Babylon who hosted programs dealing with local history and psychic phenomena. Keel described Paro as an investigator of strange occurrences around Mount Misery during the 1960s, when witnesses were reporting low-flying lights, unusual figures and other unexplained incidents in the area.
Keel wrote that after Paro began discussing UFO reports from Mount Misery, she started receiving strange telephone calls at both WBAB and her unlisted home number. Some supposedly featured metallic-sounding voices telling her to meet them on “the Mount.” She declined the invitation.
The telephone stories became stranger still. In one episode described by Keel, Paro called him and complained that he had telephoned her the previous night and told her to meet him alone at Mount Misery around midnight. Keel insisted he had never made the call.
Keel also wrote about mysterious visitors in the area. One woman near Mount Misery reportedly encountered a white-haired woman claiming to represent a local newspaper and asking personal questions. Keel said he later checked with the newspaper and found no employee matching the visitor’s description.
Other stories involved black Cadillacs, oddly dressed strangers and supposed “Men in Black,” figures that were becoming part of American UFO mythology during the same period. Keel treated Mount Misery as one of several locations where UFO reports seemed to overlap with older stories about ghosts, strange creatures and unexplained phenomena.
Paro herself published an article about Mount Misery in 1969, collecting many of the UFO, creature and supernatural stories then circulating around the area. By that point, the wooded roads of West Hills already had a reputation for ghost stories, and the UFO accounts simply added a newer layer to the folklore.
Long Island’s UFO folklore
The four stories are very different. Patchogue and Fire Island are straightforward witness reports preserved in a UFO database, while Southaven developed into an elaborate alleged crash and cover-up story. Mount Misery belongs more firmly to the world of paranormal literature, where UFOs became mixed together with strange telephone calls, Men in Black and older local legends.
There is no verified evidence in any of the four cases that extraterrestrial spacecraft visited Long Island. There are, however, real reports made by people who believed they had seen something unusual, and those reports have become stories in their own right.
That may be why these tales have lasted. Long Island already had haunted roads, mysterious woods and generations of supernatural folklore before UFOs became a national obsession. Strange lights in the sky, alleged crash sites and mysterious callers simply gave the Island’s old tradition of unexplained stories something new to work with.
