An Interview with Phil Imbrogno

UFOs, Poltergeists, Ancient Stones, and Magnetic Anomalies

by Brent Raynes

Phil Imbrogno possesses graduate degrees from the University of Texas, Northeastern University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has taught chemistry, astronomy and the earth sciences at both the high school and college levels. He will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming first annual “UFOs: the Culture of Contact Multi-Media Festival” in New York City (June 22, 23, and 24, 2007). For more information on this event, go to: http://cultureofcontact.googlepages.com/home

Editor: During your extensive field investigations during the New York’s Hudson Valley UFO wave of the mid-1980s, where you were also joined in this effort by the legendary Dr. J. Allen Hynek, your perspective on this activity changed from the mainstream nuts and bolts ET perspective to exploring the concept of theoretical windows to other dimensions. During his last years, Dr. Hynek was presumably leaning more and more in this direction as well.

Phil Imbrogno: That’s true. The UFO people think of alien spaceships. I had been researching UFOs for a number of years before the Hudson Valley incident, but nothing very spectacular, or witnessed by quite a few people, so when these sightings started taking place and I had picked up a newspaper and it said “hundreds see UFOs” – and it was just on the previous night. The paper was March 25th and it was March 24th, and in the paper there were names listed, so I called some of these people to talk to them, and every person I talked to I got like 10 more names.

Now the point is that after I interviewed a countless number of people over the course of months and months, these people saw the same thing, and many of them were very good witnesses with professional backgrounds, people who normally didn’t care anything about UFOs. They just saw something and they were convinced now that UFOs exist.

So I got a call from Dr. Hynek. I’ll never forget his first words on the phone. He said, “What’s going on up there?” Evidently, some of the sightings had made the newspapers, the AP press, and the radio. He came up and he stayed here for awhile, and he went back and forth for awhile and interviewed a lot of people. We did a lot of field research together over a couple of years, and we had a number of conversations.

Editor: Now this was what year?

Phil Imbrogno: We’re talking the early 1980s. 1983, 1984, and 1985.

The descriptions of what the people were seeing, an object the size of a football field, going over the major highways all lit up at night and at a not very high altitude—you know, at rush hour, on the major highways, the cars just pulling over to the side of the road and hundreds of people getting out watching this enormous object drift over, with practically no noise, and people coming out of their homes (who lived around the highway). It’s like something out of a science fiction movie.

So a lot of data and numerous conversations with Dr. Hynek, and he said, “When we’re talking about an object that people are reporting that’s larger than a football field, where do you put it during the day if it just comes out at night?” He said, “How do you hide something that big?” We looked at a lot of the data and people reported the object disappearing and re-appearing, there were pilot reports of the object folding down on itself, like a telescoping antenna, and Dr. Hynek said to me that he would be very disappointed if UFOs just turned out to be somebody else’s spaceships. He thought that the answer was more exotic than that. He talked about parallel realities, of a multi-dimensional universe, and I asked him, “Why are there so many sightings here?” He told me to look for “windows.” That there were “windows” in the space-time continuum in which these objects, which he believed were under intelligent control, came through these portals. And, of course, that led me to doing more research after Dr. Hynek passed over.

It’s interesting because we had many conversations about this and he believed that, for the most part, UFOs is a very complex phenomenon, that they can’t be easily explained as somebody else’s spaceships.

There were other explanations. All UFOs that were being seen were not from one source, and he believed that a great number of them were from what he called a parallel reality. But the interesting thing is that in the 1960s, John Keel was proposing this theory.

Editor: Right. And, of course, his colleague Dr. Jacques Vallee was proposing similar ideas too and they were associates. I’m sure that he had some influence on him too.

Phil Imbrogno: “You know,” Allen Hynek was smoking his pipe, and he said, “John Keel may have been right about this whole thing.” John Keel also influenced Vallee with his ideas. So after 1986, after Allen Hynek had passed over, I called up John Keel. We’re very good friends and I said, “John, you know, Allen Hynek said that you were probably right about this whole thing.” He said, “I’m shocked. Allen Hynek was my greatest critic. I can’t believe that he was saying that.”

