The Bloomfield Roar (1960)

Stephen Klyce was at the First Presbyterian Church on Broad Street in Bloomfield, where he was the organist, when he and others heard "what sounded like a roar of a jet". Outside they saw "a bright object in the sky with a hazy outline around it." It seemed to stand still in the east, toward New York City. A plane passed overhead at the same time, and the account puts the object about 5,000 feet up. After some five minutes it was gone.

Ralph Lavella of West Paterson called ten minutes after Klyce with a stranger version. At about 5:45 he had seen a jet flying south-east, heard an explosion and "saw an object leave the plane and move in an easterly direction." A bright light came from it, and after several minutes it seemed to drop from the sky near New York.

What is on the record

Everything comes from one FBI Newark office memorandum, written the same evening by Special Agent William H. Rockett and released in the FBI's Newark file, FBI-UAP-D012. It logs the calls by the minute. Klyce rang at about 5:50 PM and Lavella at 6:00. An anonymous caller at 5:47 gave similar information. At 6:27 Albert Douglas of Springfield described sitting in his car at a supermarket and seeing a vapour trail in the southern sky with a bright object at its end. It travelled "at jet speed", then seemed to stop and stayed still for five minutes before it disappeared. The first two calls went on to an OSI agent at Camp Kilmer at 6:03.

The memo itself gives no evaluation. In the lower margin someone has written "Balloon from Va." The note is unsigned. Outside the file, published launch lists record a NASA Shotput rocket, a test of the systems for the Echo balloon satellites, fired from Wallops Island, Virginia at 22:35 GMT that day. That was 5:35 PM on the East Coast, ten minutes before the sightings. The file does not make that link itself.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. Three callers are named, and the memo sets their accounts side by side. No independent testimony sits beside it in the archive, and the tier measures sourcing rather than truth. What hung over the New Jersey skyline is not resolved here.