Wakefield Property Attracts Mysterious Objects

Wakefield Pond Mystery Dissolves Into Shadows

The Laconia Evening Citizen, January 13, 1977

 

Faulty Counter Caused Uproar

   State officials who converged on a small pond in Wakefield because of reports of a possibly radioactive object have found no object and no radioactivity, a spokesman for Gov. Meldrim Thomson said today.

   Roland Jenkins said Asst. Atty. Gen. Gregory Smith reported to the governor late this morning that the investigation “has proved the whole thing is false.”  Jenkins said the state Fish and Game Department emptied the pond and found no object.  He said tests with sophisticated equipment have shown there was no radioactivity.

   “The entire matter was caused by false preliminary instrument readings,” said Jenkins, who said some radioactivity was detected Wednesday.  But Jenkins said the equipment used turned out to be “faulty.”

   Jenkins said those who reported seeing an object apparently were misled by shadows across the cracked ice.

   Earlier, Air Force officials had reported no signs of any radioactivity.

   New Hampshire National Guard and Civil Defense officials had gone to the farm of William McCarthy in Wakefield, a small town on the Maine border.

   McCarthy said early today officials had told him not to discuss the reported object in his pond.  He termed the attention given to the hole in his ice “ridiculous.”

   “All I think we should say is we have a hole in the ice that does not belong there.  I don’t know where the reports are coming from, and I don’t know what the basis is for the continuing interest in it,” said McCarthy, who had been pressed by reporters.

   Witnesses said they saw a hole in the ice on the farm pond located between the farm buildings and a training ring and were able to see an apparently black object settling into mud at the bottom.  They also noted that preliminary readings with sophisticated instruments for measuring radiation showed activity above the norm for radioactive fallout from distant nuclear explosions.

   Later tests reportedly showed only normal background radiation which it was said might be caused by the object settling into the mud.

   Mrs. McCarthy said they had been told there was probably nothing the matter but not to let their six horses drink from the pond.

   A veil of secrecy shrouded the community of 1,400 with residents either denying knowledge of the situation or refusing to discuss it.  Mrs. McCarthy said she had been advised to keep quiet by State Assistant Atty. Gen. Greg Smith.  No one was allowed on the farm located on Ballard Ridge Rd., other than representatives of the attorney general’s office, governor’s office, state and local police and the Carroll County Sheriff’s office.

 

 

The Day the Sky Fell on McCarthy’s Pond in Wakefield, New Hampshire

By Mike Taibbi and Nick Cowenhoven, Yankee, May 1977

 

At about noon on Monday, January 10, Bill and Dorothy McCarthy discovered a hole in the ice covering their small pond.  By Thursday evening they were appearing on television newscasts, coast to coast....

 

   Bill McCarthy had spent the week trying to figure out a way to get the plumbing in for the four-bedroom cape he was building.  His tent-trailer was packed, and he was eager to take his family to Florida for the February vacation he had promised them.  His wife Dorothy was equally keen on leaving: the old farmhouse was in order, and if anything could delay her decision to leave it was the sudden and then extended relaxation of what the papers were calling The Big Freeze.  With the thaw, the sap might be running, and for two days she had plowed through the snow of her hundred acres, inspecting the maples.  If she had to, she would tap them first; the vacation could always wait.

 

   None of this would be especially noteworthy, except that Bill and Dorothy MCarthy are also the owners of the famous pond which had opened op mysteriously – and in the middle of a blizzard! – On January 10.  One month, 50 letters, 100 interviews and “at least a billion” phone calls later, they were finally beginning to feel free enough ... again .. to take their annual vacation.

   Now it really isn’t saying much to cite the “hole-in-the-pond incident” as the shining moment in the history of Wakefield, New Hampshire.  The town is known for “the nine lakes,” as the real estate brochures put it for the summer-home buyers, who now number 12,000.  And it is near Wolfeboro, which has a railroad junction to which the tourist crowd flocked years ago.  But now it has the McCarthy’s pond, the site of “the incident,” which Wakefield realtor Clarence Martin immediately began trumpeting in his advertisements in The Boston Globe.  The McCarthy’s are, in a word, celebrities’, and their little pond is now the biggest tourist attraction in town.

   The events at the McCarthy pond flashed nationwide before the public via the networks, wire services, and scores of newspapers and radio stations on Friday, January 14, four days after “the incident.”  But even among the state press, interest faded within a week.  The week is worth reviewing.

