The Trenton Night Watchman

Harry Sturdevant lost his senses of taste and smell after a glowing red cigar-shaped object swooped down at him. His face was burned so badly that he could not shave for two weeks. That is the account in the public record of the night of 2 October 1956. He was the night watchman at the Herbert Elkin construction yard by the Delaware River in Trenton. At about 3.45 a.m. the object came down at him hissing like steam. He said a foul sulphurous odour enveloped him. The public record puts the object at sixty to a hundred feet long.

What is on the record

Sturdevant and Peter Borza are the two claimants on file. The archive's single telling names Borza as a witness but its summary does not record his part.

Two corrections are needed. The telling spells the watchman's name Sturdivant. The public record has Sturdevant. More important, the telling says his workers' compensation claim was denied as a hallucination. The public record says the opposite. A New Jersey Workmen's Compensation referee, Leonard B. Willits, awarded him medical compensation. The award was made on the basis that he was hurt while investigating, whatever it was he saw. That is a ruling about an injury at work. It is not a finding about the object.

The case is well carried in print. Fate magazine reported it in June 1957. George Fawcett included it in a 1961 book and NICAP's Strange Effects from UFOs carried it in 1969. Later catalogues followed. No standard explanation for the object is on file.

Why it sits where it does

The L3 grade is thin here. It comes from a single telling and a second name with no account behind it. The case's outside weight is a state ruling that the watchman was injured on the job. What swooped down over the Trenton yard is not resolved here.