There’s quite a bit of evidence to indicate that the sightings in the Hudson Valley may have been some sort of interdimensional phenomenon rather than so-called extraterrestrial spacecraft scanning around.

And I got a call from Budd Hopkins. Budd and I go way back, and he was interested if there were any abduction cases, and I said, “Yes, there were quite a few, but Dr. Hynek doesn’t want to deal with that because we’re putting together a manuscript and Allen Hynek says we have to keep respectable sightings in the book because abduction cases would make it look more cultish and more towards the paranormal. He wanted to concentrate on witnesses, the quality of the witnesses, and what they saw, evidence that you could not deny in court.

So Budd Hopkins said, “Do you know why they’re flying over the area there?” I said, “Why?” He said, “They’re looking for people.” He may have been right also because many people who had close encounters with this object and were scanned by a brilliant light later had an abduction experience. The ones, of course, that I followed up on, which were quite a few, but definitely not the total number of witnesses who had this experience.

Editor: So it may have been that the initial experience of being hit by a beam of light was sort of a scanning process and then later the other memories would evolve?

Phil Imbrogno: What happened is that this object would drift over the highways, going really slow, like it didn’t care who saw it. It would stop over an area and project down a beam of light to engulf a car, an individual, and so on. The witnesses that I talked to, that this happened to, which is probably a small percentage of the total number, later, within two years, had an abduction experience.

So I find that quite interesting. Budd may have been right in his initial analysis saying, “It’s doing that not because it’s wanting to be seen or looking for the geology of the area. It’s looking for people.” He believed, of course, that there were genetic experiments going on and that this object was going over and scanning people to see who was genetically compatible for their species.

That’s what he believed. I don’t know, but many of the abduction experiences of course were not totally recalled. They really didn’t have positive experiences.

Editor: Now from charting the UFO activity you found a connection with lunar phases, and you also found outbreaks of paranormal activity just prior to outbreaks of UFO activity, and correlations to ancient stone chambers and carvings. Can you bring us up to speed on the significance on these aspects and what you found?

Phil Imbrogno: I received a number of phone calls saying, “Well what about all of these UFO sightings.” Everybody was telling me about the lunar phase and UFOs. “Oh yeah, UFOs are seen at the new moon, the full moon,” and so on, so I really got curious and I took the data and I did a number of graphs and I found out something interesting. Sightings peaked not on the full moon or the new moon but two to three days after the new and full moon. Not on the new moon and full moon itself. But the interesting part of that data is that it didn’t matter if it was a new moon or a full moon, the peak occurred between two and three days, or two and a half days I’d say, after the new and the full moon. So you have a definite peak there indicating that the lunar phase did have an affect on the number of sightings. That was an interesting part of the data.

Also you have to remember that I had so many reports with times and the days, especially on March 24th, 1983 and July 24th, 1984 and October 1984, and November 1983. I had so much information that I said, “Okay, I’ve got to plot this.” So I had two classifications of reports. I divided them into two sections. 1) Ordinary UFO reports, if you consider UFO reports ordinary and 2) high-strangeness reports. Electromagnetic phenomena, aliens, abductions, appearance of strange creatures, really bizarre close encounters with a smaller object that seemed to come out of the larger one, and so on.

So I took the normal UFO sightings, which is people seeing this enormous object passing over and I plotted it on the map, on a big wall map, and I put the times and the dates and everything and I realized that as you looked at it you’d see 8:15, 8:17, 8:18, 8:19, and you’d see the pattern of the UFO and where it was going. You could see where the first sightings were and although the UFO sightings from those particular dates were scattered over a very large area the center, the emanation point, the apex of these sightings took place in a small town called Kent Cliffs, New York. So I said that was quite interesting. The first sightings were in that particular area and the last sightings were in this particular area.

