At 2:24 A.M. On September 3, 1965, Norman Muscarello, - three weeks away from joining the Navy, plunged into the Exeter police station in a state of near shock. He was white, and shaking. Patrolman Reginald "Scratch" Toland, on duty at the desk, helped him light a cigarette before he calmed down enough to talk.

His story came out in bursts. He had been hitchhiking on Route 150 from Amesbury, Massachusetts, to his home in Exeter, a distance of twelve miles. The traffic was sparse, and he was forced to walk most of the way. By two that morning he reached Kensington, a few miles short of his home. Near an open field between two houses, the Thing, as he called it, came out of the sky directly toward him. It was as big as & bigger than a house. It appeared to be 80 to 90 feet in diameter, 'with brilliant, pulsating red lights around an apparent rim. It wobbled, yawed, and floated toward him. It made no noise whatever. When it seemed as if it was going to hit him, he dove down on the shallow shoulder of the road. Then the object appeared to back off slowly, and hovered directly over the roof of one of the houses. Finally, it backed off far enough for Muscarello to make a run for the house. He pounded on the door, screaming. No one answered.

At that moment, a car came by, moving in the direction of Exeter. He ran to the middle of the road and waved his arms frantically. A middle-aged couple drove him into Exeter and dropped him off at the police station.

The kid had calmed down a little now, although he kept lighting one cigarette after another.

Look," said Muscarello. "I know you don't believe me. I don't blame you. But you got to send somebody back out there with me!"

The kid persisted. Officer Toland, puzzled at first was impressed by his sincerity. He kicked on the police radio and called in Cruiser #21.

Within five minutes, Patrolman Eugene Bertrand pulled into the station. Bertrand, an Air Force veteran during the Korean War, with air-to-air refueling experience on KC-97 tankers, reported an odd coincidence. An hour or so before, cruising near the overpass on Route 101, about two miles out of Exeter, he had come across a car parked on the bypass, a lone woman at the wheel. Trying to keep her composure, she had said that a huge, silent, airborne object had trailed her from the town of Epping, twelve miles away, only a few feet from her car. It had brilliant, flashing red lights. When she had reached the overpass, it suddenly took off at tremendous speed and disappeared among the stars.

"I thought she was a kook," Bertrand told Toland. "So I didn't even bother to radio in."

Toland turned to the kid with a little more interest. "This sound like the thing you saw?"

"Sounds exactly like it," said Muscarello.

It was nearly 3 A.M. when Patrolman Bertrand, still trying to calm Muscarello down, arrived back at the field along Route 150. The night was clear, moonless and warm. Visibility was unlimited. There was no wind, and the stars were brilliant. Bertrand parked his cruiser near Tel. & Tel. Pole #668. He picked up the radio mike to call to Toland that he saw nothing at all, but that the youngster was still so tense about the situation he was going to walk out on the field with him to investigate further. "I'll be out of the cruiser for a few minutes," he said, "so if you don't get an answer on the radio, don't worry about it."

Bertrand and Muscarello walked down the sloping field in the dark, Bertrand probing the trees in the distance with his flashlight. About 100 yards away from the roadside was a corral, where the horses of the Carl Dining farm were kept. When they reached the fence, and still saw nothing, Bertrand tried to reassure the kid, explaining that it must have been a helicopter. Muscarello refused to be placated. He insisted that he was familiar with all types of conventional aircraft.

Then, as Bertrand turned his back to the corral to shine his light toward the tree line to the north, the horses at the Dining farm began to kick and whinny and bat at the sides of the barn and fence. Dogs in the nearby houses began howling. Muscarello let out a yell.

"I see it! I see it!" he screamed.

Bertrand reeled and looked toward the trees beyond the corral.

It was rising slowly from behind two tall pines: a brilliant, roundish object, without a sound. It came to toward them like a leaf fluttering from a tree, wobbling and yawing as it moved. The entire area was bathed in brilliant red light. The white sides of Carl Dining's pre-Revolutionary saltbox house turned blood-red. The Russell house, a hundred yards away, turned the same color. Bertrand reached for his .38, then thought better of it and shoved it back in its holster. Muscarello froze in Ins tracks. Bertrand, afraid of infrared rays or radiation, grabbed the youngster, yanked him toward the cruiser.

Back at the Exeter police station, Scratch Toland was nearly blasted out of his chair by Bertrand's radio call. "My God. l see the damn thing myself?"

Under the half-protection of the cruiser roof, Bertrand and Muscarello watched the object hover. It was about 100 feet above them, about a football field's distance away. It was rocking back and forth on its axis, still absolutely silent. The pulsating red lights seemed to dim from left to right, then from right to left, in a 5-4-3-2-1, then 1-2-3-4-5 pattern, covering about two seconds for each cycle. It was hard to make out a definite shape because of the brilliance of the lights. "Like trying to describe a car with its headlights coming at you," is the way Bertrand puts it.

