Queenston, Ontario:
The Great Northeast Blackout

The northeastern region of Canada and the United States was plunged into blackness late in the day of November 1965. The Great Northeast Blackout, the worst in history, affected thirty million people, one-sixth of the population of the North American continent, in eight American states and the eastern portion of Ontario. Electrical power which went off at 5:16 p.m. was restored within three hours in most parts of the province. New York City was without power well into the early hours of the next morning. The Blackout gave rise to a great deal of lore, including the belief that the birthrate in New York increased sharply nine months after the Blackout. Doris Day and Steve Allen starred in a 1968 motion picture based on the incident called Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?

The incident has been considered UFO-related by many writers including Yurko Bondarchuk in UFO: Sightings, Landings and Abductions (1979); John G. Fuller in Aliens in the Skies: The New UFO Battle of the Scientists (1969); and Frank Edwards in Flying Saucers: Serious Business (1966). A number of authors including Bondarchuk point out that there were reports of UFO activity in the vicinity of hydro installations at the time of the Blackout.

The official investigation pinpointed the problem - the malfunction of a backup relay on one of the six lines linking the mammoth Sir Adam Beck No. 2 Generating Station at Queenston, Ontario, north of Niagara Falls, with the rest of the Eastern power grid. A sudden surge of power tripped the circuit breaker and the backup relay failed. The overfl1ow of power leaped to the other five lines, the relays of which overloaded and tripped their circuit breakers. The process continued along lines in New York State until the entire grid of thirty-one interconnected power utilities had broken down.

Where did the sudden surge of power come from?

"To this day that question has remained unanswered," wrote Bondarchuk. Donald E. Keyhoe maintained that "a giant craft, estimated at well over one hundred feet in diameter," appeared to be positioned directly over the Clay substation, a strategic installation that channelled power from Niagara Falls to New York City. Early explanations for the Blackout had pinpointed this very substation as the cause of the power failure. And Edwards noted there was UFO activity in the Syracuse area at the time of the Blackout. A scientist and UFO researcher James M. McCampbell, in Ufology: New Insights from Science and Common Sense (1973), maintained that the power-grid breakdown was UFO-caused, that Canadian and America hydro authorities knew this, and that they were "covering up."