Exeter Officer Eugene Bertrand on UFOs

The 1965 sighting of a UFO over the Seacoast region of New Hampshire was given credence by local newspapers largely because two of the eyewitnesses were policemen. This rarely seen interview was recorded and edited in 1980 by Exeter, NH students researching the “Incident at Exeter” by John G. Fuller. They spoke to police office Eugene Bertand about his UFO sighting on September 3, 1965. The students were part of my Journalism class at Exeter High School and their interview appeared in THE TALON, the monthly award-winning school newsmagazine. — JDR ————

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OFFICER EUGENE BERTRAND SPEAKS
The UFO Interview from 1980

STUDENT: Mr. Bertrand, would you please tell me what happened the night you saw the UFO?
BERTRAND: That night, a fellow by the name of Muscarello came into the police station. He had been coming home from his girl’s house in Amesbury (MA), walking along Route 150. Some object came out of the sky, swooped down at him. He ran to a house and pounded on the door, and the guy would not let him in. He saw a car, ran out to the road and got a ride to Exeter. So, (police dispatcher) Scratch Toland called me into the station and asked me to go out with him and see what he saw out there.

We got out there, we saw nothing. It was pitch dark. He asked me if I would come down to the field with him, so I walked down the field with him, and he started yelling. I looked over and I saw some object come skimming across the treetops, about 70-80 feet in the air, and it looked like it might be spinning. At first we thought the lights were going from left to right, but it could be we were losing them as the thing was turning. I grabbed ahold of the guy; I yanked him out of the field because I didn’t want to get caught in an open field with something swooping down. We got back to the cruiser and Officer Hunt showed up. The three of us watched it for a minute. It took off and headed towards the coast, making no noise, just about treetop level.

STUDENT: Were you at all scared of this?
BERTRAND: Well, I wasn’t really scared, but I was concerned.

STUDENT: What did you think was happening? What ran through your mind when you first saw this?
BERTRAND: I don’t know. It was just something I had never seen before. It was just an … unidentified … flying object!

STUDENT: What did the Air Force have to do with this?
BERTRAND: Well, I was talking to Hunt. We watched it until it disappeared and I asked, “Where do you think it is now?” He said, “I think it’s probably over to Hampton.” Just then we got a call on the radio. We heard Hampton talking — and they had just got a call that some man in Hampton had a red object swoop down at his car. He called Hampton and they sent their cruisers out. They called Pease (Air Force Base) and they sent out a couple of fighter planes.

The next day I got a phone call around noontime; it was from the Exeter Police Department. They wanted us to meet, with two Air Force officers at one o’clock at the police station. The first thing they told us to do was to keep it quiet, but we told him it was too late because there was a newspaperman from the Manchester Union who was in the station when this happened. Apparently, they had picked up stuff on their radar, before we knew about this. I talked to the operations officer. He said he couldn’t figure it out because there was no refueling operations going on at that time on the East coast. Then a theory from the Pentagon came out saying it was a refueling. Then they changed it when they found out I had been in refueling, said I was looking at a planet inversion.

STUDENT: Approximately how big would you say this was?
BERTRAND: Muscarello said it was as big as a barn; to me, it didn’t look that big. I thought it was just a good-sized plane, like a 124 or something.

STUDENT: Did it follow the laws of aerodynamics or did it seem to defy them?
BERTRAND: It did defy them. I’ve never seen anything fly that way. It was just floating like a leaf.

STUDENT: Can you describe Mr. Muscarello to me? Do you remember what he looked like, his attitudes and things?
BERTRAND: Well, he’s a kind of a crazy kid in a way.

STUDENT: So if you hadn’t seen this yourself, you might have figured he was making it up?
BERTRAND: Yeah.

STUDENT: Was there any conversation between you and Officer Hunt or other police officers about it?
BERTRAND: We talked about it a number of times. That night, and later, we tried to figure out what it was, but never could come to an explanation what it should have been, you know?

STUDENT: Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

Copyright © 2000 SeacoastNH.com. All rights reserved. Republished in 2005. Originally published in THE TALON Exeter Area High School, October 1980, J. Dennis Robinson, Journalism teacher and faculty advisor