There were no known abductions among the 50 or so who attended the grand opening , Friday of the the Pine Bush UFO and Paranormal Museum, but there were plenty of goosebumps.

There was also plenty of excitement over the long-anticipated museum opening.

“I’m like a kid in a candy store,” said Linda Zimmerman, a Hudson Valley UFO watcher who was one of the creative forces behind the project. “This is a passion for us.”

Zimmerman and Lance Hallowell led visitors through the new museum on Friday, before the first official tour. There were television screens showing videos of some of the more famous UFO sightings over the past 60 years and scaled-down replicas of alien objects, based on the descriptions of eyewitnesses.

Pine Bush has come to celebrate its reputation for its frequently reported sightings of unidentified flying objects, but the museum is more than just a collection of flying saucers and weird-looking space ships. There’s also a work map showing the locations of sightings of USOs, or unidentified submerged objects in the world’s oceans and rivers. There’s also a recreation of a reported Sasquatch sighting in Tivoli, complete with a recording of what appears to be a screaming Bigfoot and a reproduced room from Montgomery’s Historic Patchett House, current home of the Wallkill River School of Art, but once a funeral home. The room reportedly had a ghost in the basement morgue.

Another room contained a reproduction of one of the roughly 100 stone chambers of Putnam County. It’s been theorized that the structures were built by 18th century farmers to store grain, To some, though, the structures resemble the stone monuments of the ancient Celts who lived well before the time of Columbus.

“They are astronomically aligned,” Zimmerman said, meaning they may have been used to mark the solstice and other change of seasons, much as Stonehenge was in ancient England.

The museum also gives a nod to Hollywood, including sci-fi movie posters and an actual theremin, the eerie-sounding instrument most famous for the Star Trek theme.

The museum has been a long time in the making. Buoyed by the success of the annual Pine Bush UFO Fair, Domanie Ragni, Director of Community Services and Small Business Tourism for the Town of Crawford made a presentation to the Crawford Town Board in May of last year to garner support for the permanent museum. By that time, the annual fair had already been postponed (it was ultimately canceled) due to the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Now the UFO Fair is back on the schedule for Labor Day weekend, but residents and visitors tired of the long wait now have a place to visit. The Museum is located at 51 Main Street, and is open Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, 12 - 6 p.m. and Friday and Saturday, 12-6 p.m. Special events are planned for the third Friday of every month. Visit pinebushmuseum.com to book your tour.