This Guy From ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ Has Letters Confirming His UFO Sighting
The following story is focused on the Netflix Unsolved Mysteries episode titled "Berkshires UFO," and contains details about the experience of one person featured.
The fifth episode of Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries does something no other episode in the series does: investigates a series of UFO sightings.
Titled "Berkshires UFO," it looks at several seemingly unconnected people who all claimed some form of encounter on the night of September 1, 1969.
Thom Reed, who was only 9 years old at the time, has opened up more about his story—and has official documentation confirming his experience.
While most of the episodes of Netflix's reboot of Unsolved Mysteries focus on terrible crimes like murder and unexplained, mysterious deaths, one episode in the first batch of new episodes focuses on something a little less common: UFOs.
The show's fifth episode, titled "Berkshires UFO," looks at a number of people in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, who reported seeing or experiencing something having to do with an unidentified flying object on September 1, 1969. A few of the people featured in the episode detail experiences like abductions, or seeing an object resembling a giant flying saucer in the sky. But a man named Thom Reed claims to have had a much more subtle experience: he was in his car, blacked out, and when he woke back up something was wrong.
As he details in the episode, Reed—who was only 9 years old at the time—was on a drive back home from his family's restaurant, seated in the back seat of his family's station wagon. In the car with him was his mother (who he says was driving), his grandmother, and brother. To get home, the family took a shortcut over a local bridge—at which point they recall seeing a bright white light which then became a bright orange light. Reed's mother, Nancy (who was also interviewed in the Unsolved episode) recalled seeing an object flying in the sky that resembled a 100-yard-long turtle shell.
And after those brief glimpses, they say, they went unconscious, waking up a few hours later. When they awoke, it was like nothing had changed—except seated in the driver's seat, now, was the Reed grandmother. They had switched spots, and the car's ignition was now off.
In a recent interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel, Reed said that the encounter has been a talk of the town for years, and that he took a polygraph test 10 years ago to confirm that he's telling the truth (or at least believes he's telling the truth) about his encounter.
"I talk about this because I'm on this campaign to straighten out or to clear up the earlier tabloid or cartoon-like coverage, which is unfair," Reed told the paper. "It's not fair to those people who have gone out on a limb to support this."
Reed also says he has numerous documents that confirm the event happened, and was disappointed that this paperwork wasn't featured in Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries episode.
The letters that Reed have include a 2015 letter from Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker recognizing his family's "off-world incident" on September 1, 1969. He also has letters from the Great Barrington Historical Society planning an event around the incident, and another confirming the local radio station's broadcast of the event. Anyone can read these letters on Reed's website.
Radio station 1420 WBSM, based out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, had Reed on its show called Spooky Southcoast back in 2018, when he said that the 1969 encounter was actually the third time that he and his brother had encountered the assumed spacecraft. The first, as he described, involved seeing a craft that they said looked like a turtle shell on the ground in 1966. He said that the pair saw the same craft again the following year in 1967.
“It almost had panels of some sort. It was about 60 feet around,” Reed said. “We did not see any landing gear or windows. It looked completely sealed.”
He told the show that the UFO of the 1969 encounter, though, was different—instead resembling "an upside-down Hershey's kiss."
To film his segment on the show, Reed went back to the site of the incident. He described what that feeling was like to Knox News. "There is an odd undertone for me," he said. "I physically feel a change. I get uncomfortable. There's a uneasiness—almost an anxiety. Even 50 years later there's some undertone. Maybe it's emotional memory, but it's uncomfortable. I don't like it."
In years past, it would be easier to dismiss claims like Reed's as outlandish or unrealistic. But after recent reporting by the New York Times on UFOs (and claims from people such as former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge), its a little harder to outwardly ignore such claims.
Reed's story has remained consistent for the last 51 years. There's a chance the rest of the world is just now catching up.
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