So I took the high-strangeness reports, just to see how they would fan out on another map, and I noticed that they weren’t spread over a large area. They were concentrated in very small areas, they were clustered, and I said “That’s bizarre. What the heck is this?” So the next thing to do was, of course, to go out to these areas and just take a look. Got a team of people together, and we went to Kent Cliffs in Putnam Valley, and Lake Carmel in Brewster. All the high-strangeness reports were of a higher concentration in Putnam Valley, New York, and Kent Cliffs, New York. At the first location, we found a stone chamber. I said, “You know, I’d heard about these things. Barry Fell wrote about them in his book America B.C.” Then the second location we found a big carved standing stone hidden in the grass with another stone chamber, and I said, “There’s another one of those things.” Then the third location and I realized that this was more than just a coincidence. So there was a direct correlation between the locations of these stone artifacts, these megaliths, these chambers, in relation to paranormal activity and the UFO sightings. And, of course, that led into further research because not only did I start investigating the paranormal phenomena, residents were contacting me saying that they saw apparitions coming in and out of these chambers, balls of lights, and UFOs seemed to be seen in very close proximity to them.

We did a number of different studies. Of course, with the geology and everything, and then we did magnetometer studies. The magnetometer studies proved to be quite interesting. They showed that these structures are located on extreme negative magnetic anomalies where the earth’s magnetic field actually takes a big dip and it doesn’t seem that the chamber is closing the magnetic anomaly but someone built the chamber (word unclear) to mark the magnetic anomalies, or the standing stones there. So there was a correlation between these magnetic anomalies, the UFO sightings, and so on.

And the greatest number of chambers that we found was in Kent Cliffs, New York, and of course getting into a study of this, getting into the legends, getting into the history, and so on, countless numbers of reports of strange going ons around these structures that indicate to me that they may actually be the location of Dr. Hynek’s dimensional windows. We know for a fact that UFO-paranormal investigator’s have in the past considered a correlation between magnetic anomalies and the appearance of UFOs, and I think that I was actually really the first one to actually document that, because the data was graphed and charted and it was analyzed by physicists at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory in New Jersey and they couldn’t understand the data, how the earth’s magnetic field is being deviated into like a funnel, which a psychic friend of mine calls a vortex.

So it is no coincidence that the chambers, the UFOs, the magnetic anomalies are all in these particular locations and you experience these phenomena. People go up there with cameras. Hundreds of photographs have been taken of spheres, of balls of lights, a majority of which can’t even be seen by the human eye. But yet digital especially picks it up. These are things that exist outside the range of the human senses. Many of the UFOs that may appear in the area, or of UFO like phenomena, may actually be invisible to us.

So the stone chambers are a fascinating thing, unlike the UFOs where if you see a UFO in your life you consider yourself lucky because you saw something fascinating. These structures are out there. They’re sitting there and have been there for centuries and they were obviously built by an ancient people who came here.

Now getting back a little bit to the location of the chambers, they’re not built randomly. They’re built in straight lines, they’re built on lines of magnetic anomalies, and it’s interesting because the geology of the area where the chamber’s are built has a layer of magnetite, which is high pure iron ore, and on top of that a layer of quartzite. So you have this interesting geology, and the chambers themselves, the stones are only made of quartz, quartzite, and granite, with fine quartz in it. So they’re not just stones piled upon each other. The builders put a lot of effort into selecting a certain proper stone, and you could theorize why, but obviously it was very important to the builders to construct them this way.

Editor: You eventually came to feel that, and did quite a bit of research and felt that these were connected with the Celts or Druids, that there were actual visits to this continent, which of course modern historians and mainstream archeologists haven’t really acknowledged for the most part. I read where you felt that apparently there were three waves of visits in the ancient past, as described in Sean Casteel and Timothy Green Beckley’s book Our Alien Planet.

