Dr. UFO has brought an alien invasion to Hamilton
Run, don’t walk to the Hamilton Public Library and …wait, scratch that. Let’s start over.
Beam, don’t hovercraft over to the Hamilton Public Library before September comes to a close to check out the exhibit in the lobby that serves as either A) definitive proof that aliens exist, live among us, are mining the moon, travel in underground tunnels on Mars or that B) Pat Marcattilio, known as “Dr. UFO” and the founder of the Hamilton UFO study group - now known as “Fringe New Jersey” - is a few light years short of a parsec, if you catch my drift.
Either way, the material presented is fascinating. NASA pictures showing “proof” of aliens, statements from the former Canadian Minister of National Defence Paul Hellyer detailing his knowledge that it’s real, books that dive down this rabbit hole. It’s all here, and it’ll take you no more than five minutes or so to believe it ... or not.
And believe me: Marcattilio is a believer. When I asked him what he’d tell people who disagree with him, he simply pointed to the stack of NASA photos with legitimately weird things on them - like 90-degree angled building-like structures on the moon that look like, well, buildings - and his answer is simple: “Well, it’s NASA photographs. How can you argue with that?”
And while it’s easy to dismiss Marcattilio and others like him, let’s keep in mind a few things. For starters, if you were going around saying the Earth was round a few hundred years ago, you’d be labeled a loon. Say the Earth revolved around the sun, you might get burned at the stake. So things change.
Then there’s this: According to a Gallup poll, 25 percent of us believe aliens have visited Earth already. So it’s not like Marcattilio’s beliefs are so far out there as far as “far out there” beliefs go; what separates Marcattilio is that you talk to him for a few minutes, you realize he believes with a capital B. (Full disclosure: I believe we are not alone in the universe. I don’t believe aliens are here. Anyway …)
Anyway, Fringe New Jersey (fringenewjersey.com) meets the second and fourth Wednesday of every month at 7 p.m. in the library, and most meetings attract 40 or so like-minded people. Additionally, the group’s Autumn Conference will be held November 5 at the Hilton Garden Inn in Hamilton.
And just when I thought my interview was over and I was going to be short a full column, Bill Miller walked into the library. Old-timer type. He started poking around the exhibit, and I asked him if he thought aliens were real.
“Yes,” he said. “My father was a detective in the Trenton police department. He led an investigation on West State Street. A night watchman was burned and claimed he was burned by something out of the sky. Guy wasn’t drunk, and he was actually burned and …”
And then Marcattilio jumped in and told the rest of the story. “First case of an UFO attacking a human,” he said.
He knew the name of the night watchman, and so when I got back to the office I Googled around. The story was not easy to find. Found it in something called “The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse UFOs: History 1956 September October.” (Find it for yourself here: cufos.org/ UFO_History_Gross/1956_09_10_ History.pdf Scroll down to page 69, and there it is. In a nutshell: A guy named Harry Sturdevant, a night watchman, claimed he saw a red light zoom toward him and emit a noxious gas, knocking him senseless for a half hour or more. This vision of a red light matched up with two other reports from around the same time. One was from a 5-year-old on Parkside Avenue and the other from a Trentonian delivery man.
The story of Sturdevant and other two made the papers, and Trentonian reporter Emil Slaboda (who went on to become longtime editor and whose son, Greg, is a longtime photographer here) wrote, “‘During my eight years as crime reporter at The Trentonian, I have run into many instances where a hoax was perpetrated or attempted. But never have I found any person as overwrought as Mr. Sturdevant was that night. His state was such that tears actually were streaming from his eyes. Something terrified him.”
The Trenton detectives - including, as you’ll find in the reading, one Lt. Adolph Miller - also believed Sturdevant.
Things got to the point where Sturdevant, who lost some hearing as well as his sense of taste and smell as a result of the incident, was unable to continue at his job. His employer refused to pay him. So he sued for workers comp. And he eventually won, which prompted Slaboda to later write, “Such a decision almost amounts to an admission by the state that flying saucers do exist.”
The verdict was later overturned, but what a great piece of Trenton and alien? - history.
And the fact I just happened to be interviewing Marcattilio when Bill Miller just happened to walk in and that his father just happened to be the detective in Trenton’s biggest alien case has freaked me out. It’s almost as if forces outside our control brought us all together and …