Great Ithaca Flap (Newfield, New York, 1967)

Background

The Great Ithaca Flap was a short but intense local UFO wave centered on the hamlet of Newfield, a few miles south of Ithaca in Tompkins County, New York. It drew local press attention, including quotes from an Air Force lieutenant, and it is remembered mostly because of one child's claim of seeing occupants. It fits the mid-1960s pattern of community-level sighting waves that ran alongside the official Project Blue Book era, and it is documented almost entirely through local newspapers and later local-history write-ups rather than official records.

The October 1967 sightings

The central report came from Donald Chiszar (also spelled Chizsar), a 12-year-old who on the evening of October 24, 1967, at about 9:30 p.m., said he saw a craft hovering roughly 130 feet above the ground near Main Street in Newfield. He described a saucer-shaped object with a large window and two humanoid figures inside, which he said were rough-colored, brownish, and had "big, wide hips." He said the craft "leveled off real fast and disappeared." The account is the basis for the humanoid-encounter tag on this entry, and it is the only occupant description in the local record.

Other residents reported different phenomena the same week. Stanley Orr saw two large, stationary red lights from his car on Route 13 and, by his own account, only thought of a saucer after hearing about Chiszar. Others reported lights flashing in sequence, in red-and-white or green-and-white. By October 30, local residents claimed more than 100 sightings, and the reports continued through November; at a meeting in Ithaca the claimed count was described as "in the hundreds." The wave took its later name from this surge.

Investigation and official response

The investigation was informal. William Donovan, a self-described UFO investigator, interviewed witnesses along Newfield's Main Street. In December he said he could find no proof of flying saucers. About a year later he was charged with fraud in an unrelated matter, which later commentators have cited as a reason to discount his work. Lieutenant Gerald White of Hancock Air Force Base told reporters the lights sounded like aircraft on one of the air routes out of New York City. Police and military officials were reported as skeptical, and unnamed Cornell astronomers were described as "rather incredulous."

Case for and against

The case for a real unexplained event rests on the number of independent witnesses, the consistency of the light descriptions, and a child's detailed account given in a local newspaper before the wave had a name. The case against is stronger on the documentary side. There is no physical evidence, no photographs in the sources consulted, and no official record beyond press quotes. The air-traffic explanation proposed by Lt. White is plausible for lights seen from the ground at night in that corridor. The ithacating article also reports an anonymous former Cornell engineering student's claim, posted online, that the lights came from heat-tab-powered plastic bags launched from campus in 1967. That claim is unverified and is presented here only as one of the alternative explanations offered over the years.

Current status

The Great Ithaca Flap is remembered as a local curiosity rather than a national case. It appears in Tompkins County local-history material and in ithacating's 2015 retrospective, and it does not appear in the Wikipedia list of US sightings consulted. It is best treated as a contested local wave: the witness reports are real and documented in print, the occupant claim rests on one twelve-year-old's testimony, and no explanation has been established.