Exeter River Mobile Home Park

A mobile home park formerly known as Lindenshire Trailer Park, rumored to have been built over an old cemetery in Exeter.

At approximately 2:00 a.m. on September 3, 1965, eighteen-year-old Norman Muscarello was hitchhiking home to Exeter along New Hampshire Route 150 after visiting his girlfriend in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Near the Carl Dining farm in Kensington, he noticed five brilliant red lights low in the sky, flashing in a deliberate sequence from right to left and then left to right. As he watched, the lights resolved into a single massive object that he would later describe as being 'as big as a house.' When the object moved toward him, Muscarello dove into a roadside ditch, terrified. He eventually made it to a nearby house and pounded on the door, but the residents, a couple who had been asleep, refused to open up. He flagged down a passing car and was driven to the Exeter police station, where he arrived visibly shaken and nearly incoherent. Officer Eugene Bertrand, a Navy veteran who had served aboard aircraft carriers and knew what conventional aircraft looked like, was skeptical but agreed to drive Muscarello back to the site. Earlier that evening, Bertrand had encountered a distressed woman parked on Route 101 who told him a huge red object had followed her car for twelve miles. He had dismissed her account. Now, standing in the field near telephone pole number 668 on Route 150, Bertrand changed his mind. Horses in a nearby corral began kicking the fence and the sides of a barn. Dogs in the area erupted in barking and howling. Then the object rose slowly from behind the trees beyond the corral. Bertrand described it as 'this huge, dark object as big as a barn, with red flashing lights on it.' He drew his service weapon, then thought better of it and holstered it. He and Muscarello ran back to the patrol car and radioed for backup. Officer David Hunt arrived minutes later and independently witnessed the object as it hovered approximately 100 feet away at 100 feet of altitude, rocking back and forth with its pulsating red lights cycling in rapid sequence. The two officers and Muscarello watched until the object moved silently away toward Hampton. Bertrand and Hunt wrote to Project Blue Book, the Air Force's official UFO investigation program at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. In January 1966, Lieutenant Colonel John Spaulding replied on behalf of the Secretary of the Air Force, stating that 'based on additional information submitted to our UFO investigation officer, we have been unable to identify the object you observed on September 3, 1965.' Raymond Fowler of NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, filed an eighteen-page report on the incident that became the centerpiece of the 1966 Congressional hearings on UFOs. John G. Fuller, a columnist for the Saturday Review, personally investigated the sightings, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and claimed to have seen a UFO himself during his research. His 1966 book, Incident at Exeter: Unidentified Flying Objects Over America Now, became a New York Times bestseller and remains one of the definitive accounts of a UFO encounter verified by trained law enforcement officers. Exeter now hosts an annual UFO Festival celebrating the incident. The site on Route 150 near the Exeter River Mobile Home Park is where America's most credible UFO encounter was witnessed by two police officers who had nothing to gain and their reputations to lose by reporting what they saw.