November ushered a chill into the air over Northeastern U.S. states, and I had barely turned 17 when, on the now infamous date of November 9, 1965 a cascading and ultimately total electrical blackout quickly took out the power grid covering a good portion of the Northeastern United States. The event was brief, consuming only a few hours, but accompanied far and wide by the last phenomenon anyone might expect: UFO reports, by the hundreds, maybe numbering in the thousands when one contemplates reports not reported publicly.
National news sources and wire services buzzed and hummed with personal accounts of lives disrupted by power failures as hours dragged on afterwards, and among the chatter came people's revelations of encounters with strange lights and perhaps objects in the sky observed just prior to, during and right after the blackout.
Almost nowhere was this multiple witness effect more prominent than in Central New York, where all variety of sighting reports accumulated. Were UFOs involved -- or was there a simple explanation for UFO-like reports encompassing all affected Northeastern states?
Quickly aware that something newsworthy beyond the blackout itself may be afoot, reporters for the Syracuse Herald-Journal and Syracuse Herald-American (now defunct, their resources incorporated into the remaining Syracuse Post-Standard) including Joseph Ganley, Robert Haggart and Richard G. Case went to work straight away interviewing witnesses and piecing Central NY's slice of the story together.
After initial stories received top billing in the Central NY dailies, successive reports were accomplished by Richard Case himself, and at some point I was in contact with him about the potential UFO aspect of what soon became known as "The Great Northeastern U.S. Power Failure." I had already been in telephone discussions with Richard Hall, then assistant director of the Washington, D.C. UFO organization NICAP (see link in link list for history), as NICAP was obviously interested in the event, and in between fielding numerous phone calls from anxious witnesses to weird things seemingly occurring in conjunction with the blackout I met with Dick Case, some 13 years my senior, at the newspaper offices on a weekend afternoon to go over reports, maps and whatever other bits and pieces had accumulated regarding strange observations.
(Amidst all of this, I had been in contact with a power company official who promised that he might be able to offer some very important information regarding the blackout and UFO observations, but the deal was that he "might." Subsequently, for reasons never disclosed to me, I was left clueless.)
Nevertheless, when you're 17 and your notes and interest in the UFO topic are suddenly being regarded seriously and not ridiculed by a member of the working press, that's something to behold. Case, a military veteran who would go on in later years to pen a regular newspaper column, write several books, explore historical events and win awards for his work turned out several articles in the Syracuse newspapers about the blackout's witnesses to the strange, the unusual, the unidentified and, in some cases, mistaken sightings perhaps innocently solved.
As decades elapsed since The Great Northeastern Power Failure, calming explanations for what happened and how it all went down -- sans UFOs -- have almost been set in stone by "the authorities" and we can read all about the UFO aspect via Internet sources, but of course some of us will continue to wonder.
And Dick Case? It was almost comedic how months or a year would pass and suddenly I would be contacted by a formerly unknown witness to a strange sighting during the blackout, somebody who had contacted Dick Case initially. Then there would be weeks and months of silence until another Case-induced phone call would dribble in.
Blackouts aside, Case continued to write articles, when warranted, about other peculiar events involving Central NY and his remarkable sense of history served us all well.
Over the years, I've occasionally run across articles or books that reference the Central NY blackout/UFO newspaper stories, and one can thank Haggart, Ganley and particularly Dick Case for chronicling the story behind the story in these instances.
In 1968, long after the blackout, the late atmospheric physicist and UFO proponent Dr. James E. McDonald spoke before Congress and briefly expressed concern about the blackout's implications as they may relate to UFO activity (his congressional testimony may be found online). I've little doubt that valuable documentation such as that gleaned by Dick Case had been soberly regarded by McDonald as he warned Congress (for better or worse) of things we should not dismiss so casually.
My last contact with Dick Case occurred several years ago, while he was still writing a regular newspaper column about Central NY events. The subject matter isn't important now, just suffice it to say that I had sent him a brief note augmenting a radio broadcast issue he had raised. He kindly inserted my comment with a name credit, and that was that.
Dick Case was another of the "old school" newspaper journalists who vanish before our eyes much too soon and far too abundantly. Will Case be missed? I expect he was missed long before he was even gone, and that's high tribute.
