UFOs Over Canada: Personal Accounts of Sightings and Close Encounters

Sightings"

Preface

UFOs over Canada is a collection of personal accounts of sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects. This collection may not be the first book about UFOs in Canada, but it is the first Canadian book to offer the reader so many first-person descriptions of sightings.

The sixty accounts in this collection are all eye-witness accounts; here there are no second-hand reports or third-hand descriptions. In their own words, in a narrative fashion, witnesses express what they sensed, what they felt, and what they thought. Some of the witnesses go further, as they recollect their memories and impressions of close encounters with alien craft and even the experience of being abducted by alien beings.

I see it, but I don’t believe it, wrote one of the contributors to this collection. W. Ritchie Benedict saw his UFO from afar—hovering high over Calgary about 4:30 p.m., Monday, October 24, 1974. Benedict expressed amazement, and to this day he shares that sense of amazement with the witnesses whose words are reproduced in this book. Benedict ended his account with a question. Fellow observers quite often do the same, in effect concluding in the following fashion: I don’t believe it, but I saw it.

There is nothing new about strange shapes in the sky. Indeed, they are as old as the hills and as cumulous as the clouds. Mystery Lights is the broadest term to refer to illuminations that have been observed and described as they streak or hover in the sky by day or by night. Such sights have been observed throughout the ages, and increasingly so during the second-half of the twentieth century.

Records show that the word saucer was used as early as 1878 by a farmer to describe a mysterious shape seen in the sky over Texas. The term flying saucer was coined almost three-quarters of a century later by a news reporter covering the first of the modern sightings. This sighting occurred on 24 June 1947, when the civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold observed nine bright, crescent-shaped objects streaming between the peaks of Mount Rainier and Mount Adams in the State of Washington. Arnold estimated that they were moving at about 1,600 miles an hour, three times the speed of any aircraft of the day. He reported that the objects were streaming in what appeared to be a chain-like formation. As they were proceeding in a southward direction, their flight may well have originated in the north, across the border in British Columbia.

Arnold’s sighting lasted between two and three minutes. Later that day he told a news reporter, Bill Bequette of the Pendleton East Oregonian, They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water. This description gave rise to the term flying saucer. The experience left Arnold something of a celebrity; it also left him with a taste for anomalous aerial phenomena. He was approached by Ray Palmer, editor of the newly launched Fate Magazine, and together they wrote magazine articles about the sighting. Arnold kept watching the skies, and in later years claimed additional sightings. In the parlance of UFOlogy, he became a repeater.

The term flying saucer swept the United States and eventually the rest of the world. But it was not long before researchers and investigators of the phenomenon began to feel that the adjective flying did less than justice to the flight characteristics of the objects, and that the noun saucers failed to take into account the multitude of shapes and sizes assumed by the objects or effects. The term unidentified flying object, with its acronym UFO, was chosen by the U.S. Air Force’s Project Grudge study in 1949. The acronym found favour in the late 1950s; by the late ’60s, the euphonious letters (rather like LSD) pretty well displaced the low-tech flying saucers. For four decades now, UFO has proved to be both durable and general enough to remain in use.

The only thing new about UFOs is the acronym UFO. Evidence is available that archaic and prehistoric cultures embraced traditions of strange things happening in the heavens. Mystery Lights (to use the broadest term) are mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, where they are equated with harbingers of things to come. During the Middle Ages, religious traditions and popular superstitions, both Oriental and Occidental, held that such sights were omens of disaster or signs of divine intervention or both. In the Western world, there were various waves of sightings of strange aerial craft around the turn of the century. In our own time, the social fabric is shot through with colourful strands: descriptions of Mystery Lights, Phantom Airships, Flying Saucers, and UFOs. The phenomenon which seems so wonderful and so mysterious to so many has been described and discussed on hundreds of television shows, in thousands of books, and in millions of reports carried by newspapers and magazines.

Despite the fact that interest in the subject of UFOs is a global feature of our time—the UFO phenomenon is, like the film studio, universal international—always and everywhere the phenomenon has been characterized by both the presence of soft evidence and the absence of hard evidence. Accounts of UFOs exist, but do UFOs exist? Why do the accounts persist, unless the vehicles themselves exist? Is the phenomenon physical in origin or psychic in nature? Or does its source lie between these two extremes, in the realm of the imaginal, to employ the term introduced into the discussion by Henry Corbin, the French Islamic scholar who has argued for the existence of a domain or a dimension common to both the material world and the region of the mind?

Despite sightings that have taken place over the millennia, there is no proof at all that any of the following questions may be answered in the affirmative:

• Was Earth visited in the distant past by ancient astronauts?