Phil Imbrogno: Right. When I started researching these chambers back in 1984, I was completely ignorant about them. People were telling me that they were Colonial root cellars, that they were Indian sweat lodges, and so on and so forth. But I knew that there was a connection between what I was researching and the Hudson Valley stuff and these stone chambers, and Dr. Hynek’s windows to another dimension. So I did a considerable amount of field work into these chambers, historically and so on.

If you go to a hard-core astronomer and want to talk about UFOs, you get the strange look and they walk away from you. The same thing happened with the chambers. When I went to a certain archeologist and archeology meetings they’d give you a look and they’d laugh at you. “Ha, ha. The stone chambers. That’s Barry Fell’s crazy stuff.” But, you see, there’s enough artifacts in the area and there are enough standing stones that nobody has really ever documented, except Barry Fell tried and another archeologist by the name of Sal Trento also started some early research, but gave up on it.

The structures of the chambers are amazing. Not only the chambers—it’s carved standing stones, and also some of the large boulders, the dolmens, that are sitting on pedestal stones in the area, things that you would only think that you would find in Ireland and Scotland. The walls in the chambers go up at angles. Enormous stones were cut from the bedrock—flat stones, and placed on top, so they’re not just little huts. Some of the larger ones go back 35, 40, 50 feet, and there’s tons and tons of stone.

There’s two types of chambers. One is cylindrical and the other one is oval. To the Celts this indicated male and female. Also the chamber openings point to the east, the southeast, the south, the southwest, and the west. None really to the north, or the northeast or the northwest. Also many of these chambers had different purposes. For example, these sites that I’ve been talking about with all of the paranormal stuff that takes place around them, and still does. One chamber we called the winter solstice chamber and you go in there on the first day of winter and you see the sun rising and it comes down, just about to the angle of the chamber opening, but if you went back 3000 years ago the sun would rise directly into the chamber opening, down this corridor, and project on to the back of a wall. Also, in another chamber, they found a stone that had carvings on it and I looked at the carvings and I recognized that. Somebody was trying to make an impression, in the stone, of the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters), which was very important to the Druids. The Pleiades was directly overhead at midnight. It marked the end of the old Celtic year and the beginning of the new Celtic year. That was the high holiday and it was called Samhain. Now, the Druids believed that this time there was a universe, a parallel reality that was very close to ours and at certain times of the year, and especially at that time of the year, our world merged with their world. Our reality merged with this other reality and beings from that other reality could easily come into our world and we could go into their world. Today we call this holiday Halloween, and the Druids believed in it very seriously because it was when these two worlds merged together. And that particular chamber, in Kent Cliffs, which we called a Cathedral Chamber, because it has a very high ceiling to it, was probably used for a ritualistic purpose for Samhain, because at the bottom of the stone there were carvings and writing, and the writing was Ogam. It was partially translated. Most of it was weathered away. But you do see the word “Samhain,” pronounced Soween in Irish Gaelic or Saveen in Scottish Gaelic, for that time of Halloween, the end of the Celtic year, the end of the thirteen month calendar. On a number of occasions, people have reported what they called the ghost of a Druid priest seen in the chamber, coming out of the chamber and going into the chamber and so on.

Other things that we found, for example, in one chamber we called the King’s Chamber we found an obsidian dagger, a dagger that was carved out of obsidian, volcanic glass, which is not indigenous to this area. When we had that analyzed it turned out that that obsidian dagger was cut from a volcanic outcrop of obsidian 2800 years ago. Now that doesn’t mean that the chamber was built 2800 years ago, but it means that whoever built the chamber may have brought the dagger in there, and the chemical analysis showed that it was possibly from Iceland.

