Long before there were drones in the fall of 2024, New Jersey had plenty of unidentified flying objects. Would we expect anything different from the state that was used as the setting in the “War of the Worlds” broadcast?

UFOs (or UAPs if you want to go with the latest terminology which hasn’t fully caught on yet, unidentified aerial phenomena) have been reported in New Jersey for generations. One of the first notable sightings came in 1966 when a mysterious glowing object was seen over Wanaque.

It started on Jan. 11 when people from many other towns were among callers to police that they saw the strange object over the Wanaque reservoir. Calls came from Ringwood, Totowa, Paterson, Oakland, and even Butler. It was described as between 2 to 9 feet with a light brighter than any star changing from white to red to green and it was reported the object moved in a manner no man-made aircraft could.

What made this sighting so credible is the huge number of people reporting it. Even the mayor of Wanaque saw this.

“The phenomenon was terribly strange,” Mayor Harry T. Wolfe explained. He described it as an oval object.

Witness calls came in from a 20-mile radius. The closest reported seeing this thing burn a hole in the reservoir’s ice, a brilliant light beam shooting down from the object.

Canva / TSM Illustration
Canva / TSM Illustration
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It didn’t end there. The next day, Jan. 12, a police officer, Jack Wardlaw, reported he witnessed a brilliant white disc floating near his home in the Wanaque’s Stonetown section.

Wardlaw described it as “definitely disc-shaped and at certain angles, egg-shaped.”

Stacker compiled a list of New Jersey towns with the most UFO sightings in the last 30 years. They used data from the National UFO Reporting Center, and sightings with locations listed across multiple cities were not included.

LOOK: Cities with the most UFO sightings in New Jersey

Stacker compiled a ranking of cities with the most UFO sightings in New Jersey using data from the National UFO Reporting Center.

Gallery Credit: Stacker

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Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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