Yankee Mystery Files →
A Strange Light over Starks
(page 3 of 4)
Meanwhile, Bud and Helen were enjoying a fine dinner at the Fiddlehead. At 7:00 they paid the check and left for home. Well fed and relaxed, they drove on, listening to a country-and-western station out of Bangor, waiting for the truck's heater to warm them. Soon they were traversing the dark hills of Starks, talking, completely unprepared for what was ahead. And then it was upon them. Helen grabbed Bud's arm. "There it is!" she cried. He stopped the truck as the light rose before them, hovering imperiously above the hilltop, casting a brilliant light on the whole hill. Bud started up the hill again, shielding his eyes against the light, when suddenly it advanced toward them. He stopped again and watched it sink slowly down behind the trees to the left of the road. So Bud once again started up the hill, and the moment he did, the light sprang up and shone right through his windshield, blinding him.
"Whatever that is," Helen said, "it's not going to let you over the hill." So Bud shifted the truck into reverse and started backing down. There were no turnarounds, and with snow on either side of the road Bud had to back down the entire hill. As he maneuvered, Helen told him what the light was doing. At first it seemed to stay up in the air, but then Helen began to shout, "It's coming toward us! It's coming toward us!"
"I kept backing down the hill and it kept coming toward us, dropping in altitude until it was about sixty feet off the ground and directly to the right of us," Bud described. He stopped the truck again and rolled down the window to see if he could hear anything, perhaps a helicopter rotor -- but the air was silent. Whatever propelled the light wasn't making a sound. That was more than enough for the Hendsbees. Bud jockeyed the truck around on the road and backtracked to Route 148, a longer, more indirect route home.
All day Sunday the Hendsbees debated whether or not to tell anybody what they had seen. To whom could they tell their story? "We never said we saw a UFO," Helen says, "just a light, a floating light." They knew that once the story was told they could expect a paragraph in the local paper and maybe some phone calls from friends, but they didn't count on the barrage of inquiries and the utter invasion of their privacy that followed Bud's call to the Waterville Sentinel.
Monday morning's Sentinel carried the story, as did many state television and radio news broadcasts. Calls began pouring into the Hendsbees' home and to the sheriff's department from friends, curious acquaintances, and reporters. A Boston radio talk show called, live, after midnight. A couple of researchers from Florida called, ready to fly up and hypnotize the couple.
Enough was enough. Bud finally put his foot down. They had told the same story dozens of times and had no more to say about it. What they needed to do now was to forget about it. Besides, there were plenty of others who had seen the same thing and called the Hendsbees to tell them so. "They can get names and names and names of people in that area who've seen it," he said.
Whatever was in the Starks sky is, and will probably remain, a mystery. But there is reason to believe that the brilliant floating light was responsible for a real tragedy that Saturday evening. At 11:30 P.M. a 24-year-old woman was killed in Mercer, five miles southeast of Starks, when her car left the road on Route 2, an east-west road across the valley from, and roughly parallel to, Route 43. She had been driving alone, west from Skowhegan to her home in New Sharon, when, according to state police, she failed to negotiate a curve in the road and became airborne. Her car wasn't found until the next morning, when a driver spotted the wreck 40 yards into the woods against a clump of trees.
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