Now the Native Americans have legends about the people who built the chambers. They say they came across the sea, eighteen to a ship, their faces were of fire (red beards), their eyes were of the sky (blue eyes) and they had horns coming out of their heads (helmets). Where a chamber was built was once Native American sacred ground and if you look at a lot of the language, if you look at the Algonquin language, there are many, many words that are pronounced very similar to Gaelic words, and it could also explain why many of the Algonquins, when the colonials came over, they were the only Native Americans who had tribe members with fair skin and blue eyes. Also a lot of the Native American beliefs in the Northeast have this belief of a spirit world close to us, very similar to the old Celtic worship of the idea of another world, and there must have been a lot of infusion into the Native American society from these people who came here.

The chambers themselves are in different states of decay. For example, the very first people who built the chambers here and the last chambers that were built here, there was a great length of time between them. Probably the last people who built the chambers and in between didn’t even know about the first people who came and who built the first series of chambers and the second series of chambers and so on. From what I can tell, in my analysis, is that the oldest ones (you can tell there’s a different design and people are getting better as time goes on). The first series of chambers were built somewhere at the pre-Bronze Age, so we’re talking about 2800 B.C. The second series of chambers was built around 500 B.C., 600 B.C. and so on, and all the way up to about 100 A.D. and so on. And the third series of chambers was built by Irish Christians in Connecticut in 500 A.D. Then there seems to have been a lapse, and then around 800 or 900 A.D. the first Vikings came over and they didn’t really do much of anything, but explore and start settling into the landscape and then of course the Vikings came back and forth until about 1200 A.D., and then there was another gap where Columbus came over.

But one thing that you have to remember is that in 500 A.D. the story of Brendan the Navigator, an Irish Christian monk who sailed across the sea to go to this land, North America, because he had a vision and was told to do so by an angel. It was this voyage and the story that was written about this voyage that inspired Christopher Columbus as a boy to when he became an adult to make this journey. So there’s legends way before Columbus’s time about the Northeast United States being unexplored and colonized by not only the first group (who I believe were Pheonician), the second group who were the Celts from Brittainy, in Ireland, and then the third group who were Irish monks from Ireland. Then of course the Vikings came after that.

But these chambers were built by these people over a very long period of time. You also find these stone chambers and standing stones in Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. If you start in New York’s Hudson Valley and go north the most northern town in Putnam County is called Fishgill. After you leave Fishgill the chambers disappear. Then they re-appear in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. But the chambers up there are much more recent than the chambers in New York’s Hudson Valley. As far as I know, NEARA, New England Antiquities Research Association actually found pieces of wood that was probably used to move one of the stones, trapped between the rocks in the massive stones that make up these chambers, and those pieces of wood were radiocarbon-dated to 1200 A.D. If you look at them and compare them to the Hudson Valley chambers, you can see that those chambers up there are much more preserved and there is much less weathering than with the chambers down here.

Editor: You stated that in legend the ancient Druids used to summon strange lights, where apparently they’d be in a circle of stones and a light would come and perhaps enter the person in the center, and that person would kind of channel information about astronomy or various things.

Phil Imbrogno: The Druids believed that there was this parallel universe. One of the translations of the word Druid means “gate opener.” These standing stones, and there’s a few of them up here—most of them have collapsed. Yeah, the Druid legends state that they would have these stones in the ground and they would have a person, most likely a woman, stand in the center, and these stones would channel up energy and the light would come up and bounce around the stones. The Druid priest would be controlling the whole thing and the light would go into the person and the person would pass out and wake up with ideas of medicine, astronomy, prophecy, and it would last for a certain length of time and then it would just fade away from the person, as if this person was being programmed or downloaded with information. Which is an interesting thing because people who have gone out to these chambers here and actually spent time in them, many people have claimed to have seen visions, heard voices, heard music, seen apparitions appear in front of them, and many people go out there and stay around these areas and a lot of people do it still today because of experiences that they had. They go out there and it’s almost like somebody is programming information into them. Some of them are looking for answers to problems or whatever, but it seems yes, you go into these locations and you stay there for awhile and all of a sudden all of these thoughts and ideas start coming into your head. It’s happened to me on a number of occasions, and it seems the more that you go into these areas the more sensitive you become to them. How or why this is happening I don’t know. Perhaps the anomaly is somehow connecting synapses in the brain with some multidimensional source in the universe.

