Berkshire Athenaeum Backdrop for TV Show on Local UFO Story
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The Berkshires are a being featured in a new episodes of "Unsolved Mysteries" that are being launched this summer by Netflix.
The first episode is "Berkshires UFO" and will premiere on Wednesday, July.
This episode was partially filmed last year in various parts of the Local History Department at the Berkshire Athenaeum.
"According to the show's producer, the Berkshires UFO episode is so strong that it was chosen as the lead episode," said the library's acting Supervisor Ann-Marie Harris.
The library also helped to supply some history and information on an unidentified flying object sighting and encounter that occurred in September of 1969 in Sheffield, said Harris, an incident that the Great Barrington Historical Society recognizes as "historically significant and true."
"In that incident, it is reported that Thom Reed, his brother, mother and grandmother were mysteriously taken from their car by a UFO," Harris said.
Netflix, a subscription streaming service, will be launching six episodes in July and six episodes in October.
The story's been featured on television several times before and is featured at the International UFO Museum And Research Center in Roswell, N.M. The Reeds' claim of an encounter with aliens was the pilot episode of "Alien Mysteries," a Discovery Channel Canada show, in 2013. The Reeds, brothers Matt and Thomas, say they've had four encounters with aliens, three in the 1960s, one of which included their mother and grandmother, and a fourth by Matt in 2009 in Indiana.
The brothers say they have documentation of sightings by others during the 1069 event and radiation and magnetic anomilies around the times of the encounters.
Thomas Reed had installed a monument to the encounter on Boardman Street in Sheffield in 2016 that lead to several years of controversy; the town ordered it removed off public property and then found the second location was in a public right of way. It was hauled away a year ago.
The Great Barrington Historical Society & Museum in 2015 formally inducted the UFO story, noting the number of witnesses of unidentified flying objects that included call-ins to the radio station around the time the Reeds' story of the 1969 encounter.
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