Some believe the 1965 Northeast blackout began with a glowing craft over a Syracuse substation. Thirty million people lost power that night, and the relay blamed for it was never shown to be broken.
The night the grid fell
The official version of November 9, 1965 is small. Indiana Connection's 50th anniversary feature blames a Q-29, a safety device the size of a shoe box at a remote Canadian substation near Niagara Falls, whose limit had been set too low for the line it protected. When demand rose at dusk, it tripped, and the failures cascaded down the interconnected lines.
Within minutes most of New York State and parts of seven neighboring states and Canada were dark, including New York City, Boston and Toronto. About 30 million people lost power across 80,000 square miles, some for up to 13 hours. Some 800,000 New Yorkers had to walk out of stalled subway trains in dark tunnels. "Where were you when the lights went out?" became a catchphrase, and Congress demanded changes to the grid.
https://www.indianaconnection.org/lights-out/
A ball of fire over Clay
NICAP, the civilian UFO group of the era, kept its own file on that night. It says the Syracuse Herald-Journal was flooded with calls reporting more than one hundred sightings in the Syracuse area. One of the first came from Deputy Aviation Commissioner Robert C. Walsh, who was flying over the city when the lights failed. After landing at Hancock Airport, he and airport officials saw an enormous circular ball of light drifting overhead.
Flight instructor Weldon Ross and his student James Brooking, approaching the darkened airport, reported a second fiery object below them. NICAP's account puts it directly over the Clay substation, the installation that channels power from Niagara Falls toward New York City. The same file notes something that still bothers researchers: the pulse of current that tripped the relay in Ontario was never identified, and early suspicion centered on the Clay substation, right where the witnesses were looking.
https://www.nicap.org/nyne.htm
What NICAP told its members in January 1966
The January 1966 NICAP Reporter opened with a line that captures the whole file: unidentified flying objects did not cause the blackout, "or did they?" It noted the official report blamed a broken relay at the Sir Adam Beck No. 2 plant in Queenston, Ontario, and then pointed out that residents of Erieau, Ontario had reported a large object overhead about the time of the blackout. Witnesses said it had appeared almost every night for a week, turning the night sky as bright as day.
The bulletin quoted Ross describing a "ball of orange-reddish fire which flared up bigger than a house fire," seen while he was over the high line running from Clay to Niagara Falls. A Camillus housewife, Mrs. Dewey Boshers, said a mushroom-shaped ball of light rose over the moon, moved forward as her house lights dimmed, then vanished in a flash at the moment the power went out. NICAP itself told members this was no proof. It just kept collecting the reports.
https://iapsop.com/archive/materials/nicap_reporter/nicap_reporter_v4_n04_jan_1966_i40.pdf
The relay that was not broken
The Condon Report, the Air Force-funded UFO study, could not ignore the case. Its chapter on indirect physical evidence quotes writer John Fuller at length. In Fuller's account, the trouble was first traced to the remote-controlled Clay substation, where everything was found in order. Then came "something else," noted briefly in the press and immediately dropped: a huge red ball about 100 feet across, just over the power lines near Clay, reported by five people including Walsh at 5:16 p.m., the moment the outage began. Fuller listed other sightings from New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Holyoke, Amherst and Woonsocket.
Fuller's argument is the core of the theory. Backup relay Q-29 was pinpointed as the source, but nothing in it was broken when it was removed for inspection, and it went back into normal operation when power returned. The line it protected was undamaged. Life magazine asked why everything went berserk. Arthur J. Harris, a supervising engineer at Ontario Hydro, said it was "practically impossible to pinpoint the initial cause." The Condon committee filed the blackout as explained without UFOs.
https://condon.ncas.org/text/s3chap04.htm
What Congress was told
A special House subcommittee on power failures, part of the Commerce Committee, took testimony on the blackout, printed in 1966. The Federal Power Commission walked members through the official sequence on its transmission map. At the triggering moment, just after 5:16 p.m., the first of five 230-kilovolt lines running from the Beck complex on the Niagara River into Ontario was opened by a relay designed as backup protection. The remaining four lines opened in rapid succession, all within 2.7 seconds.
The Beck complex was also tied across the Niagara River into the United States, and the cascade spread from there. It is an account built from relay settings, line trips and seconds on a clock. For believers, that precision is the problem. The official story explains how the grid fell once the relay acted. It never explains the glowing objects that witnesses placed over the same lines at the same minute.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-89hhrg66577p1/pdf/CHRG-89hhrg66577p1.pdf
A wave of blackouts
UFO Insight's write-up of the case argues November 9 was only the start. It lists power failures that followed in the next months, each tied by researchers to strange lights: San Salvador the same day, Toledo two days later, parts of London on November 15, Lima four days after that. In St. Paul on November 26, power engineers, police and drivers reported bright blue objects while car headlights, batteries and radios failed. Texas and New Mexico, Buenos Aires and southern Italy followed.
In 1968, University of Arizona scientist James E. McDonald told a House Science and Astronautics symposium that UFOs had been seen hovering over power facilities, that the Federal Power Commission held dozens of sighting reports from the night of the blackout, and that the coincidences deserved serious study. Some go further and ask whether the silence protected something bigger, such as an energy technology no utility wanted discussed. The relay explanation still stands. So do the witness reports. Vote on which one you believe.
https://www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/cover-ups/east-coast-power-blackout-1965-ufos