"Wanaque" is really an old Indian name for "Roswell".

THERE HAS BEEN A RECENT RESURGENCE IN THE WANAQUE UFO reports of Jan. 11, 1966. Officer Joe Cisco, at that time a police patrolman of Wanaque, was recently interviewed by The Record about the lights that were reported around the Wanaque Reservoir that cold winter evening.

“I saw a bright light,” he said with a shrug. “You tell me. I don’t know what it was.”

Officer Cisco was asked by a dispatcher to go over to the sandpits of the reservoir because there had been a flood of reports about bright lights over the water. When Cisco arrived at the pits, he didn’t notice any disturbance, so he headed to higher ground only to witness a bright “blue-white” spot silently hovering. “It stayed in the air; there was no noise. I was trying to figure out what it was,” he says.

There were other calls to the police that night also. The civil defense drove up to the reservoir claiming the reports from residents were jamming up the radios.

“Something’s burning a hole in the ice! Something with a bright light on it going up and down,” claimed one radio report.

Another message said something landed on the front of the dam.

Warren Hagstrom, now mayor of Wanaque, remembers going to the reservoir and seeing something that was awful bright. “We didn’t know what it was,” he said. “We thought it was a helicopter, but we didn’t hear a motor; it looked like a helicopter with big landing lights on. We got Goosebumps all over when we saw where the hole in the ice was. None of us ever said it was a flying saucer, we just saw a bright light.”

Another councilman saw the light also. “It was there. I saw it, a brilliant white object and the color kept changing. We watched it for a good half hour, then it zoomed away.”

Those reports brought on a slew of reporters, media and military investigators to the site. Every one in the town who had a police radio descended to the saucer site.

For days later, the police watched the reservoir, but nothing appeared. Then in February of that same year a Wanaque Reservoir officer reported bright lights, one as big as a car. “It was like nothing earthly,” he told the military.

Cars started lining up along the roadside to get a glimpse of the saucers, and at one point the police had to close the reservoir to the public.

Mayor Hagstrom said the government tried to make a joke of the sightings, claiming them to be an airplane, a planet too close to earth, or frost. As for the holes in the ice, they claimed it to be a natural phenomenon.

There have been other lights and strange phenomena reported along the Wanaque Reservoir. Whatever the case may be, dozens of citizens saw something bright hovering above the water that night in January of 1966, and nobody knows what it was.