Morning Sentinel
They saw 'strange lights in the sky'
By LARRY GRARD
Staff Writer Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel Friday, February 23, 2007

ANSON -- It was about 7:30 Wednesday night when Gehri Rinaldi took time out from her son's 14th birthday party. She went outside to the front porch and lit a cigarette.

That's when she saw the strange lights in the sky. In all directions.

By the time the UFO show was over, Rinaldi and her son, Dalton Mosher, had seen weird, inexplicable sights.

"I saw four of them in a row, and I went, 'wow,'" Rinaldi recalled. "The lights were reddish-orange. I called Dalton out. We looked left and saw two more. And then we saw them going through the trees. That's how low they were."

The family's experience was one of at least four reported Wednesday -- all at about the same time and in the same general area -- to the Somerset County Communications Center.

There might be an explanation in the form of the Vermont Air National Guard.

Marie Endsley, Vermont Air Guard spokeswoman, said a unit did practice maneuvers in Maine on Wednesday night with three F-16 jet fighter planes. The training mission could explain the lights that several residents reported seeing fairly close to the ground.

"We were conducting our normal training missions and were flying through there," Endsley said. "They were for a short period of time."

Endsley said F-16s now fly lower than 7,000 feet. Flares, she said, might look reddish-orange, but would disintegrate well before hitting the ground.

Tom Hawley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray, said there were no weather-related conditions Wednesday night that could have caused such sightings.

Other calls came from Skowhegan Road in Fairfield, Main Street in Norridgewock and Norridgewock Avenue in Skowhegan. The Fairfield caller reported seeing "strange lights in the sky heading south," while the Skowhegan caller reported seeing yellow lights in the sky over Skowhegan.

Somerset County Sheriff's Deputy Richie Putnam took the calls from Anson and Norridgewock. Putnam said neither the Federal Aviation Administration nor the Brunswick Naval Air Station reported any flights in the area.

"(People) were seeing streaks of white light, and it wasn't anything that they recognized," Putnam said.

Rinaldi, who moved from Arizona to Anson only three weeks ago, tried in vain to photograph her close encounter with her 35 mm camera, but it jammed.

"It worked for me inside the house, for the birthday party," she said. "It shut itself off outside. It would not take a picture."

Rinaldi also said she saw one UFO that streaked sideways over the sky, like a comet. When she went inside to check the camera, she heard her son hollering.

"Mom, Mom, there's more!" Dalton Mosher yelled.

By that time, Mosher recalled, he was getting a little scared -- especially when he saw lights moving through the trees.

"There were a bunch more," he said. "One just shot across. It looked like it had a tail on it. I was just scared. I didn't know what to think of it."

Gehri Rinaldi said she doesn't spook easily.

"The part that startled me the most was when I went back out 30 or 40 minutes later to have a cigarette, and all the dogs were howling," she said.

UFO sightings were reported a week ago in the Farmington area. Lt. Niles Yeaton of the Franklin County Sheriff's Department said he thought they were flares from military planes in training. People in the area have heard low-flying jets at night, Yeaton added.

Somerset County Sheriff Barry A. DeLong said he doesn't dismiss stories of UFOs, because he has seen one.

It happened back in the 1970s, when he was on patrol one night in Bingham.

"I didn't want to talk about it," DeLong said. "I didn't want people to think I was crazy."

DeLong said the lights he saw were not far from the ground.

"They were hovering about 15 feet from my cruiser, late at night," the sheriff said.

"It had fixed lights that were spinning. It was huge, and oval-shaped. I knew it wasn't a jet fighter. It slowly started backing off toward Sugarloaf, and then at a terrific speed."

Larry Grard -- 474-9534, Ext. 343

lgrard@centralmaine.com


Reader comments

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reader of Portland-Boston, ME
Feb 23, 2007 5:57 AM
What is wrong with this picture when you think of national security?
The VT National Air Guard said they were conducting trainning missions over this Maine area, but according to one caller who called the Brunswick Naval Station,the air base were not aware of anything going on in the area.


morning sentinel:
"A Norridgewock caller said he saw lights, called the Brunswick Naval Air Station, which told him they were not aware of anything going on" http://news.mainetoday.com/updates/009413.html
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lambie of Madison, ME
Feb 23, 2007 7:49 AM
I saw a UFO at around 8:30 pm near the end of August around 1997. I call it a UFO not because I thought it was aliens but because no one could identify it. That night my teenage son, sister and my 2 youngest saw it too. It was very loud, triangular shaped and filled most of my view of the sky. All the lights on the bottom of it were shades of white so that when you looked up at it you had a hard time distinguishing whether it was stars or not. Way out in front of the point of the object was a bright light going as fast as it was and that was slow. We went inside after it slowly passed over but the next day in the paper someone wrote in the paper from Skowhegan looking for people who saw the same thing. He said that he and his wife watched it for hours into the early morning. People from Portland saw it too. But we could not get answers for this sighting from the military. About the new sighting....since it was moving around I would rule out the tomato greenhouse in Madison but on some nights the glow from that place is really eerie and you can see it from a good distance. report abuse
Joyce Shaw of Skowhegan, ME
Feb 23, 2007 9:13 AM
I,too, have seen a "UFO",which took away any skeptisism I ever had. It was 1962& I was on my way home from my evening shift at a local N.Home.It was midnight.We were living in Lakewood at the time, & as I was coming down the highway,I saw a huge,colorful shape hovering above the ground in the area of the golf course. It had many flashing lights of all colors & was HUGE! It stayed stationary for a few min., & then moved slowly in a westerly direction over the lake. When I got to my home on Naomi Ave(trembling very badly by this time,I might add)it was hovering over the lake. It stayed,hovering & flashing it's lights,for several minutes, then streaked amazingly swiftly, across the sky & was gone. Two on-duty policemen reported seeing the exact same sight from Parkman Hill the same night. So.......I say(& I KNOW) something is out there.....report abuse
Andrea Sawyer of Casco, ME
Feb 23, 2007 12:48 PM
A bit dubious that the Vermont Air National Guard would be doing maneuvers here.report abuse

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