Tales of an EXETER-terrestrial (Continued)

"What was he going to do, shoot it?" one of my students said laughing. In 1980, back from a long stretch in the military, Muscarello still wore his hair slicked back, Elvis-style, with long sideburns, a thin mustache and was paunchier than the tough teenager in 1965 news photo. "He was kind of a crazy kid in a way," Bertrand told my student reporter. But in front of the class that day, the more Muscarello spoke, the calmer and more confident he sounded.

"At the time I was more afraid of the gun than that thing," Muscarello said of the UFO. "So we boogied back to the cruiser and Gene got on the blower and he says, 'Scratch, I see the damn thing myself!"

The rest is UFO history. Reporter John Fuller was assigned to write a piece originally called "Outer Space Ghost Story" for Look magazine. It appeared in Reader's Digest and then in True Magazine as "The Incident at Exeter" - the title Fuller used for his book. Peter R. Geremia, director of the New Hampshire chapter of Mufon (Mutual UFO Network) remembers Fuller as a scrupulous investigative reporter. Geremia has studied Fuller's notes now archived at Boston University and describes his work as "very very meticulous".

But there's more to the Seacoast UFO story. In 1980 my Journalism students fanned out and interviewed everyone they could find associated with the book. We published the results in a special edition of the school paper. Conrad Quimby, then editor of the Derry News and a staunch nonbeliever, told one student that he had tipped off Fuller to the Exeter UFO incident. Quimby said he was also friendly with a Portsmouth couple, Betty and Barney Hill, who had seen a UFO while driving in the White Mountains in 1961. As Fuller worked on the Exeter book, Quimby introduced him to the Hills. I checked this fact with the late Betty Hill, a few years ago, when she was 81 years old. She agreed that her husband Barney had confided in Quimby, and that indeed may be how Fuller -- and soon the whole world -- learned of the couple's wild ride.

"Interrupted Journey", Fuller's follow-up book, about the Hill's alleged abduction by aliens was another big seller. His detailed journalistic style again intrigued even skeptics and positioned Betty and Barney Hill deeply in the hearts and minds of UFO addicts world-wide. Distinguished actor James Earl Jones, the voice of CNN, Bell Atlantic and Darth Vader, was a key force in turning the book into a film and Jones played the part of Barney Hill in the 1975 film version "The UFO Incident."

The two books were eventually republished back to back by Betty Hill as one trade paperback volume and are already out of stock again.

The Hills received a royalty for their UFO story, much of it recorded while under hypnosis. Muscarello and the Exeter witnesses were not compensated in an era before the fearful onset of checkbook journalism. One month after seeing the Exeter UFO, Muscarello began a close encounter with the US Navy and served in the Viet Nam War. He remembered first discovering Fuller's book about him at a shop in Saigon. By the time he arrived in my classroom 15 years later, Incident at Exeter had sold over a half million copies.

"Don't you feel at all ripped off?" someone in the classroom asked Muscarello. Teenagers have an inherent sense of justice that. If I were in charge of public education in America, all kids would study Journalism, work on the school paper and write oral histories. They would meet real people, ask real questions and report the results with detail and without bias. Decades later the students who worked on this special UFO newspaper still recall the project in detail.

"It would have been nice to make a few bucks, right?" Muscarello shrugged. "He (Fuller) said he made a bundle. I talked to John on the phone about four months ago. It was the first time I'd talked to him in 15 years. I had lost my original copy and he sent me that one," Muscarello said, gesturing toward his copy of "Incident at Exeter".

It was, as I recall, one of my best days as a high school teacher. Our school paper The Talon was consumed by the students at Exeter Area High School as soon as it was published. The kids sold ads and paid for the whole process. We bought our own typewriters. We purchased our own textbooks. The paper won some sort of award and 25 years after the fact -- 40 years after the "incident" itself – the kid’s UFO issue is as readable as ever.

Norman Muscarello died at age 55 in November of 2003. Betty Hill, who died the following year, remembered Norman as a wild young kid. She was never sure if she believed his tale, but she told me there were plenty of UFOs in that area. She used to go down to Exeter and sit in the field and watch them all the time, she told me.

According to his obituary, Norman actually graduated from high school in nearby Hampton. After returning from military service, he spent most of his life in Exeter. A few years before his death, I called the dispatcher at the Exeter Police Station to see what had happened to the three officers. The young dispatcher had never heard of any UFO flying over Exeter or of the officers in question. Two, it appeared, had passed away. One transferred out long ago.

UFO researcher Peter Geremia says he met with John G. Fuller, corresponded and spoke with him on the phone. The two men planned to present a detailed lecture together in Exeter in 1990, but the author died just weeks before. Time passes and the thin cables that connect us to the truth rust and snap. I couldn't find the audio tape of our conversation with the man who saw the lights over Kensington in 1965, just the typed transcript my students painstakingly typed and edited after Muscarello’s visit.

I don’t know what Norman Muscarello did or did not see in that field 40 years ago. UFOs are not my cup of tea. But what I saw in that classroom when Norman spoke years later was a real phenomenon – kids who loved being in school. 

Copyright (c) 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. Contact us for information on possible use of all content. Originally published here November, 2000.