The North Hudson Park landing received a great deal of press and television coverage following my rather detailed piece in The Village Voice. Frank Gonzalez, the Wamsleys, George O’Barski, and other witnesses were interviewed by various TV crews. (The case itself, I must point out, involves additional UFO incidents which I have not gone into here. Ted Bloecher’s excellent and thorough two-part series in FSR2 should be consulted by the interested reader.) One high point of the television coverage was a 1976 talk show hosted by Stanley Siegel and shown over New York City’s Channel 7. The guests were Dr. Robert Jastrow of NASA’s Goddard Lab; Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who headed the second moon landing; Dr. J. Allen Hynek of the Center for UFO Studies; and witnesses Betty Hill and George O’Barski. After recounting the events of that night in North Hudson Park, from the moment his radio ceased playing to the almost unbelievable sight of the UFO lifting-off in near silence, George was faced with this problem: Stanley Siegel, apologizing in advance for the question, said that his viewers would demand he ask it. “George, did you really see these things you’ve described? Do you have a drinking problem? A history of mental illness?” Was this witness telling the truth?
There was a pause and George leaned back in his chair, and spoke slowly and directly. “I always figure like this: if a man, as I have, has lived a reasonably honorable and decent life for seventy-three years, he isn’t going to do something that’s crazy, and in one wild burst destroy his whole life’s history and decency.” There was no studio audience that day, but the cameramen and technicians nodded and smiled at one another, responding with genuine warmth to George’s unmistakable integrity.
I noticed one additional thing; when Stanley Siegel asked these questions, George never for an instant mentioned the fact that there were other witnesses, that William Pawlowski independently confirmed the landing. He declined, one might say, to borrow from another man, and defended his account on the sole grounds of his own truthfulness.
At the time of the North Hudson Park investigation, neither Ted Bloecher nor I knew very much, first-hand, about abduction cases. It occurred to both of us, however, that there was a nagging time problem in George’s account. If the UFO incident spanned only three or four minutes, and George arrived home at roughly three A.M., then he couldn’t have left his Manhattan store until two-fifteen to two-thirty A.M. The twenty-block drive from his shop to the Lincoln Tunnel, and then along Boulevard East to the park, can hardly have taken more than, say, twenty minutes at that time of the day.
George closes his store at midnight, but hardly ever works as long as two and a half hours before heading home. He has also mentioned to me that he has, from time to time, a sense of having been “told” something by the silent figures, something he cannot grasp or remember. I suggested one day that he think of undergoing hypnosis to see if there might be a part of his experience that has been deliberately blocked from conscious memory. “No, sir,” he answered. “When the doctors put you under, you’re out there somewhere and you may never come back.” I told him about a witness who was currently undergoing hypnosis to recall a lost period of time in a similar case. “How’s he doing?” George asked. “He’s finding out some fascinating things, but it’s been emotionally draining for him.” George beamed at my answer. “You see what I mean? I was right. You’ll never see me getting hypnotized!”
The essential deduction to be made from the North Hudson Park landing is not that it, too, could possibly involve an abduction. It is that we have an example—a vivid example—of the freedom of movement enjoyed by a UFO craft, a freedom which suggests just how widespread such abductions could be. We are not limited to dark country lanes and isolated Nebraska farms. One of the witnesses to a related sighting near North Hudson Park on Boulevard East reported a brightly lit, windowed object just over the top of the Palisade. He stopped his car and got out to watch it. The UFO then moved off towards the George Washington Bridge, and instantly all of its lights blinked off. He watched the dark mass speed away, a nearly invisible blot in the night sky. The UFO that George watched land might have blinked off its lights, and there could easily be a more complicated scenario here than any of us imagines, though it will forever remain speculation. I have only raised the issue to demonstrate the complexity of the problem.
Very recently I was in George’s store and we were having a rather philosophical chat. “You know, Budd,” he said, “I’m not a religious man. My wife was religious. But I’m getting on, and I figure I haven’t got a lot of time left, so I think about it. I figure if there is a God, and I face him sometime, I’ll just say, ‘Lord, you didn’t give me all the brains in the world or all the advantages, but I did the best I could with what you gave me.’ And I figure he’ll have to accept that. And if he does, I’m gonna say, ‘O.K., Lord, here’s one I want to ask you. Who were those little guys I saw in the park that night? Where are they from? Are you their God, too, or what?’ ”
