AudioBlog: Did UFOs Cause the 1965 Blackout?

by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”On November 9, 1965, a huge portion of the Eastern United States experienced a power outage that began at 5:17 p.m. and lasted until 7:00 a.m. the next day in most areas. According to an article on the New England Historical Society website, it happened because maintenance workers “set a protective relay too low on a power line to Ontario, which then tripped the relay. It then sent power to other lines, overloading them.” At the time, the entire U.S. was in the midst of a UFO flap, and there was speculation that UFOs had something to do with the outage. As far-fetched as that might seem, this was considered seriously by Saturday Review columnist John Fuller in his 1966 book, Incident at Exeter and was discussed in Congress in 1968 during a UFO symposium. A high-strangeness aspect to all this is that Oscar-nominated actor Stuart Whitman, claimed he was given an explanation by the occupants of two UFOs he saw in New York City the night of the blackout. Read more →