1969 Berkshire County UFO Sighting Featured in Netflix's "Unsolved Mystery" Recognized as History
It's finally here: a reboot of the popular 90s crime show "Unsolved Mysteries" has arrived on Netflix. The show went off the air in 2010, but the streaming service recently picked up the 12-episode reboot, six of which were released on July 1. The most compelling of the episodes: "Berkshire UFO," which tracks an unidentified flying object sighted by several people in Great Barrington, Sheffield, Stockbridge, and Egremont in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, on September 1, 1969. Residents interviewed in this episode, especially Thomas (Tom) Reed, his brother Matt Reed, Tom Warner, Nancy Reed, Jane Green, and Melanie Kirchdorfer, are candid about their experiences.
The unmistakably eerie consistency of these testimonies is unmistakable. Even creepier: brothers Matt and Thomas Reed, who appeared in the Netflix episode, have since encountered aliens four times, according to Iberkshires.com (opens in new tab). (They don't use the word "abduction" and profess to not like the term (opens in new tab).) Three of those encounters were with their grandmother and mother in the 1960s; the fourth was in 2009, when Matt was in Indiana.
Tom Reed (open in new tab), widely considered to be the star of this sighting, wrote that he was "taken in a dull circular boat with a willow tree painted on it. He was nine years old at the time.
In 2015, according to Engineering News-Record (opens in new tab), the Great Barrington Historical Society recognized the 1969 supernatural encounter as an official historical event. From our perspective, this is a pretty historic event," Debbie Opperman, the society's director, told WAMC (opens in new tab). 'Basically, it's an important event for a lot of people in South County at the time.'
A monument to the event was erected by private supporters, but was controversial, graffitied, and later removed. (Open in new tab) The monument featured a plaque that read: "Our country's first official induction of an extraterrestrial/UFO event."
The monument was also the first to be erected in the United States.
This is not the first time supernatural stories have been seen on television. The Reeds' story about their encounter with supernatural forces was the pilot episode of Discovery Channel Canada's "Alien Mysteries" (open in new tab) and has also been featured on the History Channel's "Ancient Aliens." The event is well known in the UFO community and is part of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico.
Leeds and other Berkshire County residents are not the only ones who have witnessed the event, but not all UFO reports are as well-sourced as theirs. According to the National UFO Reporting Center (opens in new tab), there have been over 1,800 reports of unidentified flying objects in the sky since 2006 alone. It's up to you to decide "if any of them are real," but after this episode, I'm 100 percent sure that the "aliens are real!" I am 100 percent on board with the hype that "Aliens are real!
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