Pine Bush is a hamlet in the Town of Crawford in Orange County, New York, in the farm country of the Wallkill River valley below the Shawangunk Ridge, not far from Stewart International Airport. For roughly two decades from the early 1980s it had a second identity as the UFO capital of the Northeast, a place where people drove from other states to park on dark farm roads and watch the sky.
How it started
The reputation dates at least to 1981, when the science magazine Omni ran a piece called The Pine Bush Adventure by Harry Lebelson, a field investigator for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. He described residents who had seen strange lights, and one who said a silvery, domed disc about a hundred feet wide had hovered near his house with a turbine-like whir. Lebelson reported showing photographs of the lights to a physicist and an astronomer who could not explain them. A local paper, the Citizen-Herald of Walden, followed up and found residents reluctant to talk. The state police told the paper they had no recent reports, and one officer said he could not remember any cluster of sightings in twenty years in the county.
Pine Bush sat just west of the great Hudson Valley flap of 1983 to 1984, when residents of Westchester, Putnam and neighboring counties filed hundreds of reports of a huge boomerang of lights. State police traced that object to a group of pilots flying light planes in tight formation at night out of Stormville Airport, with colored lights and dark undersides, and the pilots admitted they enjoyed the confusion. UFO writers did not all accept that, and the 1987 book Night Siege kept the flap alive, mentioning Pine Bush in passing.
Ellen Crystall
The person most responsible for Pine Bush’s fame was Ellen Crystall, a New Jersey woman who began visiting in 1980 and kept returning for years, photographing lights over the fields. In 1991 she published Silent Invasion, describing groups of craft rising out of and landing in fields, sometimes at close range, and two sightings of the beings themselves. She appeared on national talk shows. Many in the UFO world, by one enthusiast’s account, dismissed her claims as fantasy and her photographs as unconvincing; Crystall said the blurring was deliberate interference by the aliens.
After a widely seen display of lights across Orange and Dutchess counties on August 6, 1992, Crystall wrote to the Middletown Times Herald-Record complaining that the paper had ignored it and that Stewart International Airport kept telling callers they were seeing airplanes flying in formation. She said she had videotaped one of the craft for twelve minutes from Route 17. The airport’s explanation was the same one that had settled the Stormville sightings a few years earlier.
The skywatchers
Through the 1990s a loose community gathered most clear nights on West Searsville Road. The writer Scott Carr, who joined them, described lights darting overhead, photographs full of white orbs that no one had seen with the naked eye, and a steady drift into stranger claims. A geologist, Bruce Cornet, arrived in 1992 after reading Crystall’s book and announced that he had found underground transmitters beaming energy into space and that the valley was a scale copy of the Cydonia region of Mars. In 1997 he and two others videotaped what they described as a black triangle. By then new houses were going up along the old skywatching roads, residents were posting no-trespassing signs, and police were moving parked cars along.
Where it stands
By 2003 the Times Herald-Record reported that the media attention had died away, Crystall had died, and newcomers might not know the town’s reputation, though residents still traded stories of lights, abductions and orbs on film. Pine Bush now holds an annual UFO Fair on Main Street, with talks, costumes and an alien beauty pageant. The lights people watched were real, and some observers were careful and sincere. But no photograph or video from Pine Bush has been shown to record a structured craft, and nothing in the record rules out the ordinary explanations of aircraft, bright stars and camera artifacts in a region where formation-flying pilots had already produced one famous UFO.