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  The North Newark UFO Case:
Anatomy of a Journalistic Investigation
(cont.)

Other Witnesses

Several sets of neighbors experienced something on the night of March 5. One was the Susus, John Gonzalez's next door neighbors. When I asked Teresa Susu what she remembered of that night she said, in broken English, "I see a big light. I was scared. [My daughter] Angela was here. We were playing a game. My lights were flashing. I go outside and see firemen."

Later I spoke to Angela Susu. "We just saw some lightning, that's all," she recalled. "We were in the living room, and we just saw the lightning through the window. I think it flashed only once. We were watching TV and it went off for a few hours. The lights went off for a couple of times. Then we went outside, but we didn't see anything outside. Some people out there were saying it was an earthquake. Others were saying it was lightning."

A ham-radio operator in Brooklyn also claims to have seen something over New Jersey that night. Alex Cavalleri lives in Brooklyn, 8 to 10 miles from Newark, on the sixth floor of a building that faces the Verrazano Bridge and has a direct view of New Jersey. At about 8 P.M. that evening, Cavalleri was building an audio pre-amp for his radio. He tried using two different scopes, but neither would stabilize, and his TV "was going crazy." Cavalleri attributed it to local interference. This lasted about 30 to 40 minutes.

Later Cavalleri decided to run his ham radio antenna out the window. "It's a crystal clear, beautiful night," he recalls. "While I'm setting up out the window, I see over the Newark area two or three columns, or flashes, of light. It was exactly over John's house. So I get on the radio, 28.376 MHz. I tune in and there's a lot of commotion. John was on the radio with the other guys before I got in there. I find out what's going on. John's house was shaking. He saw lights. Fire and police and rescue are all there, he tells us.

"Then at about 11 we get interfered with. I'm on the radio and talking and all of a sudden I have this outrageous interference. I really should call it a transmission. I believe it to be a transmission, though I've been getting a lot of flack for that. I believe it was a modulated signal. I don't believe it was any form of man-made interference. While I was on the air, my radio broke into receive while I'm still talking. They are hearing me while I'm receiving this signal. Other than being impossible, the signal itself was extremely peculiar.

"This is hard to explain unless you have heard all the forms of noise that are out there. This was not static. This was not whistles. This was not bells. On our radios you hear a million things, and they sound spacey some of them. Sometimes atmospheric noises sound like a Star Wars video game. So it's common to hear all kinds of crazy noises. But this wasn't noise. It was like a whistle, lowered to the bass range. Between a hum and whistle kind of sound. It was in there with varying amplitude, it would rise and fall in tone. The first time it happened it lasted 20-30 seconds. It happened three times that night until I signed off at about 2 A.M.

"At about 11 P.M. I saw two helicopters flying over me with no lights, no markings, a dark color. I told John they were headed in his direction and would be over there in three minutes. Boom, and they were over his house. Around that same time there were more flashes of light."

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