UFO Spotted In Library’s Local History Room

Well before mysterious drones started showing up in the skies of New Jersey, a UFO — or so the story goes — appeared above a billboard at Middletown Avenue and Front Street, back in 1953.

That mid-century mysterious flying object was the subject of just one of the many queries, curious and quotidian, that have ended up on the desk of New Haven’s Allison Botelho in her 25-year career as the New Haven Free Public Library’s local history librarian.

A Rhode Island native who began work at the NHFPL in 1995, Botelho has for a quarter century presided over the spacious, high-ceilinged room that fills up most of the northwest corner of the library’s main Elm Street building, to the left and behind the circulation desk as you enter.

“I have the library gene,” she said, ​“the detective aspect” of the profession that grabs her most. ​“I know how to be a navigator. I know how to show people where to find stuff.”

Fielding questions over the years — often from family members looking, for example, for a lost relative or an obituary, or from professional genealogists, or lawyers involved in settling estates — Botelho said that she, alas, often isn’t able to find specific answers, but try she does.

Botelho hasn’t just been asked about UFOs. She’s also received queries about a 4‑year-old girl who fell to her death off East Rock in the early 1900s, and about a lost grandfather whose wife took him to the hospital and supposedly just left him there and was never heard from since. 

But, to circle back to the UFO incident for a second…

The library’s reference department, of which Botelho is a part, received that UFO question back in February 2023 from a man in Sacramento, California, who was on the hunt for contemporaneous newspaper articles about a 1953 Fair Haven sighting.

Botelho wasn’t able to find any journalistic reports on the matter. But a colleague of hers did find a clip – from a source Botelho is still trying to track down — with a tantalizing description of the close encounter.

That clip reads in full:

August 19, 1953 — like most days — began with tedious hussle and bussle to the residents of New Haven, Connecticut. By nightfall, the big city had returned to its monotony. But suddenly the complacency had been jarred. For something was seen shortly after 9 p.m.

And that something crashed through a signboard at the intersection of Middletown Avenue and Front Street.

Two noted UFO researchers — Joseph Barbieri, then of West Haven, Conn., and August C. Roberts, of Jersey City, New Jersey — personally investigated the intriguing occurrence on August 22.

Their on-the-spot research uncovered several disconcerting facts.

Driving along a highway a few minutes past nine on Aug. 19, an unidentified man — Barbieri later learned — saw a red ball of fire trailing sparks. As it crossed in front of him, the object grazed a tree-top, rose slightly, and disappeared in flight.

A marine corp naval aviator and mid-century UFO obsessive named Donald Keyhoe later wrote about the 1953 sighting in New Haven in his 1955 book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy.

OK, now back to Botelho’s work in the local history room of the library…

With names changed for privacy reasons, here’s a typical email reply from Botelho to an out-of-state inquirer, from back in 2015:

Hello,

I’m sorry to say I haven’t been able to find any reference to the existence of another child of Ralph and Peggy Doe. We have a database that covers the local paper from 1878 to 1900, which I checked with no luck. We also have a database that covers the Hartford Courant up to 1922, but I couldn’t find anything there either. I also checked Ancestry Library Edition, with no results.

So I think you might want to contact the New Haven Vital Records office. I don’t know if they can search a death if you don’t know the death date, or a birth if you don’t have the date, but you might want to give it a shot. http://www.cityofnewhaven.com/…

I’m sorry I couldn’t find more for you.

The room features three main collections, she explained. Books on city business, church, and architectural history, and if you’d like to check out the history curriculum in the New Haven Public Schools in 1908, this is the place.

Then there’s a second collection of city documents like budgets, meeting minutes, and aldermanic correspondence from the late 19^th century up to the 1980s.

Finally a clippings file with items largely from the New Haven Register and the New Haven Journal Courier. Botelho termed the clippings file unique with ​“a treasure trove” of stuff — largely from mid-20^th century pamphlets and newsletters and brochures that will show you, for example, the amenities in a new apartment building that is opening up.

“Students use it for information on the New Haven Redevelopment [of the 1950s and 1960s]” when they are researching particular neighborhoods, she said.

And if you want a playbill from the Shubert Theatre from 1917 onwards, Botelho’s precinct is where to find it.

A lot of these materials, like the playbills and the book collection, are also in the online NHFPL catalog, but of course for the clippings or to handle the books of mid 19^th century Westville farmer and litterateur extraordinaire Donald Mitchell (of the eponymous Mitchell Branch Library), or to examine poetry books in Yiddish self-published by one Abe Abelson residing at 856 Washington Ave. in 1906, you have to physically visit the room.

There are a small number of unique and unusual items, kept in glass enclosed cases like the New Haven Collection of Sacred Music, a church song book published in New Haven in 1818. Seems that the local pastors became aware that not everybody was singing from the same song book, or some of the congregants didn’t know the words to the psalms at all, Botelho guessed.

Most of the items, however, are not rare but comprise what she called a collection over the years put together for ​“informational value, not artifactual value.” The users are all kinds of people, from students with papers to write to professional genealogical researchers.

In-person traffic, Botelho recalled, was also far busier in her earlier years presiding over the room before resources became so digitized, before Google, and so many other resources available online.

And it’s actually a little catch-as-catch-can these days to use the room and to wander through its holdings in person, she added. Much depends on the librarians’ shifting schedules.

While more and more material is online and Botelho puts out there every week — on the NHFPL’s website and on Facebook and Instagram accounts — vintage and appealing material like old pictures to promote use of the room, there aren’t that many in-person visitors of late, although the email queries keep coming. Botelho said she’s helping to unravel about three research mysteries a week.

One pending inquiry, for example, is from someone who is trying to track down the text of Booker T. Washington’s last speech at the Varick A.M.E. Church back in 1915.

“I was able to find a link to the second-to-last speech,” she said, and the search goes on. Botelho said when she’s on the trail of something, time permitting, she likes to keep going and going, ​“to turn over every rock.”

Botelho, like all the librarians, shifts from room to room, from reference desk to technology desk, and so forth during the course of a work week. Most often, she said, she’s helping people not navigate research collections like the local history room, but more quotidian mysteries like how to use the library’s computers, or reference guides, or other aspects of the technology.

That’s why she takes particular pleasure in the kind of navigational helpfulness she’s called upon for in local history: the search for lost relatives, or obituaries, or combing the microfilm and other resources for any reference to the mysterious ​“red ball of fire” that was grazing tree tops and billboards in the summer of 1953 Fair Haven.

“That’s why I went to library school,” she said. That’s what she was trained for.

The NHFPL, she says, hopes to hire additional librarians so the local history room can be regularly staffed according to the hours advertised. For now, to visit in person it’s wise to arrange an appointment in advance.