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Of all the world's unsolved mysteries, those with a paranormal twist are probably the most difficult — and the most controversial. Are they really mysteries? Is there anything to solve ... or are these tales simply that — tall tales?

For the Reed family of Massachusetts, their stories of unexplained encounters are anything but tall tales. Instead, they're encounters that span three generations and entire decades, punctuated by terrifying instances of lost time, encounters with alien creatures, and — perhaps even worse — ridicule and harassment from those who heard the stories.

The previously obscure case reached a whole new audience when it was featured in the first season of Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries reboot (via People). Will anyone come forward to shed a light on just what has been happening to the Reed family? Or will it simply ... continue to happen to them? Are they destined to keep having mysterious and unexplained encounters? Or is there a rational explanation for what's been happening to them for more than 50 years?

The most famous encounter that the Reed family, consisting of parents Nancy and Howard and their sons Thomas and Matthew, had was in 1969, but according to The Alien Abduction Files, it really started in 1954.

Nancy was 15 that year. She, her mother, her brother, and her brother's girlfriend rented a cabin on Massachusetts' Moosehead Lake. Nancy and her brother's girlfriend both woke in the middle of the night and later told of a similar experience that started with a light streaming into the window.

The light illuminated something in the darkness: two squat, pudgy figures, standing in the room and simply watching them in silence. Nancy recalled that she was unable to move on her own but could feel her body moving — as though someone or something else was moving her legs for her. The sensation faded as the sun rose, but the nausea remained. The events of that night were the only unexplained occurrence she went through until things started happening to her sons, more than a decade later.

Thomas Reed's account of the events of 1969 and what led up to them was detailed in The Alien Abduction Files, and he told interviewers that for him, it started in September 1966.

It started fairly quietly, with the appearance of orbs that seemed to float around the room he shared with his brother Matthew. He described a series of lights, floating in the air and giving the distinct impression of watching them. Just a few days later, he and his brother both experienced something terrifying, an encounter that started when they were standing on the stairs in their home. They glimpsed two figures, and suddenly, they were outside ... where they were then escorted onto a craft they both described as looking like a turtle shell.

Inside, Thomas was shown images of what he believed were galaxy clusters, along with an image of a willow tree that he believed was incredibly important. The brothers were also told that they were going to be part of a study the beings were doing on human genetics and the immune system ...  and then they woke up back in their bedroom.

The encounters, the boys say, kept happening. The next year, their mother found them missing. When she tracked them down, they said that a ball of light had appeared outside their bedroom window. They also told of seeing figures standing over their sleeping mother and grandmother and of repeat visits to the craft.

Here's what the Reeds saw in 1969 -

On September 1, 1969, Thomas, his mother, brother, and grandmother had just driven across the Old Covered Bridge in Sheffield, Massachusetts (pictured). According to the telling in the Engineering News-Record, that's when they witnessed a bright light rising from the Housatonic River. Nancy, says The Alien Abduction Files, knew what was going to happen and tried to outrun it. The car stalled, though, and they were all suddenly in what Thomas would later describe to Mass Live as "what looked like an airplane hanger [sic]."

He remembered being forced to lie on a table, but he jumped up and ran. He only got glimpses of a single, wide-open area and some hallways before being returned to the original room, and then ... they were all back in the car. Two hours had passed, but to them, it had felt like only a few minutes. And no one had been returned to exactly the same place they had been taken from. Thomas remembered that his grandmother had been in a state of shock, wandering down the middle of the road. His mother — who had been unconscious when he woke — was able to drive them home once he got his grandmother safely back to the car.

There were a ton of other witnesses to the UFO sighting -

Here's the thing: It wasn't just the Reed family who told a story of something bizarre happening that night. There were a ton of other witnesses.

According to Atlas Obscura, the local radio station was bombarded with calls from people who were seeing strange lights flashing among the clouds. Some of the 40-odd callers even reported spotting a mysterious craft in the sky, and at the time, it wasn't a matter of people calling to report a UFO. David Isy, manager of the station WSBS, says that people didn't know what it was — just that something strange was happening in the skies over their town.

