For those who visit today the former North Concord Air Force Station, near Lyndonville, Vermont, it would not say much: just some buildings abandoned for decades and a little more.

Yet during the cold war the ground-based radar facility, located near East Mountain, was strategically important and recorded one of the first post-war UFO sightings by American troops.

The strategically important radar base

Opened in 1956 and closed just seven years later, the base, located around 1,5 km fro East Mountain, came to host up to 175 men of the 911th AC&W Squadron. The base functioned as a warning station and ground-control intercept.

In the first case, the base made the tracking and identification of all the planes that entered their airspace, in the second it served as a guide for the Usaf fighters that took off against any potential enemy identified.

Equipped initially with a search radar MPS-11 and a long-range height finding radar MPS-14, then from 1958 also with an FPS-6A height-finder radar and from 1959 with an FPS-3 search radar, the base was fully operational in 1961 when an incident occurred that still has no official explanation.

Ufo over East Mountain

In the summer of that year, the base workers noticed an unidentified flying object stationed just above East Mountain. According to some military reports, the UFO would remain motionless and visible for 18 minutes, after which it quickly disappeared without a trace.

49/5000 Since the famous “alien abduction” of Barney and Betty Hill by an extraterrestrial UFO happened a few weeks later, many believe that the flying object could be the same as reported by the Hills.

Unlike the later episode, however, the UFO sighting above East Mountain has never been deepened and even today there is very little talk about it, almost wanted to remove the memory of an “incident” of which public opinion should never have known. Will it only be due to the climate of tension those years?