1976-12-22 - Worcester, MA - Disk

Large disk with white strobe lights around its parameter

On the evening of December 22, 1976, I was at home alone waiting for my parents to return from Logan airport in Boston, MA. I was 12 years old and remember enjoying some alone time to listen to music and crank up the volume. it was close to Christmas and I was out of school for the Christmas break. It was about 10:00PM when my parents arrived home. My dad, who had been away in Florida for a week or so, ran up the stairs and looked down the hall to me and said "Want to see a UFO?" I was not really sure what he was talking about but he seemed pretty exited so I jumped up and followed him outside to our back deck. We lived on a pretty high hill and had a great view to the south and east. We watched as a very brightly lit object moved slowly across the horizon from east to west. It was going right towards the City of Worcester. When it arrived over the City it began to move in a pendulum type motion over the City. Its motion was deliberate wi! th a machine-like perfection. It did this for quite a while, maybe twenty minutes or so. Then it straightened out and slowly moved back in the direction it came from.

But that's not the whole story. Because my parents had seen the object at a much closer distance. While they were driving home on the Mass Pike, they saw the object. it was next the highway and then crossed over the highway right over them. My mom described the object as very large, round, with two rows of windows and a red light underneath it. She also said there was an area were the windows were "blacked out", like a door. And this area was slowly rotating. Like the craft was slowly rotating as it moved forward. There was no sound. She said people were pulling over and stopping on the highway to look at it. The next day, and for a couple of days after the event, the local newspaper ran a couple of stories. This is when things got strange.

The newspaper, and the FAA, were trying to explain the event as a lighted advertisement for a dog track in Connecticut being towed by an airplane. People were not happy about this and the newspaper received several complaints, one from my dad. He said if it was an advertisement it was the worst one he had ever seen because he was underneath it and couldn't read it. And, according to other witnesses, nobody else could either. In fact, several of the witnesses specifically reported "It was not an airplane." People also used words like "traumatic", "terrified", and “we shook" to describe their feelings. Not what you would expect from paid advertising for something as benign as a race track. The dog track also said they were not aware of any advertisement that night. The question begs, why would anyone advertise something late at night, in December, outdoors – in the cold of central Massachusetts. This whole idea is ridiculous.

There are two sketches of this object. One in the newspaper and one from my mom. They look remarkably similar and show no airplane or advertising of any kind. This event was witnessed by untold hundreds, if not thousands, of people in central Massachusetts.