• Do UFOs routinely buzz power plants and cause power surges; do they regularly hover over farmers’ fields and create crop circles?

• Have alien intelligences established contact with human beings?

• Are alien beings selectively abducting individual men and especially women, inducing in them trance-like states, then subjecting their bodies to biogenetic experimentation?

• Are the governments of the world in a conspiracy to suppress physical proof of the existence of alien artifacts, even the preserved remains of alien beings?

• Is there evidence of a massive coverup, a cosmic Watergate?

• Does the Space Brotherhood guide the destiny of mankind on our tiny planet Earth, gradually elevating it to the standards required for membership in the Galactic Federation?

Auroral displays, blurred snapshots, blips on radar screens, strange images of rock art, photocopies of disputed documents, crop circles, mutilated carcasses of farm animals, intermittent memories, surgical implants, missing time, anomalous traumas . . . these prove nothing, of course, whereas the aileron of a UFO would constitute proof.

In the absence of an alien artifact, or even part of one, what remains of interest is anecdotal evidence. Evidence useful to a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a sociologist, or a folklorist is useless to an astronomer, a physicist, a chemist, or an engineer. That which delights the soft scientist holds few rewards for the hard scientist. Yet anecdotal evidence illuminates human experience, if not alien experience. Indeed, as the Roman historian Tacitus once boasted, Nothing human is alien to me.

The UFO experience is a global phenomenon. It is also a Canadian experience. This is the first book to look at the events and signals from a neutral perspective. But UFOs over Canada is far from being a collection of classic cases, although a number of major Canadian sightings are recalled in its pages. Readers who are interested in a national or social history of UFO activity should turn to Appendix A where they will find A Chronology of UFOs in Canada. This book is principally a collection of cases that for one reason or another have gone unheralded—unmentioned in the media, unreported to the authorities. These cases come from across the country, and the majority of sightings date from the last two decades. The 1970s and ’80s were decades nationally and internationally notable for such reports.

The accounts in this book represent the tip of the iceberg of all such Canadian sightings, for UFOs are part of the way of life of a good many Canadians. That fact is confirmed by the findings of a Gallup Poll, as reported in The Toronto Star, 22 March 1978. According to that public opinion poll:

• 10% of Canadians report seeing UFOs;

• 46% believe UFOs are real;

• 18% believe they are products of the imagination;

• 16% hold no opinion about UFOs;

• 19% have never heard of UFOs.

Far from being blips on a radar screen, these findings are an accurate gauge of the continuing interest of Canadians in UFOs. Indeed, ten years later the Gallup organization conducted an identical survey. The results of the later poll appeared in the The Toronto Star on 7 April 1988:

• 11% of Canadians report seeing UFOs;

• 46% believe UFOs are real;

• 25% believe they are products of the imagination;

• 13% hold no opinion about UFOs;

• 16% have never heard of UFOs.

Over the decade surveyed, sightings of UFOs increased by 1%. At the same time, scepticism increased by 7%. The significant growth of skepticism was at the expense of two groups, those respondents who held no opinion on the subject and those respondents who had never heard of the phenomenon; growth did not occur at the expense of the other two groups, those who said they saw UFOs or who said they believed that they are real. The public was clearly taking sides. More than one thousand adult Canadians were interviewed in each survey. Such polls are considered to be accurate within a margin of four percentage points, 19 in 20 times. (Results are not required to total 100%.)

Two findings of the Gallup polls are of particular note. Despite all the media coverage of UFOs over the years, it is surprising to learn that so many respondents (19% in 1978; 16% in 1988) maintained their ignorance of UFOs. As well, despite the ever-present risk of social disapproval, a surprisingly large number of respondents (10% in 1978; 11% in 1988) were willing to identify themselves as witnesses of UFOs.

Based on the results of these public opinion polls, it is apparent that some two million living Canadians have seen UFOs. Simple arithmetic suggests that 25,000 or so sightings occur each year in Canada. It has been estimated that no more than one-tenth of all sightings are referred to the media or reported to the authorities, so the approximately 2,500 annually reported sightings are but a surface reflection of what is happening. The UFO experience, far from being extraordinary, turns out to be quite ordinary. As a news story, it is characterized by being commonplace, continuing, and consistently under-reported. It is the sole news story of the last half-century that affects so many people in so many parts of the world. If the UFO experience is to be compared to an iceberg, here is one ice floe that is as immense as the Arctic Ocean!