They say, according to legend, that prayer can answer your questions if you pray to a higher intelligence, God or whoever, that information can be put into you, called inspiration. How are artists inspired to creative work? Perhaps it’s coming from an outside source. So these particular chambers, locations, and standing stones have this affect on people.

Someone proposed an idea to me that these magnetic anomalies are like the hard drives on computers. In a multidimensional way they kind of like store information and people can go inside, if they know how to connect to it, or are sensitive the information is downloaded into their brain. I don’t know, but the phenomenon is very real. Although it’s incredibly hard to document the effects on people are very, very real. People go into these areas, for example, have a physiological effect which is documented. For example, blood pressure drops considerably, pulse rate drops considerably, and some people go out there and they have emotional effects. They start bursting out in tears, and this has happened over and over again. Women actually go into these areas and have their periods. It’s happened so many times. The first couple of times I kind of ignored it.

There’s definitely a physiological effect also that these places have, and I believe that it’s due to these magnetic anomalies that are found in the areas, and they must have a physiological effect on the human body. Animals will not go into these chambers. You never find animals (in them).

Editor: I was reading that you had stated that apparently that like with a Druid burial they would place someone in these chambers after they died and in a lot of these chambers there was a place where a body could be laid out?

Phil Imbrogno: Yes. We found a couple of chambers they call the tomb because there’s a stone slab that’s cut in the back that’s perfect for a body. One of the legends that the Druid’s had, and you’ve got to remember that the Druids didn’t have a written language. They didn’t write anything down because they were afraid that people were going to learn it. It was only passed on. The same method, by the way, that the Native Americans had. You see, they believed that when someone died they would pass over into this other dimension. There were many of these other worlds, and where you went, and what you did when you passed over depended upon your station in life, your spiritual awareness, who you were, like were you a great king, were you a great warrior, were you a great wise man, were you a priest, were you a murderer, and so on. They believed that the body would have to be placed in it, and the Druid priests were said to put a containment, say like an energy field, around the body, inside one of these chambers, whether it was Ireland or Scotland, or here probably, and that this resonation of energy would hold the spirit in, stopping it from passing over to the other side until the proper gate or doorway could be opened for this spirit to pass over to go to the right place to where it was supposed to go. Once the spirit was gone and passed over, the body was just taken out and for the most part it was just burned or recycled back into the earth. They would just strip off the meat from the body and take the bones and leave the meat for the birds. Once the spirit was gone they believed that the body was just an empty shell.

Editor: Now you’ve had some experiences yourself over the years. Paranormal, strange lights, things that you had experienced yourself.

Phil Imbrogno: Yeah, on three occasions I saw the Hudson Valley UFO, and on a couple of occasions with people I was researching it with. There are many people who are involved with paranormal research, but you don’t really understand its reality until you experience something yourself, and then it becomes more of a reality than a hobby. You have people who are investigating UFOs who are looking for spaceships and so on, which is okay, but you see a lot of these people are doing it as a hobby or something to fascinate them or entertain their bored life, but what they don’t realize is that a lot of this stuff is real and I know many people, people who I have worked with and have been part of my investigation team who have totally given up all of this because once they realized that this is a reality it scared them to death and they got out of it. It was no longer like watching TV. It was something that was in their life. It was real. “My God, this isn’t just something I read about.” People say, “This is real!”