It hovered there, 100 feet above the field, for several minutes. Still no noise, except for the horses and dogs. Slowly, it began to move away, eastward, toward Hampton. Its movement was erratic, defying all conventional aerodynamic patterns; "It darted," says Bertrand. "It could turn on a dime. Then it would slow down."

At that moment Patrolman David Hunt, in Cruiser #20 pulled up by the pole. He had heard the radio conversations between Bertrand and Toland at the desk and had scrambled out to the scene. Bertrand jumped out to join Hunt at the edge of the field.

"I could see that fluttering movement," Hunt says. "It was going from left to right, between the tops of two big frees. I could see those pulsating lights. I could hear those horses kicking out in the barn there. Those dogs were really howling. Then it started moving, slow-like, across the tops of the trees, just above the trees. It was rocking when it did this. A creepy type of look. Airplanes don't do this. After it moved out of sight, toward Hampton, toward the ocean, we waited awhile. A B-47 came over. You could tell the difference. There was no comparison."

Within moments after the object slid over the trees and out of sight of Bertrand, Hunt and Muscarello, Scratch Toland took a call at the desk from an Exeter night operator.

"She was all excited," says Toland. "Some man had just called her, and she traced the call to one of them outside booths in Hampton, and he was so hysterical he could hardly talk straight. He told her that a flying saucer came right at him, but before he could finish, he was cut off. I got on the phone and called the Hampton police, and they notified the Pease Air Force Base."

The blotter of the Hampton Police Department covers the story tartly:
 
 
 

At 4:30 A.M. that morning, Mrs. Delores Gazda, 205 Front Street, Exeter, and mother of Norman Muscarello from a previous marriage, was in her own words "pretty shook up." Without a phone, she had had no word from her son since early the previous evening.. Nervous and wakeful, she watched the police cruiser pull up outside her second-floor flat, where she keeps a spotlessly clean apartment in the face of a restricted budget. She ran to the outside wooden stairs, and watched officers Bertrand and Hunt escort her son up.

"You know what a shock this could be to a mother," she says. "And of course I could hardly believe this fantastic story. It wasn't until  I talked to the two police officers that I knew what they went through. When he came in with the police, he was white. White as a ghost. I knew he couldn't be putting me on. Thank God the police saw it with him. People might never believe him."

By 8  A.M. that morning, Patrolman Bertrand returned to his modest clapboard home on, oddly enough, Pickpocket Road. His attractive young wife, Dorothy, was dressing the children and straightening up the house.

"When Gene came in the door," she says, "I knew right away that something unusual had happened. He said that I wouldn't believe what he saw during the night, then he told me about it. And I still didn't believe him. Until after all the reports came in."

For days afterward, whenever he went to bed Bertrand would think about it. "It's a startling thing," he says, "and you think about it because you wonder what it is. Your mind imagines the impossible. The world is going so fast that it could be something from outer space. It makes
you wonder, it really does. Dave and I talk about it often. I get this feeling from him that he doesn't think it belongs to the Air Force. I want to keep my mind open. Look for a reasonable explanation. But then, as I look back in my mind again, I wonder. When I first heard the kid tell about it, I thought it must have been a plane. But the more he talked, I knew it couldn't be one. Then I was sure he was talking about a helicopter. I did ask him on that four-mile ride out to the place, did you feel any wind? I know from a helicopter, he's bound to feel some wind from it. but he said he didn't. I thought he might have got scared, and was mistaken. When we watched it, Dave and I and the kid tried to listen, to hear a motor. We did everything to check it out. We weren't believing our eyes. Your mind is telling you this can't be true, and yet you're seeing it. So you check out your eyes to make sure you're seeing what you're really seeing. We just couldn't come up with an answer. I kept telling Dave, what is that, Dave? What do you think? He'd say, I don't know. I had never seen an aircraft like that before, and I know damn well they haven't changed that much since I was in the service."

Lt. Warren Cottrell was on the desk at 8 o'clock that morning. He read Bertrand's report, a rough piece of yellow manuscript paper hunt-and-pecked as a supplement to the regular blotter. It read:
 
 
 

Cottrell called the Pease Air Force Base to reconfirm the incident, and by one in the afternoon, Major Thomas Griffin and Lt. Alan Brandt arrived. They went to the scene of the sighting, interviewed Bertrand, Hunt and Muscarello at length, and returned to the base with little comment. They were interested and serious.

By nightfall that evening, a long series of phone calls began coming into the police station, many from who had distrusted their own senses in previous sightings before the police report.

Nightfall also marked the beginning of a three-week nightly vigil by Muscarello, his mother, and several friends. In the short time left before he was to go to the Great Lakes Naval training Station, he was determined to see it again. He did.

Source: John G. Fuller, "Incident At Exeter",  Pg. 9 (paperback)