If you see a UFO in Canada, to whom do you report it? Most witnesses mention their sightings to family members and friends who are likely to be sympathetic and who accept the informant’s sanity and sobriety. Some witnesses may mention their experiences to people in the media. At one time local news reporters and desk editors of news syndicates were uncritical in their reporting of such stories, always arguing that flying saucers are real. Since the mid-1980s they have been taking a tougher approach to news items and feature stories about UFOs. Whenever possible, stories on UFOs are given a human-interest focus rather than a hard-news slant. Some are seen in the context of the New Age movement.

There is also the moderating influence on the media of the skeptics. The leading skeptical organization is the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Members of this Buffalo-based group operate a hot line for news media that offers access to ready—and reasonable—explanations for any and all inexplicable effects that are currently being uncritically reported. Since the late 1980s, in this country, skeptical groups have been active in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. The national chairman is James E. Alcock, Professor of Psychology, York University, Toronto, and the author of Parapsychology: Science or Magic? (1984) and Science and Supernature (1990).

The leading Canadian skeptic is arguably Henry Gordon, magician, media maven, and author of two popular books, Extrasensory Deception (1984) and Channeling into the New Age (1988). The latter book is an exposé of the woolly thinking of Shirley MacLaine and other proponents of the New Age. Gordon, a resident of Toronto, was born in Montreal where for many years he operated a magic and party shop and performed as a parlour magician.

The leading skeptic in North America is James Randi, magician and escape artist, who performs professionally as The Amazing Randi. He is a CSICOP founder and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, one of the genius awards. Randi is a native of Toronto who was raised in Montreal and who now resides in Florida. He has written thoughtful, debunking books on the paranormal, Uri Geller, and faith-healers. Randi follows in the footsteps the late Harry Houdini. Just as Houdini spent many years exposing fraudulent mediums, Randi has devoted considerable time to debunking so-called faith-healers and gullible parapsychologists.

Despite the best efforts of CSICOP, sensationalism is alive and well in the media, especially in the pages of the tabs, the supermarket tabloids with their outspoken headlines, outlandish stories, and outrageous illustrations. Montreal since the 1950s has been the hub of Canadian tabloid publication and the home of Hush, Flash, and Midnight-Globe, among others. Randi, in his youth, contributed an astrology column to one of the Montreal tabloids; he subsequently saw the error of his ways. A generation later, David Gower was employed by a Montreal tabloid to concoct tales of vampirism; he subsequently became a founder of the Ontario Skeptics and a lively public speaker who publicly admits to the sins of his youth. Of local interest is the fact that Midnight-Globe lent the last half of its name to the contemporary tabloid with one of the largest circulations, Globe. For a time this tab was owned and operated by a Montreal businessman. These days, Globe is owned by American business interests and published out of Florida, as are its two leading competitors, National Enquirer and Star.

Community newspapers, as distinct from tabloids and news syndicates, investigate and publicize a great many sightings when they are reported by responsible individuals. The bigger the name, the bigger the coverage. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter admitted to two sins—lusting after strange women and sighting a UFO. (Prime Ministers might take note!) Other witnesses report their sightings to the police. The interest hard-pressed desk sergeants show is more likely to be courteous or curt than it is curious—seldom more, unless there is some evidence of recklessness or dangerousness, of fraud or foul play. Few witnesses go to the trouble of reporting sightings to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or to government agencies like the Department of National Defence and Transport Canada. Indeed, Philip J. Klass, the Washington-based critic of alien abductions, ruffled feathers when he urged people who claimed they had been abducted to report their abductions to the FBI rather than to the press. He argued that kidnapping, whether conducted by aliens or others, is a federal offence.

The reports of sightings made to such agencies as National Defence and Transport Canada are routinely forwarded to the National Research Council of Canada. Officials at the NRC examine them, index them, and classify them in its file marked Non-meteoritic Sightings. Each year the accumulated reports are transferred for safekeeping to the National Archives of Canada. (Additional information on the extent of involvement of NRC and NAC appears in Appendix B: Non-meteoritic Sightings.)

Almost every city of any size in the country has its own UFO study group. Study groups are formed by charismatic men or women who demonstrate strong interest or special insight into the UFO experience, perhaps as readers interested in such matters, perhaps as contactees or even abductees. Members of these groups keep abreast of developments in the field through reading the literature—subscribing to specialized journals and purchasing new books, not only the well-known ones issued by the major publishing houses, but also the lesser-known ones issued by special-interest houses.

Some members of these study groups are field investigators in their own right. Over the years members have followed up sightings that were reported in their localities by interviewing witnesses and filing reports with such national and influential organizations as the National Investigative Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), and the Canadian UFO Research Network (CUFORN). The latter organization is a particularly active study group.

