'1HE LANDING IN NoRTH HvosoN PARK
35
tation to expose himself to ridicule was natural. And his story was
all but incredible.
An hour or so later, I was back in the store with my cassette :tape recorder, and George cautiously began to unburden himself. The incident had happened ten months previously, in the middle :of January. George had closed the store at midnight, walked " Co gnac," his German shepherd guard dog, and had then worked on his bookkeeping and shelf-replenishing. Around one or two A . M . , he locked up and started for home in his black Chevrolet. George lives in North Bergen, New Jersey, j ust across the Hudson River from Manhattan. That night, according to habit, he was driving through deserted North Hudson Park on his way to a twenty-four-hour diner in Fort Lee. His car radio began to pick up $tatic and "sound tinny," and, as he fumbled with the dial, mut tering at the prospect of another costly repair, a low, brilliantly lit object passed his car a hundred feet or so on the left, traveling in the same direction. It was a warm night, George remembered, and the window was partway down on the driver's side. He heard a quiet humming or droning sound coming from the craft, which now had stopped in a playing field ahead of his car. Proceeding very slowly and feeling totally bewildered by what he was seeing, George drew closer to the roundish, thirty-foot-long ship, which now was hovering about ten feet above the ground. It was circum scribed by a series of regularly spaced vertical windows, roughly a foot wide by four feet high. George looked on in stunned disbelief as a narrow panel opened between two windows and a ladderlike apparatus emerged. The ship settled to within four feet of the playing field, and immediately a group of small figures appeared and, one after the other, descended to the ground. George estimates that they were only three-and-a-half-to four-feet tall, and they were clad in identical helmeted, or hooded, one-piece light-colored garments. "They looked like kids in snow suits," he recalled. There were at least nine and possibly ten or eleven of them-he was too shocked to count-but he could not make out their faces. When George was telling me these things, his eyes were round, startled again by the memory of his terror: ''I've been held up in the store lots of times by men with pis tols and knives, and I've been plenty scared, but nothing like this, ever." He accents, and repeats, the last phrase. He kept his car moving slowly, but the figures paid no attention to him. Each one carried a large spoonlike tool and a little bag with a handle. They