Item 3.15: A Cold Case Warms up in Poquoson, Virginia
(Originally published in the July 2007 issue of "UFO Magazine.") By Larry W. Bryant Exactly 47 years and seven months after his role as a dual witness in one of the most compelling UFO encounters in recorded history, Lester Harold Moore, Jr., of the Hampton Roads bay-area city of Poquoson, Virginia, has stepped forward to help put his story on the public record -- from the citizen's standpoint, not from the federal bureaucrat's. Besides observing his 62nd birthday June 8, 2007, the native Poquosonite will be contemplating, once again, how he and a fellow neighborhood teenager, Mark Muza, had tempted fate during the twilight hours of Oct. 19, 1959, when they ventured out upon the restricted territory of an old USAF bombing range near Langley Air Force Base. They brought with them their shotguns and their zeal for bagging some water fowl. Separated by about 100 yards from his hunting companion, 15-year-old Muza (the older of the two by one year) came to a sudden halt in the marshland about a mile north of his Ridge Road home as he heard a whirring sound above his head. "Like a flock of wild birds," as he described the sound to a Newport News Daily Press reporter summoned to the area by Muza's mother. Almost frozen with fear, Mark chose to greet the small, unannounced, self-illumined saucer-shaped craft not with a wave of his hand but with a blast from his 12-gauge shotgun. As the craft kept descending from the estimated height of 80 feet, Muza fired another round; then, reloading with a solid-slug shell, he delivered the third and final blast before the interloper decided it had had enough of the Muza brand of hospitality, spinning away toward the southeast. During my interview with him a few days later, he told me that he'd distinctly heard his third shot ricochet as if it had hit a metallic object. After I had Muza fill out a simple sighting-report form for forwarding to the now-defunct, Washington, D.C.-based National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, I stopped by Harold Moore's home to seek HIS account. But his mother was skittish about my interviewing him, so I let the matter drop for then. (Note: mid-fifties-era residents of Poquoson tended to be xenophobic, so I was expecting at least a modicum of such hostility.) A year after the event, I produced a mimeographed monograph about this, my very first field investigation (at age 21). In it, I decried the lack of an official USAF Project Blue Book probe into the case. In the course of pushing for a formal investigation into this "shot UNheard 'round the world," I sought, with the help of a teen-aged UFOlogist in Norfolk, the intervention of U. S. Rep. Porter Hardy, Jr. But USAF authorities at both Langley and the Pentagon had chosen to stonewall both me and Hardy, averring that it would be contrary to AF policy to mount a UFO investigation on the basis of hearsay evidence. Had any of them been firemen alerted to a house fire by an anonymous passerby, would they have exhibited the same reluctance to become involved? Eleven years later, a newsletter called UFO Commentary (published by then-teenager Patrick Huyghe of Newport News) carried my retrospective essay about what was becoming a classic case in the annals of UFO research. Then, for his column of Dec. 28, 1983, a reporter at the Norfolk Ledger-Star interviewed Muza (who then was serving on the Newport News police force). The resulting story noted that Muza recalls the incident "as if it happened yesterday." Finally, upon discovering some official Poquoson-related records, I wrote another retrospective review,* posting it in one or two places on the Internet during January 2001. I'd wanted to contact Muza for an update interview but, alas, I ended up learning about his recent demise from cancer. In that essay, I also expressed perennial frustration over my inability to track down one Mr. Harold Moore, Jr. (assuming he still was alive). Not long afterwards, though (as if harnessing the theorized "six degrees of separation"), a Hampton resident contacted me with a key datum: Moore's first name was not Harold but Lester. What's more, this Lester fellow used to attend high school with a friend of the Hamptonian's. Bingo! I now had a full name, street address, and phone number, thus rounding out all the leads I'd need to resume my search. Unfortunately, with two unreturned phone calls later, I still had yet to make contact. I particularly had wanted to inform Moore of my recent acquisition of certain Blue Book files on his case, particularly as regards the two Langley AFB-dispatched investigators' interview conclusion (in May 1960) as to the (perceived) veracity of Muza and Moore. (By the way, those interviews had evolved from my persistence in pressing the case with Rep. Hardy and with the House Committee on Science and Astronautics.) Months passed by as the missing-link contact simmered on the back burner of