The Route 24 Reporters

Jerry Lopes said he saw it a second time, and that three Braintree police officers were standing with him when he did. The first sighting belonged to him and his colleague Steve Sbraccia. The two WHDH radio reporters were driving to the Raynham dog track along Route 24 near Randolph when a large silent craft passed over at about five hundred feet. In the archive's telling it was shaped like home plate or a triangle, big enough to blot out the stars. According to that telling both men saw it again on separate later occasions.

What is on the record

One video supplies all three claimants: Lopes, Sbraccia and the three Braintree officers. The officers are counted as a single entry, so the figure of three understates the people named in the story and overstates how many separate sources the archive can reach. Every one of them comes through the reporters' own account.

Outside the archive the trail is short. A local television station covered the reporters' story in March 1979, and the 2013 documentary The Bridgewater Triangle interviews both men. Each of those traces back to Lopes and Sbraccia. No independent catalogue entry for the sighting has been found.

The archive's telling cites a Brockton Enterprise article and several police reports that it says corroborated numerous witnesses across the region. Neither the article nor the police reports could be checked, and the archive holds neither. The dating is loose as well. The archive's sources place the sighting somewhere in 1978 or 1979, and the television coverage fixes it to March 1979.

Nobody has offered an explanation, and no official body is known to have investigated or analysed the sighting.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3 on the archive's count of claimants. In practice it is two working reporters telling the same story, with a police sighting that reaches us only through one of them. That is a real account from two named people, but it is one account. What passed over Route 24 is not resolved here.