The UFOs and Mysterious Animals of the Mount Desert Island Region
Actually, just a few of them.
How many UFO reports were there in Hancock County in the early 1950s?
So many that The Ellsworth American wrote in its Wednesday, July 23, 1952 edition, “a change from the repeating tales of persons seeing flying saucers and ‘fire balls’ in the sky is that of a resident of Pleasant Beach, Trenton, watching a large silvery or aluminum colored ball sailing up the Union River Bay on the afternoon of July 13.”
Trenton, if you aren’t familiar with the area, is the last town on the mainland before you go over the two small bridges to Mount Desert Island.
The paper goes on to say, “It had the appearance of being about thirty inches in diameter from a distance on the shore of three-quarters of a mile at least out in the bay. It floated along at the rate of speed of a motor cruiser, perhaps fifteen miles per hour, with only a slight summer breeze behind it, and going ‘up stream’ against the tide. It took the red buoy off Lord’s Rock properly and was last seen way off to the Nor’ard heading for the spindle marking the mouth of the river.”
Strange enough and definitely solid enough to have taken down a buoy, the paper hoped for more information but ended a bit tongue and cheek.
“Did anyone else see the latest means of travel from space?” it queried. ‘Or, was it ‘Neptune’s Car’ mistaking our bay for the location of the coming Rockland Lobster Festival?”
One would also have to wonder if the relationship to the increase in sightings in Maine in the 1950s and 1960s had to do with secret test flights of government planes.
A 63-page report from the Pentagon has said that the U.S. government knows nothing about extraterrestrial technology or visits. Classified government programs led to many of the sightings. Others say that the report is poppycock since it is the government basically investigating itself.
There are many who believe that UFOs are real, very real, and some of those people believe that the UFOs sometimes bring sightings of strange creatures. Maybe Big Foot. Maybe skin walkers. Maybe some things that currently have no name. And they think it could all be connected.
Long before there was the Turner Beast, a mutated and dead canine found in another part of Maine that made international news before it was tested and turned out to be a dog-wolf hybrid, the people of Hancock County were dealing with their own strange creature.
“Mysterious sightings are usually connected with flying saucers,” the Ellsworth American wrote in its Wednesday, October 21, 1959, edition. “However, another type of sighting has taken over the state. An animal is presenting the unknown quantity.
“The burning question: What the deuce the animal is?”
The creature was described as three feet tall, five feet long. Its tail was long, and it looked to weigh somewhere between eighty and a hundred pounds. The markings were like a cougar’s or maybe a mountain lion’s.
The animal was first seen by Charles Cogwell who lives in Holden, which is close to Bangor. He saw the creature by Branch Pond on the main road. Next, another citizen called Game Biologist Bill Peppard.
Peppard, the paper relayed, “had nothing to offer by way of explanation.”
Except, he said, maybe it was a feral dog?
More people saw the creature.
Game Warden Virgil Grant and Officer Robert Sawyer (who was still in training at the time) were on an Oakfield backroad when they say it.
They weren’t alone; the sightings came from all over the state.
And then it all stopped.
In a November 18, 1959 edition of the paper, Hale Joy wrote in his sports column, “We haven’t heard a word about our mysterious animal since hunting season opened. A case that could probably be cleared up with the aid of some dead eye nimrod.”
There’s a whole train of thought that connects Big Foot sightings to UFO sightings. Compared to other states, especially in the Pacific Northwest, Maine is comparatively lacking in the squatch sightings, but we definitely have had people saying that they’ve seen a UFO flying around.
SOURCES AND LINKS TO LEARN MORE:
https://www.newspapers.com/image/962461936/