Already well-known throughout the world as being the host of Bike Week, Laconia recently added another item to its resume when a local girl and her boyfriend claimed their car was picked up into the air and then dropped by an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO).

While The Citizen’s attempts to reach the youths were unsuccessful, a Laconia Police Department report states that Off. Adam Batstone responded at 12:17 a.m. on March 21 to the residence of Linda Dutile where he made contact with her daughter, Emily Moore, 18, and Moore’s 16-year-old boyfriend.

Moore, Batstone wrote, was “very upset” and told him that, a short while earlier, she and her boyfriend had been parked at Opechee Park in her mother’s Ford Focus, looking out toward the lake, when “all of a sudden a dark object started to float across the sky in front of them.”

The object passed over them and returned, Moore said, and, when she and her boyfriend attempted to put the car in reverse, “the vehicle started to shake violently and the windshield smashed as though something had hit it and the air bags went off.”

There was no one around, Moore stated, and, upon questioning by Batstone, she said a bird had not struck the windshield.

“They never saw anything actually strike the car, they just saw the dark object in front of them, heard the windshield smash and the car shake violently and all of the sudden it felt like the car had dropped back down into the parking space. Moore said that she knew it sounded impossible or incredible, but that’s what happened,” said Batstone.

Batstone inspected the exterior of the vehicle and found no signs of impact on the windshield, adding that the dirt on the car was undisturbed. A check of the interior showed “no indications that any sort of impact had happened” but the damage on the windshield was “consistent with the cover to the air bag being launched into the windshield when the passenger side air bag had deployed.”

Batstone next went to Opechee Park where he searched the area of the incident but failed to find any evidence — birds, animals or broken glass or lens covers — “to indicate that a collision had occurred.”

In conclusion, “I request this case be cleared due to no criminal aspect,” Batstone wrote.

As of Friday evening, however, the case remains uncleared because of a discrepancy between where Moore told Batstone the incident allegedly occurred and where she and her boyfriend later told UFO investigators it happened — namely the parking lot at Funspot — said Laconia Police Chief Mike Moyer.

Moyer, who spoke with the UFO investigators and who has a copy of the account Moore and her boyfriend gave of the alleged March 20 event, said Batstone will be meeting soon with both of them to ask about the Opechee Park/ Funspot situation.

The testimony of Moore and her boyfriend is available online at the National UFO Reporting Center, www.nuforc.org.

A Funspot representative said nothing like what Moore and her boyfriend described happened at the facility. “It’s a hoax,” the representative said; “it never occurred at Funspot.”

“The long and short,” said Moyer, “is that we got this call to Opechee Park and the officer basically closed the case because there was nothing for us to do; and then I got a call from the UFO guys and they came and took statements and I didn’t realize until yesterday in reading the statement they [Moore and her boyfriend] gave the UFO people the discrepancy in what they told the police.”

There was no mention of a UFO, Moyer said, until the investigators contacted him.

Steve Firmani of the Mutual UFO Network New England, which several online articles reported had spoken with Moore and her boyfriend, was not available for comment.

In his remarks to the NUFORC, Moore’s boyfriend, who is identified only as “D,” said he and Moore went to the Funspot parking lot around 11 p.m. on March 20 because “we wanted to look at the stars.”

“D” said he observed an object that “blocked the moon” and that changed shapes and whose size he estimated to be “as big as 14 houses.” “D” said he attempted to drive away, but “The front end got picked up and the car could not move.  We steered left and right but the car just kept going up into the air.”

As the car rose, “D” said, he felt “something” yank his wrist but “Not aggressively” while in his head, “something was telling me ‘Don’t panic,’ or ‘Don’t be scared.’ And it wasn’t in English in my head but I got the meaning.”

There was a smell and “D” said his ears “felt like they kept on popping from the altitude.” The force that was tugging on his wrist, “D” said, then intensified. When the car horn accidentally sounded, the grip lessened, he said, and when the horn beeped again, “D” realized “we were still up in the air! It took 2 seconds for the car to drop.”

“All this took place from 11 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.,” D” said, but “It seemed like we were in the air for 10 minutes and it felt like it was forever.”

Moore, who is identified in the NUFORC report as “E,” recalled seeing “a weird black-shaped object” in the Funspot lot. She, too, recounted there being a smell and also of being “immobilized like I had no control over what I was doing or over my body.” Moore said that, after Batstone left, it was determined that the underside of the car was “totaled.”

Both Moore and her boyfriend concluded their comments by saying they are scared and don’t want to go out at night anymore.

A Laconia police officer for the past 25 years and chief for almost three, Moyer confirmed that his department has in the past received “a couple of reports” of UFOs, although they were never substantiated.

Asked whether there was anything seemingly extraterrestrial in what allegedly happened on March 20 at either Opechee Park or at Funspot, Moyer said there wasn’t.

“We did not put out an APB [all points bulletin] for a flying saucer that night,” he said, adding that, while he has seen UFOs “many times”— things he could not readily identify — he had never seen an alien spacecraft.

“I don’t believe in UFOs. Why do they always come down in a rural area?  Why don’t they land in the middle of New York City? The day one lands on the Boston Common is the day I’ll believe.”

Neither Dutile nor Moore was available for comment Friday. Calls to telephone numbers that the women provided to police produced recorded messages saying the telephone numbers were out of service.

In the meantime, Laconia’s alleged UFO incident remains under investigation.

While Chief Moyer does not believe in UFOs, nearly 20,000 hits on the UFO Examiner’s article on the incident shows a lot of other people do.