intellectual neglect. Will I let still another missed opportunity rule the day -- or will I knuckle down and focus my energy one more time on this far-too-long diverted quest? The answer arrived on May 19, 2007. On a trip from my home in Alexandria to my daughter's home in Hampton (which lies within 10 miles of Poquoson), I vowed to mount an ambush of Mr. Moore. With daughter Gretchen at my side, we drove over to this home in Poquoson. We learned from his brother-in-law that Harold was out on a crabbing mission, due to return in a few hours to the seafood market where he and his wife labored for their owner-son. (Turns out that Gretchen happens to be an occasional customer of the place.) Thus, the denouement for this protracted drama was just a short while away. We decided to visit a nearby thrift store, eventually stopping by the market. Moore's wife told us that he was expected to return there shortly, so we left for a late lunch, returning at four o-clock. Upon entering the store this time, we noticed a balding, smiling man of about 265 pounds sitting next to Mrs. Moore. Yes, it was he -- the unwittingly elusive Harold, now seemingly eager to sort out the identity and purpose of this mysterious couple from afar. I began by telling him that I'd met him when he was fourteen; that I also had interviewed Mark Muza back on that otherwise routine day etched in Mark's memory. I beamed triumphantly as Harold rolled out the welcome carpet, offering me a seat in an interlocking easy chair next to his in the store's foyer. We talked for about 20 minutes -- a spell broken only a few times as he rose to attend to some arriving customers' needs. Like Muza, Harold said that he remembers the event as if it occurred yesterday: "I even recall that it took place on a week day." He added that he and Muza had remained friends throughout adulthood. Curiously, though, they never had bothered to discuss among themselves any details or after-effects of their "flying saucer" sighting. This silence may be due to their desire to avoid further ridicule from any of the townspeople of that era. I lost no time in posing the burning question: "The Air Force's report on this case, now preserved at the U. S. National Archives and Records Administration, concludes that the case probably was a hoax. Do you agree with that assessment?" Harold, taking only a couple of seconds to respond, gave me the answer I'd expected to hear: "It was no hoax." I proceeded to explain to him that the Blue Book report had turned upside down the rationale for rejecting the two boys' accounts: "The two investigators said they couldn't accept your veracity, Harold, because the details of your accounts coincided too much." Usually, as in police investigations, if a given witness's testimony DIFFERS substantially from another's, that's a valid reason to suspect some chicanery; but not if there's substantial AGREEMENT between the two testimonies. Go figure. At this point, Harold had a question for ME: "Do you know that, around the next day [October 20th], a sighting occurred near Hampton High School?" I answered "no," wondering if the Daily Press had been notified of that case as well. Shortly before concluding our discussion, Moore dropped a bombshell (almost disguised as a passing reference): he noted that, back in October 1959, NOT in May 1960, a Langley-based investigator had accompanied the two boys on a return visit to the area of the "crime." The investigator, noting the contoured wind/weight effect upon a patch of swamp grass, declared: "Yep. Somethin's set down here." Of course, the Blue Book report contains no such admission, so the question remains: who's doing the lying here: the Muza-Moore team or the USAF team of so-called objective investigators of UFO reports from the citizenry? Given our knowledge of how readily and easily various government agencies/officials can (and do) conspire to deceive the public, how can anyone be surprised to learn that officialdom, back in October 1959, conspired to deny the public its right to know the truth about such hard-core cases of UFO reality as exemplified by the Muza-Moore incident? From now on, we, the People, deserve better treatment -- and we demand it. Thank you, Harold Moore, for honoring that principle today. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Larry W. Bryant's accumulation of these "Bryant's UFO View" installments has approached book-length dimensions. When he began the column several months ago, he was hoping to amass enough depth and variety for publishing an anthology of the more popular entries. He now welcomes readers' views on whether the time has arrived for producing that book. How about it: should he proceed, and do you have any favorite entries deserving of priority? Please let him know at his e-mail address (overtci@cavtel.net) or phone number (703-931-3341). *[For the contents of that review, see Item 3.14 of this blog -- http://ufoview.posterous.com ]
