Renee Jensen was enjoying the summer in her Harrington Park backyard on Saturday with her boyfriend, Alex, when she spotted something near the side gate.

The object appeared to be airborne, headed straight for the yard.

“Did a freaking bird die in midair or something?” she thought, going over to see what it was.

Looking down at the object, she jumped back.

It was Pennywise the clown. Albeit, a stout, cartoon version of the murderous clown from “It,” but Pennywise nonetheless. The plush character’s mouth was reddened with fake “blood.”

Adding to the mystery: some writing was scrawled in black on the doll’s forehead.

Jensen called Alex over. This was obviously a toy, but something just wasn’t adding up.

In Stephen King’s 1986 novel “It,” the 1990 miniseries adaptation and 2017 film, Pennywise is an evil clown who terrorizes children in Derry, Maine. His infamous line: “We all float down here. You’ll float, too.”

"It Chapter Two" opens in theaters on Sept. 6. Jensen wondered if the Pennywise toy she found might have been some kind of promotion for the film.Warner Bros.

“It Chapter Two,” the sequel to the 2017 movie, staring Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise, is set to open on Sept. 6. In the film’s trailer, one scene features Pennywise floating through the air holding a mass of red balloons.

Jensen has read King’s book. She’s also seen the miniseries (starring Tim Curry as the evil clown demon) and the trailer for the upcoming sequel. But after her Pennywise encounter this weekend, she’s not so sure about watching the new film.

She wonders if someone set the Pennywise toy aloft as a promotion for the movie — perhaps by drone, given the way it entered her backyard.

Harrington Park, after all, is quite a leafy Bergen County suburb. Jensen lives off a county road, but her home is surrounded by trees.

“It came at an angle and I just watched this thing, it didn’t hit a single tree and went straight over, just cleared the gate and hit the pine branches and hit the ground," says Jensen, 42, still a bit shaken from the incident.

She only has one neighbor in the vicinity, and they were not around at the time little Pennywise entered the yard.

Even so, “there’s no way they could have launched this thing from their house," Jensen tells NJ Advance Media.

Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise the clown.Warner Bros.

“If you saw how many trees we have and where this thing came from, it made no sense at all," she says. “It didn’t even hit any of our trees until it was just about to land at our gate. It looked like a dog toy — they sell it at Hot Topic or something.”

Jensen decided to share news of the clown’s arrival on Facebook. She thought about calling the police, but Alex said they’d just get laughed at. Social media responses eventually convinced Jensen to contact the authorities.

After all, Jensen remembered the wave of “evil” clown sightings and scares that were reported across the country in 2016. What if such a clown landed in someone else’s backyard?

Two Harrington Park police officers showed up. Instead of laughing at Jensen and the found clown, they told her she wasn’t wrong to report the incident.

“They were hysterical,” Jensen says. “They wouldn’t touch it. they were totally creeped out too. It was so funny.”

And no, they didn’t take the clown down the station as evidence.

“The cops were sitting there and we were all trying to figure it out,” she says, but so far, no answers have come to mind.

The officers recommended that Jensen get rid of the clown.

“I’m burning this thing,” Jensen said. She set about lighting the toy up. But the clown would not ignite, not because of any devious enchantment, but likely due to a flame retardant applied to the toy, she says. Jensen doused the clown in olive oil to help start a blaze. No dice. Finally, she successfully used some newspaper as kindling to reduce Pennywise to ashes.

The writing on the clown’s forehead, Jensen says, was the most disturbing part.

“It looked like weirdo occult satanic sh-t," she says. Jensen and her boyfriend furiously Googled the figures scrawled on the clown’s head.

“We couldn’t find anything,” she says.

On Saturday night, Jensen slept with a knife and the bedroom door locked.

“It’s funny, but it was creepy,” says Jensen, who owns a reiki and intuitive healing business in Ridgewood.

“I kind of live in the woo," she says. Throughout the clown ordeal, Jensen kept asking herself, "am I getting cursed or something?”

Just in case, she took every precaution.

“I had a stick of sage and I lit that thing," she says. "I was walking around our whole entire property.”

Jensen shared a photo of the backyard Pennywise and the burned aftermath in a Bergen County Facebook group to both entertain and notify her neighbors.

“It was pretty amazing," she says. “I’m just glad my kids weren’t here.”

At ages 10 and 12, she ventures they’d want to climb into their mother’s bed if they had witnessed Pennywise’s arrival.

Since Jensen moved to Bergen County from Chicago in 2011, other slightly odd things have happened, but they always had an explanation.

This? Not so much.

Have a tip? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.

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