 

   Monday January 10

   At noon, Bill and Dorothy were settled in front of the fore, surrounded by the paraphernalia they always assembled when they filed their tax returns.  As they worked, a blizzard added inches to the already deep snow cover.  Bill stepped away from his work, and glanced across the kitchen and through the sliding glass doors at the falling snow.  “Not especially at the pond or anything else,” he said, “just out the door.  It was then that I saw a hole in the pond.  I put on my boots and went out into the storm to have a look at what appeared to be a perfectly round hole in the ice.  And in the hole was a cube or a square about a foot on a side.”  A hole in the pond across which the McCarthy’s six horses had walked each day of the previous month!

   “I went back into the house,” Bill recalls, “and got my family to look at the hole and the black object that was in the bottom.  Then I went into the barn and got a hoe and rake and began probing to see what was in the hole.  The rake went into the hole about three feet before it hit bottom.”

   At about 2:30 P.M. he called the Wakefield Police.  Shortly thereafter his digital watch stopped.  It hasn’t run since.

   The police arrived with Geiger counters and recorded exceptionally high readings of 3 roentgens (at first no one knew how high 3R really was) with two of the three counters brought to the scene (“little $50 gamma ray counters,” a UFO buff would later sniff).

 

Tuesday, January 11

   It wasn’t until 2 A.M. Tuesday that the first contingent of state officials arrived to take further radiation readings which, they told the McCarthy’s, were well within normal limits.

   Nevertheless, they told the family to keep away from the area and to stop watering the horses with water from the pond until further tests could be made.  And they told each family member not to talk about the incident with anyone.

   The hole was perfectly round and about three feet in diameter, McCarthy recalled later.  It had melted from both the top and the bottom and the snow on top of the pond had later turned to slush.  None of the surrounding ice was broken and the pond had later turned to slush.  None of the surrounding ice was broken and the pond water itself was still.  There had never been any sign of a spring in the area.  There wasn’t any change when he checked several times Tuesday afternoon, but the McCarthys followed instructions and told no one, until Wednesday.

 

Wednesday, January 12

   The news was broken by United Press International, Concord Bureau, Wednesday night.  Dorothy McCarthy had spoken to Charlotte Palmer, who with her husband Bob owned the Palmer Motel on Route 16.  Several transmissions of the story later, the press got hold of it.  The McCarthys were on the way to becoming famous.

 

Thursday, January 13

   At 7 A.M. the area surrounding the McCarthys’ pond had been cordoned off.  More state officials arrived, along with the first wave of the media, including crews from all three networks.  Within 12 hours of the first wire service report, 50 members of the working press were on the scene.  A month earlier, the grounding of the Argo Merchant had caused nothing even approaching that kind of press reaction.  Dorothy McCarthy’s pond smelled like a big story.  Dorothy agreed reluctantly to be interviewed by a single television reporter, but the reporter was followed into her kitchen by every other film crew on the property.  Dorothy made every network newscast Thursday night.

   In fact, in the first week after “the incident,” one or more of the McCarthys were interviewed by people ... and not just newsmen ... from every state except Alaska (Canada did call).  Their unwanted local celebrity was assured.  “The girl at the bank told me her husband had scolded her,” Dorothy told us, “because she hadn’t told him I was one of her regular customers.”  Dorothy took up regular correspondence with several persons, one in San Diego, who introduced themselves to her via letter.  She has found it all pleasant, if mildly intrusive.

   “We keep thinking its over,” Dorothy says in a tone fashioned of equal parts frustration and amusement.  “But I guess it won’t ever be, really.”  She points to a cleared area to the rear of the pond, a spot used by the helicopter commissioned by one television network to shuttle its camera crews in and out.  “People drive down there,” she says, “and park their cars on the ‘helipad.’  They sort of sneak up to the pond, and just stand there and stare.  Then they leave.  We never stop anybody.”

   This isn’t the way the National Guard felt about things, back on the 13^th, when the story broke in earnest.  Or the Civil Defense Agency, or the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, or the North American Air Defense Command, or New Hampshire’s Governor Meldrim Thompson, or the Wakefield Police Department, for that matter.  In fact, from the very beginning the official handling of the incident was so completely cloaked in secrecy that contradictory explanations were unavoidable.  A huckster bent on exploiting a phenomenon of his own creation could not have designed a more implausible or more enticing scenario than did the elected and appointed keepers of the public trust.

