Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2025
UFOs Over Wayne, Maine
By Nomar Slevik
Wayne is the kind of picturesque town that keeps its locals busy with its numerous outdoor recreations. The town, for all intents and purposes, is ordinary but for one particular stretch of years in the mid-1970s, extraordinary things were afoot.
The story began on what used to be called North Pond Road, now Walton Road. Mike Waitt remembers the afternoon clearly, he was eleven or twelve, it was “nice out,” and then a “thing” appeared in the sky. It flew low over the trees and hovered. It stayed just above his family’s house before moving on toward Berry Pond.
He described its shape flatly: “It looked like a saucer, and it had these glowing, spinning lights all around it.” He told his parents and a neighbor in the horse barn, and he remembers the smell that filled the house afterward: “For the life of me I can’t remember the year or exact date, but… there was an electrical smell throughout the house… like an electrical wire had burned or something.” What astonished him most, he said, was the silence. “There was no sound, nothing at all. When it took off, it was like nothing I had ever seen before.”
The Waitt sighting did not remain private. Linda McKee, then a correspondent for the Kennebec Journal, ran the piece, and almost immediately other accounts surfaced from the same neighborhood. A woman on Fairbanks Road phoned to say she had been sitting on her porch overlooking Berry Pond the same night and watched a bright flying object streak the sky. Roy Waitt, Mike’s father, called Linda to ask if anyone else had “smelled anything funny.” He described the odor as “sorta like Freon.” After hearing his son’s account, he asked Linda to come and interview him; Linda listened and found no sign of a child’s imagination. “He was telling the truth, “She said later, “I knew the difference.”
Over on Cross Road, a stretch near Berry Pond, a girl named Jackie saw something curious about a year after Mike. She and her mother had just moved into a new home; they had no curtains yet and were talking on the couch when something outside the window caught their attention.
“We saw this huge UFO right in front of the house,” Jackie remembered, “right in the street! It was getting dark out and we could see this circular thing just hovering over the street.” Jackie hesitated when she tried to describe its color and then said, “Kind of a pink, and it was huge, huge, huge! Bigger than a house, it was humongous!” For an hour they sat in stunned silence, unwilling to speak the truth aloud because “anyone would think we were crazy.” The next day Jackie checked the pavement; there was no mark, no evidence left behind.
A well-known local woman who preferred anonymity told a similar story. She placed the incident in the summer of 1974 or 1975 and had been walking home from a friend’s place. As she walked along Pond Road, she reached the elementary school’s edge and saw “a bright blue light move along the treetops… flared and disappeared behind the trees.” It lasted only a few minutes, made no sound, and left her hurrying home with a fear that didn’t ease.
Taken together, the Waitt sighting, the Fairbanks Road report, Jackie’s pink, house-sized object, and the anonymous witness’s blue flare read like a bonafide UFO flap in Wayne during the mid-1970s. Years later, Michael Waitt’s stepmother, Regina, would sleep facing the window because she enjoyed watching the stars. One night, in the late 1980s, she observed a bright spotlight descend into the field beyond their barn. It vanished, leaving her confused and scared. A couple who lived near the property before the Waitts bought it told of a landed UFO sitting on the knoll one night. They saw it while taking a walk and immediately went back home.
Wayne’s other sky stories only deepen the town’s inventory of the strange. On Wood Road, Joel, a self-described “science guy,” saw a ball of light cross the sky in 2011 and then turn and vanish behind trees. His neighbor Gary reported a disk-shaped object that zigzagged, made right-angle turns, climbed, dove, and then stopped and hovered above them without sound. Gary estimated it to be about fifty feet across and entirely black. He watched it flash bright lights that flooded the clouds with color before it rocketing away. Later that same year, he saw a cigar-shaped object with a green glow glide silently over the Wayne Yacht Club and vanish.
Gary’s experiences then turned into something entirely bizarre. One night while watching television, something banged on his window. Upon first look, a shadow hung in mid-air. It then shifted into an almond-shaped glitch-like opening and he watched as several small luminous figures, human-like with wings, eight or nine inches tall, emerged out of it. They hovered and seemed to talk amongst themselves. Suddenly they all turned and looked at Gary, they smiled at him and then went back into the vortex. Afterwards, online research told him that others called such sightings “nature elements” or “elementals,” entities some people believe are tied to land and vibration rather than an extraterrestrial explanation.
Out by Androscoggin Lake, Chet Coulombe, a man whose life is lived outdoors and who knows the sky for its predictable things, told of three occasions that changed how he saw the heavens. One mid-November evening while unloading after a hunt, he and his son Andrew watched what looked like a bright star on the horizon that suddenly came straight at them at treetop level; Andrew said it had “four fins.” On another night Chet watched a silver cigar-shaped object that moved with a cloud as though it had its own weather. At Rangeley Lake he and his wife watched a light zip through the sky at impossible speed then vanish. A man with military experience in aircraft, Chet knew a plane when he saw one and swore that these were not of the same family.
All of these accounts are offered with that same awkward, human restraint: people who do not want to be foolish or fanciful. The mid-1970s cluster is remembered by many and the more recent accounts imply that these objects may visit the area more often than people realize. Whatever the case, if you’re in Wayne, you should probably look up.
