View of James Road with the field mentioned to the left.
Nighttime skies in northern Maine are undeniably beautiful. With no smog or city lights to take away from the Milky Way or constellations, stargazers can spend hours looking up at the view. But what happens when in the midst of stargazing you see something in the sky falling? Sofia Crouse and her friends shared firsthand their experience the night in mid-February when they saw something they could not explain.
Crouse recalls the night. “Me, Bri and Lexi all decided to run to the store,” Crouse said, referring to her friends Brianna Fenton and Alexandria Brace. “We were stopped at the main entrance, about to pull out of UMPI. All of a sudden, we saw something falling out of the sky.” Crouse and her friends decided to follow in pursuit of whatever they had just witnessed. “Sof really wanted to investigate what we had just seen,” Fenton said. “And when Sof wants something, she makes it happen.”
The three friends drove three miles into Presque Isle to Centerline Road and proceeded to make their way to James Road, which loops back to Houlton Road. It was there on James Road, however, that they were forced to stop. “When we turned onto James Road, we immediately had to pull over,” Brace said. “There were cones across the road and Sof threw the car into park and jumped out.” Brace recalls that she and Fenton begged Crouse to get back in the car, but Crouse wanted to see for herself what was going on.
“I could see that there was something smoking in the field off to the left,” Crouse said. “I had to act like I lived in a house on the road in order to get through all the guys in hazmat-looking suits. They kept telling me I couldn’t be there, that the area was ‘under restriction’ until further notice or something.” Crouse was only there for several minutes before she felt she had seen enough. “When Sof got back in the car, it was like she had seen a ghost,” Fenton said. “She didn’t say anything, which is unlike her. She just turned the car around and drove away.”
Since that night, the women have declined to do interviews requested from other local newspapers. When asked what she thought she saw, Crouse was brief. “I think it was something that should not have been seen,” Crouse said nervously. “And that’s why the men who looked straight out of Ghost Busters didn’t want me there.”
Christian “Beef” Mumley, UMPI’s extraterrestrial expert, believes strongly that what his classmates reported seeing was extraterrestrial. “There have been reports for decades of sightings around the world,” Mumley said. “Northern Maine is no exception.” Mumley believes the men seen walking around the site of the incident were a group of retired workers from Area 51’s “Sector Four” (S-4). The group of men, who asked to remain anonymous, serve as northern Maine’s response team to unidentified flying objects. The men, who saved equipment from their time spent at Area 51, shared that they feel it is their civic duty to dispose of any and all UFOs that make landfall in northern Maine.
