The Westfield Lights (1961)

John Murphy was driving home at about seven on the evening of Sunday 5 February 1961 when he noticed "an extremely bright object in the sky" to the north-west of his house in Westfield. It was not a star, he said. It was round and much larger than one and he could describe it no further. He saw it again on Monday and Tuesday evenings. On the night he rang the FBI there were three of them: north-west, west and north. They had changed "from a round shape to lateral shape and appeared to be much like a spectrum."

What is on the record

The only record is a short FBI Newark memorandum dated 8 February 1961, written by Special Agent William E. Gagnon after Murphy telephoned that evening. It is in the FBI's Newark file, FBI-UAP-D012. The memo keeps his words close. His wife told him "he had been drinking and imagining things". He said he had his daughter, a school teacher, out looking along with his son, his wife and a neighbour, and "they had verified his findings." He had tried the Westfield police, who were too busy shovelling snow, and Civilian Defense, which did not answer. He did not know whether the objects were weather balloons or foreign objects and wanted the FBI to know.

The memo ends "No action recommended." Handwritten notes add that the telephone directory lists a T. G. Murphy at a neighbouring house number with the same telephone, and that the Air Force's OSI in Newark was told on 10 February. None of the family or the neighbour is named. The file offers no explanation, and no outside account of these nights has been found.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. The one named witness is Murphy; the others who looked are recorded only by their relation to him. No independent testimony sits beside the memo in the archive, and the tier measures sourcing rather than truth. What shone over Westfield those evenings is not resolved here.