Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, April 2025
Nightcrawler: Eye on the Sky
An Unprecedented Field Research Study of UAPs on New York’s Long Island Coast
By John J. Tedesco, MEd., BSEE
Gerald T. Tedesco, BSc., BEA
Donna Lee Nardo, BA
Forword by Massimo Teodorani, Ph.D
Available from Amazon
2024, 279 pages, Paperback, US $28.00
ISBN: 9798877670679
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
This is a truly unique and significant volume written by engineers John Tedesco and his brother Gerald, and a fellow investigator named Donna Nardo. These brothers equipped two recreational vehicles, turning them into mobile labs with radar, infrared cameras, and all sorts of other equipment essential for detection, observation, and analysis of extreme weather phenomena, like hurricanes and tornados, as well as more exotic atmospheric occurrences like ball lightning, dark lightning, Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), and even UAP/UFO phenomena. As I stated in this issue’s Reality Checking column, if you haven't read Nightcrawler it's a highly thought-provoking scientific contribution to the field of the UAP/UFO phenomenon. From July 7, 2022, to March 30, 2023, the Tedesco brothers and their team witnessed spheroids as the most prevalent light phenomenon. They noted that “under decreased luminosity, it seemed to display a polyhedral appearance morphologically” while however “a few sightings appeared as ovaloid and cylindroid.” These anomalous light displays were seen to exhibit “extreme velocities, and long periods of inactivity, appearing stationary.”
Shortly after midnight on August 27, 2022, with four team members on hand they began to observe a triangular formation of lights in the hyperspectral range and through their unique night vision cameras. John and Gerald Tedesco made their way to the beach nearby. At this point they estimated the lights were around 300 feet above the ocean waters and approximately a half mile from shore. The team was located at Robert Moses State Park on the south shore of Long Island, New York. John had flashed an intense IR illumination at the lights several times. It was about four seconds after the last flash that they noticed a wave of near IR energy rapidly moving toward them. Visually they could see nothing but with their NV optics they detected an intense field of IR energy around them. Their NV Cams were having intermittent operational issues.
They added in their account: “During this occurrence, both of us (John and Gerald Tedesco) experienced an acute skeletal and muscular weakness involving our legs, which caused us to collapse on the sand as we attempted to return to the Nightcrawler, parked near the beachfront. First, John experienced this physical condition, then Gerald seconds later. The condition was temporary, lasting one to two minutes, and we quickly recovered. Once we returned to the Nightcrawler, we experienced additional operational issues, possibly due to EMI emissions, which we believe resulted from the encounter.”
Afterwards, the four team members that night (which included Donna Nardo and Susan Allgor) walked back down to the water’s edge and continued to observe the three triangular arrangement of spherical objects, in a stationary position, for about 45 more minutes before disappearing from sight.
Then about two months later an apparent “Hitchhiker-Effect,” as various researchers have called it, began to zero in it seemed on the team where they found these lights appearing around their homes; one of them (Donna Nardo) even seeing one in her bedroom one night! In addition, the weird incident one morning on the beach of three warm bare footprints around 1:30 a.m. (no one there that they could see) suddenly appeared on the beach, oddly with six toes and no prints leading up to them, still warm (checked with a FLIR thermal camera) and leading towards the ocean waters.
Where did they come from? How did they just appear like that? The team even consulted with noted cryptozoologists Alex Mistretta, Ken Gerhard, and Dr. Jeff Meldrum. Later in the book the authors write: “Could a shadow zone or shadow biosphere co-exist with us…. In this scenario, an ultra-terrestrial or crypto-terrestrial hypothesis might not be so far-fetched, even if unlikely. We should not be afraid to ask such questions and be willing to explore the possibility that there may be gaps in our understanding of nature, no matter how absurd it may seem.”
I can certainly highly recommend this book for all researchers, investigators, and anyone who is genuinely curious and open-minded about The Unexplained. And it’s certainly refreshing to have a reputable source where responsible scientific equipment, strategies, and documentation were applied to an investigative effort.