Yes, I’ve had a number of experiences. How could I not have. I’ve been researching paranormal and UFO phenomena and so on, and so you’re right in the center of the activity. You’re bound to see or experience something sooner or later. Poltergeists, apparitions, UFOs, right across the board. But for the most part, out of all of the cases that I have investigated, and all of the paranormal cases that I have investigated, the actual percentage of these cases that actually turned up good data is very, very small. For the most part, most of it is misinterpretations. People who want to believe in something that just is not happening. People who think they’re having a paranormal experience when in fact there is a logical explanation. People who claim to be channelers who are either hoaxers, people who are charlatans, or people who are just in contact with their own imaginations. But there is a small percentage of people who do this channeling who I believe are in contact with something else on a multidimensional level rather than their own imaginations. So I’ve seen enough to convince me that Dr. Hynek was right. We live in a very complex universe, it’s multidimensional in nature, and that a lot of the phenomena that we call paranormal actually emits from these parallel universes when these windows open and close, and that includes some aspect of the UFO phenomena. Not all of it. Some of it may actually be extraterrestrial but not all of it. A good percentage of it probably is interdimensional, like Dr. Hynek, Vallee, and John Keel feel it is. From my research and what I’ve been involved with, I have to agree with them.

Editor: It’s certainly compelling listening to you tell about this. Now the magnetometer that you used. Can you tell more about it?

Phil Imbrogno: Well the magnetometer that we used was taken from the Lamont-Doherty Observatory and you see I could do the readings myself but because the readings would be questionable I got one of their scientists [later, in an email, Phil identified this person as Dr. Bruce Cornet…editor] to come up with me and run the magnetometer and get the data. This was a magnetometer that it costs like twenty or thirty thousand dollars. Luckily, I got a sympathetic ear down at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory and a fellow who has a Ph.D. in physics came up and met with me one day, was interested in the stuff, and he came out and did the readings and was totally surprised and brought the data back to his fellow scientists down at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory. They went over the data and they were just like amazed by it saying of these anomalies how could they naturally be formed?

Editor: This John Burke was mentioning about the stone chambers in New York and he was talking about putting corn seeds in them and then later planting them, and some that were outside the chambers, but the ones that were inside the chambers grew much, much better than the ones that were outside. I wonder if you had heard of anything like that?

Phil Imbrogno: You know, I’ve heard different stories, but I really don’t see any evidence. I mean, from what I know if you put anything in these chambers they rot. They’re not like for food containment. People say root cellars, but you can’t put roots and potatoes in these things. They rot.

In the recent New York state tourist guide they mention the stone chambers and they’re no longer calling them root cellars. They’re saying that they’re possibly of ancient Celtic and Druid origin, and saying to people, “Ah, it’s one of the great mysteries of the Hudson Valley, like the Headless Horseman.”

Editor: Now you wrote a book on UFOs with Dr. Hynek and Bob Pratt, and then you also wrote something on your research into these stone chambers and the Druid history?

Phil Imbrogno: Right. After Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings, I wrote a book called Contact of the Fifth Kind. Contact of the Fifth Kind was all of the cases that we didn’t want to deal with in Night Siege that involved contact and channeling and abductions and so on. It was my investigation into the possibility of: are human beings in contact with a non-human intelligence. In Contact of the Fifth Kind I began to mention the chambers, because they started to play a part in my research, as well as some of the underground mines that also connected with the story. In Contact of the Fifth Kind there’s a chapter called Underground, that starts talking about the stone chambers and the underground passageways and mines that catacomb a certain percentage of Putnam County. Then after Contact of the Fifth Kind, I wrote Celtic Mysteries in New England, and then the most recent version of that is called Celtic Mysteries:Windows to Another Dimension in America’s Northeast.

So the first book Night Siege was published by Random House and Ballantine. Contact of the Fifth Kind was published by Llewellyn, and then Night Siege came out again in a second edition, which was updated all the way to the 1990s. That was published by Lewellyn, and Celtic Mysteries in New England was published by Lewellyn. And I actually have another manuscript, which may be published soon, called The Interdimensional Reality. It really focuses on the idea of Dr. Hynek’s parallel universes, parallel realities and so on, by combining the idea of UFOs with this new idea of the interdimensional universe.