weirdness · Sep 5, 2026 · DAILY TRANSMISSION
Exeter’s UFO Festival Is Making Peace With the Weird Sky
Today, a New Hampshire town turns unexplained 1965 lights into trolley rides, alien pets, lectures, and a fundraiser for local families.
Red lights, green antennas
Downtown Exeter, New Hampshire, is preparing for an alien-pet contest at 1:15 p.m. today. Fifteen minutes later, costumed aliens will parade through town. Somewhere nearby, people can also board a trolley to the spot tied to a famous 1965 UFO report.
That combination is the whole beautiful deal. The Exeter UFO Festival begins today, September 5, and runs through Sunday. It treats an old mystery with both a straight face and a foam antenna headband.
The event remembers the “Incident at Exeter.” In the early hours of September 3, 1965, several people, including two police officers, reported seeing unexplained red lights around Exeter.
Nobody has to solve the sky
An unexplained report is not proof of an alien spacecraft. Exeter’s own festival does not claim to have physical evidence of visitors from another planet. It calls the case an unidentified flying object report, which is the honest bit: people saw something they could not identify.
That uncertainty has become the town’s party trick. Visitors can hear paid talks at Town Hall about UFO history and classic sitcom UFOs. Or they can skip the big cosmic questions and join free children’s activities, grab food, and watch a parade of tiny Martians.
There are also crafts where kids make “UFO crash sites.” That is a very funny phrase for a table covered in glue sticks.
The Hills are in the building, historically
This year’s program also marks 65 years since Betty and Barney Hill gave an account that became hugely important to American alien lore. The Hills were an interracial New Hampshire couple, and their story became famous in the mid-1960s.
Their account helped shape the familiar alien-abduction template: missing time, nonhuman beings, and memories recovered later. A template is a pattern that later stories copy or build from. Plenty of people now recognize those ideas from movies, TV, books, and gray-alien pop culture.
Today’s keynote speaker is Kathleen Marden, identified by festival organizers as the Hills’ niece, estate trustee, and family archivist. The serious history gets a seat at the table, right beside face paint and alien merch.
From local embarrassment to local tradition
The Exeter UFO Festival is not a fresh gimmick that landed from nowhere. New Hampshire Public Radio visited in 2018, when the event was already in its ninth year. The town had little-green-men decorations in storefronts and on the common, with believers and skeptics showing up together.
That mix is what makes the festival more interesting than a plain old paranormal convention. Exeter has found a way to keep an eerie local story without demanding that every visitor believe the same thing. You can be there for the history, the hula-hoop lessons, the snacks, or a costumed lizard named Captain Blorp.
Not every town handles its weird reputation this well. Some would bury the old headline under a parking lot. Exeter put it on a trolley route.
A fundraiser with flying-saucer garnish
The practical side is almost sweeter than the strange one. The Exeter Area Kiwanis calls the festival its largest fundraising event. It says profits support Seacoast organizations serving children and families.
Local merchants and restaurants participate, so the mystery also pulls people through downtown. That does not make the 1965 lights any less unexplained. It makes the town’s response unusually grounded.
For one weekend, Exeter turns an unsolved sky story into a public ritual: a repeated community event with its own costumes, routes, snacks, and jokes. Folks may disagree about what happened in 1965, but today they can still line up for a trolley, cheer an alien pet, and look up together.
SOURCES FROM THIS TRANSMISSION
Welcome to the 2026 Exeter UFO Festival! ↗Exeter History Minutes — Exeter Historical Society ↗The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America | JSTOR ↗Exeter UFO Festival ↗Welcome to the 2026 Exeter UFO Festival! ↗Radio Field Trip: Learning About UFO Encounters in Exeter | New Hampshire Public Radio ↗