   When the first tests taken by Wakefield Police indicated high radiation levels, those readings were considered provocative enough to bring in an assistant attorney general, field inspectors from three state agencies, and stand-by troops from the New Hampshire National Guard.  They were ready for anything.  State Civil Defense Director George McAvoy told Governor Thomson to “expect the worst” after earliest reports came in.

   But even as a spokesman for the governor was announcing that there was nothing at all in the McCarthy’s pond, officials at the scene were behaving as if McAvoy’s worst fears were true.  The massed fourth estate was kept away from the pond for the most of Thursday morning as local police and firemen, aided by the National Guard and eventually the state police, tried to pump the pond dry.  Officials on the site refused steadfastly to speak to reporters, explaining that they had been forbidden to discuss the incident.  For reporters who pushed too much, the Carroll County Jail was mentioned as a possibility.

   An explanation was simply not forthcoming.  It was apparently not learned on that Thursday what caused the hole and melting snow: or if it was learned, it was not revealed.  “The entire matter was caused by false preliminary instrument readings,” declared a news release from the governor’s office, explaining the first dramatic radiation readings.  The object “seen” by McCarthy was a shadow on the ice, it was announced, by way of publicly closing the case.

   The more learned official explanations, several weeks after the event, were scarcely more illuminating than the first official proclamations and just plain wild guesses.  John Stanton, director of the state Radiation Control Agency, analyzed samples of water and sediment taken from the pond and “found the results so mundane” that he didn’t bother to send a breakdown to any other state or federal agencies.  “Nobody is particularly interested.” he explained.

“I’ll send a copy to Mr. McCarthy but that’s all.”  Stanton’s tests for radiation yielded figures generally within the range of those from previous samplings at New Hampshire dairy farms, he said.

   In the meantime, the McCarthys had been invited down to the University of New Hampshire in Durham and presented with facts, figures, graphs, and “little tiny penciled equations” assuring them that nothing terribly untoward had occurred.  The three professors – a physicist, a mechanical engineer and a hydrologist – told the McCarthys that the “only object that might have retained heat long enough to melt through a foot of ice would be some kind of a battery, probably from a satellite” – the space junk theory.

   And there were people there who weren’t noticed by the somewhat intimidated assembled press.  “We went down to Worcester, second week in February,” Dorothy recalls, “to see about buying a horse from a man named George Lynch.  George had watched the news, and he told us that he saw his nephew standing by the pond in film taken that first Thursday.  But his nephew lives in Germany, works for a computer electronics firm, and George found out that he hadn’t even called his parents yet by the time he showed up at the pond.  Went straight there, and later told George his company had flown him to New Hampshire to New Hampshire on the first available flight after the news got out.  George didn’t say why, or if he knew why.”

   Eventually a reasonable explanation was offered, but not by investigating officials, but by an assistant professor of freshwater botany at the University of New Hampshire.

   The heavy snowfalls of January 7 and 10 were themselves responsible, explained Professor Alan L. Baker in a letter to the editor of a local newspaper.  “It is not too uncommon at this latitude to find meltholes in the ice,” he observed.  “Quite often they remain hidden beneath the snow and can only be seen after shoveling away the snow cover.  The meltholes can occur regardless of ice thickness, water depth, and air temperature.  The more the snow, the larger or more abundant the meltholes.”

   The Durham professor first studied the phenomenon while taking graduate courses in glacial geology at the University of Minnesota.  Since then he has often observed meltholes on New Hampshire lakes during field trips.

   A melthole is formed when the weight of a heavy snowfall depresses lake ice, forcing the water underneath it, which has a relatively constant temperature of 38 degrees F, up through cracks at the low points on the ice cover.  The water melts the walls of these cracks, eventually forming circular holes which freeze over when a new equilibrium is reached.

   The holes are melted from both above and below as the water is forced to the surface, tapering the edge of the ice.  Baker suggests that the fluffy snow which fell that week on the McCarthy’s pond absorbed the water, concealing the hole until the snow was saturated and turned to slush.

   One other reasonable and officially debunked explanation: an employee in a Massachusetts Civil Defense office told how he heard from a counterpart in New Hampshire Civil Defense that the hole was caused by the head of an unarmed missile, the head having been inadvertently discharged from high altitude (thus picking up friction heat) by one of the B-52’s that fly training missions out of Pease Air Force Base in Newington, less than 50 miles from the McCarthys’ pond.  The Air Force was among several agencies to deny the story, but the rumor persisted.

   None of these explanations satisfied the legions of believers in romance, or the would-be provers that all romance, in the end, is explainable by logical, of otherworldly, means.  Take John Oswald.