In 2018, WGBH spoke to Tom Warner, who was one of the other witnesses. He said his memory of what happened was just as strong as it was on that day: He had been lying out in the yard, stargazing, when suddenly he was looking up at a floating object that flooded him in a beam of light. "Twenty feet or more in height, probably about 30 to 40 feet around, and it has — as I'm looking now, I can see it — it had lights. The lights were colors I'd never seen in my life." And witnesses are adamant: Warner told WGBH, "When you see something, it's like — I see you. I see that rock. I see that building. I saw that UFO."

Yes, Thomas Reed passed a polygraph test -

The Reed family was positive about not only what they'd seen, but what they'd experienced — and had been experiencing for a long time. When Thomas was asked to undergo a polygraph test, he agreed. He passed with flying colors: The results were that he was telling the truth, 99.1 percent (via Atlas Obscura). But that raises an interesting question: How accurate is that?

According to the BBC, a lie detector test actually measures "an indirect effect of lying." Specifically, it picks up on things like changes in the breath and blood pressure and how much someone's sweating. So basically, it's like author and professor Aldert Vrij says: "It does not measure deception, which is the core problem. The idea is that liars will show increased arousal when answering the key question, whereas truth tellers will not."

There's a further catch, says forensic psychologist Dr. Sophie van der Zee: "[...] the polygraph is quite good at identifying lies, it is not very good at identifying truths." That said, experts estimate that if the examiner knows what they're doing, and if there are proper controls in place, then it's between 80- and 90-percent accurate. Still, it's possible (but very difficult) to cheat the system, although a number of things can make for a false reading.

The family has struggled with their experiences -

Let's address the cynics out there, as well as the inevitable belief that some people claim to have been abducted just for the attention. Thomas Reed says that's not the case at all — he told The Boston Globe that his family's experiences have actually made their lives pretty miserable: "We know what we saw, and it was not local. It was definitely off-world. And it affected my whole family, and there has been a lot of post-traumatic stress."

His mother was a local restaurant owner, and there were plenty of people who stopped by just to turn her day miserable. Thomas himself suffered regular beatings because of it, and it finally got so bad that they first boarded up their house and then moved. But, Thomas says, his mother always told him to tell the truth, so he wasn't going to keep quiet.

"It hasn't helped us in any way to talk about it," he says. "We're not making any money. This has tarnished our life. This has smeared our family's name. It can only hurt you when someone Googles your name. But when you have something extraordinary like this happen to you, how do you keep a lid on it?"

Further -

A historical society confirmed the 1969 UFO sighting as an official part of history.

A quick flip through most mainstream history books will give you a lot of information about things like wars, kings, and conquering, but alien encounters? Not so much, which makes it weird that the area's local history museum, the Great Barrington Historical Society & Museum, inducted the Reed UFO case into their archives in 2015. According to The Boston Globe, the group believes it's the first time an actual historical society has done that, and it's the first time a UFO encounter has been recognized as "historical fact."

A 2009 encounter provided physical evidence -

One of the things that was distinctly lacking in the tale was physical evidence, but according to the retelling in The Alien Abduction Files, the Reeds got that in 2009.

It was Matthew Reed who was driving along in his SUV one night, late, after dropping off a friend. He stopped at a traffic light and suddenly found himself parked near a cornfield. His boots were covered with mud, an hour had passed, and he immediately reached out to the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON. MUFON sent out a response team and found magnetic anomalies centered around the SUV — compass needles went crazy when passed along the surface of the vehicle. They also documented radiation readings around the vehicle and noted that there were no other nearby places which yielded the same readings, and the same tests performed on other vehicles didn't yield the same results, either.

MUFON has a pedigree worth mentioning, too: They were founded in 1969, and their first director was Allen Utke, associate professor of chemistry at Wisconsin State University. They have strict guidelines about applying the scientific method to field research and have come to the conclusion "that there are unexplained events in our world that are genuinely worthy of further scientific investigation."

Debra Kelly

Read More: https://www.grunge.com/222068/the-untold-truth-of-the-1969-berkshire-ufo-sighting/?utm_campaign=clip