The Canadian UFO Research Network, Inc., or CUFORN, was founded in Toronto in Dec. 1977. It is directed by Lawrence J. Fenwick, Harry Tokarz, and Joseph Muskat (a team of investigators known locally as Larry, Harry, and Joe). The quality of their in-depth work may be assessed in the detailed report of the group of musicians abducted in the Niagara Peninsula. The report appeared as Canadian Rock-Band Abducted? in the Flying Saucer Review, Volume 29, No. 3, 1984.

Some researchers and investigators prefer to work on their own rather than as members of study groups. One individual so motivated is Mr. X, the legal name of a writer and researcher based in Kingston, Ont., who has generated the country’s most extensive computerized lists of sightings of aerial and other unusual phenomena. Another private researcher is Chris Rutkowski of Winnipeg who is an authority on anomalous activity in Manitoba. He issues his own Swamp Gas Journaland, being a trained astronomer, has a special interest in UFOs. Recently he has shown a particular interest in the widely reported crop circles. (What cattle mutilations were to the 1980s, crop circles promise to be in the ’90s.) Private investigators make a major contribution to the field. John Magor, a retired newspaper reporter and the author of two books on UFOs, edited and published his own periodical, Canadian UFO Report, from Duncan, B.C. During the nine years it appeared, from 1969 to 1978, Magor’s journal was the best in the country and among the best anywhere.

The most widely known independent investigator and researcher of UFOs in the country is Stanton T. Friedman. In 1980, Friedman, a nuclear scientist and UFO activist, moved with his wife and children from Hayward, California, to Fredericton, N.B., home of his wife’s family. From the Maritimes, Friedman sallies out to hold forth on his pet subject, "Flying Saucers Are Real! With boundless energy, he delights radio and television audiences and astonishes audiences on college and university campuses with his views. Friedman refers to himself as the flying saucer physicist, but he is also the flying saucer publicist. He is the world’s leading proponent of the conspiracy theory of UFOs. He argues that revelation of the extent of the governmental cover-up of proof of UFO activity over the last half-century would result in a Cosmic Watergate."

Television producers frequently pair Friedman, who is ebullient and argumentative by nature, with Philip J. Klass, the UFO skeptic who reacts in a caustic and often captious manner. On television they seem to be two halves of a single whole: Punch and Judy, Gaston and Alphonse, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Off-screen it is another matter. If Friedman has an uphill battle arguing for the authenticity of the documents in the Majestic-12 dossier, it is clear sailing for Klass whose argument in such books as UFOs Explained (1975) and UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1989) is that there is simply no evidence at all for the existence of UFOs, not to mention a conspiracy of international proportions.

Through the efforts of members of study groups and individual researchers and investigators, considerable statistical data on UFOs has been accumulated and analyzed over the years. J. Allen Hynek, the distinguished astronomer who devoted the second half of his professional life to the analysis of UFO data, is credited with inaugurating the systematic and statistical study of the phenomenon. On his extensive travels, Hynek investigated individual cases, interviewed witnesses, visited the locales of sightings, scrutinized photographs, etc. No stranger to Canada, he investigated a number of important Canadian cases. Indeed, those Canadians who met him in his capacity as an investigator often quote him as making the following observation: On a per capita basis, more Canadians report UFO sightings than do people of any other country.

So eager was Hynek to establish the scientific basis of sightings—the systematic and statistical study and analysis of the evidence whether of the soft or hard variety—that it might be said he downplayed the human element and the drama. Certainly, in his writings, the dynamics take second place to the mechanics. Personal histories and psychological factors are given little if any weight. One has often to look elsewhere to re-establish some of the missing features: the age of the informant, his or her educational level, the person’s mental and emotional state, personal beliefs concerning psychical phenomena generally, past history of similar experiences, and so on. Hynek’s work rises above the Plimsol line in detailing flying saucer sightings, but falls below the water level when it comes to detailing the dimensions of the UFO event as an episode in someone’s life.

The public’s perception of UFOs has changed considerably over the last half century since Kenneth Arnold’s seminal sighting. No longer are UFOs described, as they always were, as hardware in the sky (spaceships from their base in Lake Ontario or the North Pole; starships from the close planets or the far stars); now they are sometimes felt to be software in the psyche (unconscious projections; ultradimensional entities or intelligences). It is doubtful that human nature has changed much, if at all, over the last fifty years, but during that period the social and technological expectations of Western societies have become more sophisticated. These expectations now extend to the spiritual, and so do our images of these visitors.