   “Don’t tell anybody I’m here,” Dorothy McCarthy quotes Oswald as saying by way of introduction on the 15^th.  He was, in Dorothy’s estimation, a man of some complications in personality and intent.  He came dressed in black, with an ear-flap hat and a bag of tools, and he did not engage in small talk.

   Oswald greeted us in that same reticent way, and only after we’d interrupted him three times in the course of his shoveling.  It took fully an hour, and eight different approaches, to finally get his name.

   It turns out Oswald was a field investigator for the Center for UFO Research in Evanston, Illinois, though of course he didn’t tell us that.  His boss in Evanston did.  He’d traveled to New Hampshire from Massachusetts along with fellow space sleuth Ray Fowler as soon as the initial explosion of public attention had died out.  For hours at a time Oswald paced off the measurements of the pond, in the end being satisfied only with a precise tape-measure calculation.  “One hundred five feet by eighty-four feet at the wide end, fifty-five feet at the pinched end,” he recited to us in his longest sentence.  He took samples, augured new holes, stirred the water, took soundings for evidence of underground springs, and probed and probed.

   And he was there to do more than that.

   Oswald’s boss in Evanston is Alan Hendry, an astronomer with an astronomer wife who is president of CFUFOR.  “We had to find out if there was substance to any of the rumors,” Hendry said.  “A UFO touchdown may have been a possibility, sure, but if it was it was a wholly unmonitored possibility.”

   So Oswald, like Fowler, spent much of his time in New Hampshire not at the pond, but in the surrounding woodland searching for broken branches and scorched vegetation.  The two men questioned ice-fishermen, in the middle of a New Hampshire winter night, looking for evidence.  They found none.

   That lack of evidence does not upset Dorothy or her husband Bill.  They did not invent the incident (there was only one timid and later corrected official use of the word “fraud”), and they did not seek to enlarge or extend it.  Bill just wanted to finish the plumbing, so he could forget about the job and take his family on vacation.  Daughter Kathy just wanted to get the tack shop in order, for the opening of spring’s first business.  And Dorothy just wanted to put up her maple syrup, and give favored mare Toquesta a trim.

   Before she did, though, she tried to put the McCarthys’ memorable January in some kind of perspective, aided by a first week of partly re-discovered isolation.  “I suppose I would prefer that it was wholly explained,” she said, staring into the distance.  “I mean we had our day...my uncle saw me on TV in Los Angeles, and who the heck are the McCarthys?!”  She was speaking very gently, and shyly.  “But it’ll sure keep the stories going around the fire...make the winter pass a bit faster.”

   Then she went outside to see about hanging the sign her friend Bob Palmer had just painted for her, special:

   “LITTLE HORSE POND – SITE OF YE WEIRDO SPACE DROP, JAN. 10, 1977”

   She turned, and held it aloft on request, looking away as the shutter began clicking.  Then suddenly a twinkle seized her eye, she smiled – then laughed out loud at who knows what.

 

 

NH Man Says He Found A Space Rock In The Woods

By Jim Smith, October 9, 2009

Reporter for WBZ, Source: wbztv.com

 

Bill McCarthy loves to take walks through the woods of east Wakefield, New  Hampshire.  But he’ll never forget the walk he took a few weeks ago. 

 

That’s when he found a 7 inch long hunk of something that looks like a rock, but isn’t. It was lying on the forest floor.  “It looked to be kind of a rock,” he said.  “So I picked it up.”

 

It’s much lighter than a rock and feels like plastic, but it has fossil-like patterns of a leaf on it, and red markings that seem like paint, and it won’t melt.   Bill thinks it’s come from outer space.  “it could have been in a container just floating around up in space.  It just doesn’t belong here.”

 

This isn’t Bill’s first close encounter.  More than 30 years ago, a piece of radioactive space junk fell on a frozen pond on his farm.  The government came and took it away.

 

It’s safe to say Bill doesn’t know where the rock came from.  He took it to the fire department to get it tested.  Authorities say it’s not radioactive – good news for all of us.

 

Is this mysterious object extraterrestrial?  Bill McCarthy has an open mind.  “We’re not alone.  There could be life out there.”

 

“And you may have gotten a piece of another world?” asked WBZ’s Jim Smith.

 

“Hopefully,” McCarthy replied.

 

In the meantime, he looks for answers to an eerie northern New England mystery.

 

If the rock is space junk, it wouldn’t be unheard of.  Thousands of these kinds of objects fall from the sky each year around the world.