Charlie Red Star
Page 1
To Bob, Elaine, Freddie, Mark, Rolande, Eleanor, Peter, Jean in Sperling, the Dufferin Leader staff, and the adventurous film crew from CKY-TV in Winnipeg. By looking up in the sky, you provided a wonderful story for the world to read.
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Notes
OF RELATED INTEREST
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all who have helped on this project over the past several decades. Their input and suggestions helped a reluctant author make sure this book finally got published.
My very special thanks to Rob Diemert and his wife, Elaine, who helped me for the two years I was in and out of Carman investigating and talking to witnesses. Rob set up interviews for me, and because he was at the centre of the entire rash of sightings, there was almost nothing he didn’t know.
Elaine helped me edit and typed up the very first manuscript that was done shortly after all the sightings stopped. If it hadn’t been for her, there would have been no manuscript.
Thanks to all the people in southwestern Manitoba who talked to me knowing they would get ridiculed if their stories ever got out. Thanks also to others who were ridiculed after they talked but continued to talk. Many of the witnesses in this book are now dead, and because the names have been changed, their children and grandchildren will never know the historic role their parents and grandparents played. I, sadly, am one of the few people who got to hear their experiences. I am eternally grateful; their stories changed my life greatly.
The biggest thank-you probably goes to my oldest sister, Pat. She is the historian of the family. Long ago, when the manuscript didn’t get published, I gave it to her, and she kept it for a quarter century, years after I’d forgotten I’d ever written it. When she gave it back, I realized she had saved the story, since I had long since discarded most of the notes used to write it.
Finally, a big thank-you to those who pushed to have the manuscript published. It was my younger sister, Sandra, who encouraged me to publish it when I had no interest in doing so. Then it was Teza Lawrence, a TV producer in Toronto, who really pushed for Charlie Red Star to be published. She actually took her valuable time to find Dundurn and negotiate with them when I still didn’t believe.
Thanks, too, to Brian Westbrook and Laurie Rosenfield for early editing, and for their enthusiasm, which prevented me from scrapping the project. If not for this chain of people pushing the book to the finish line, it wouldn’t have happened, since I fought against publishing it the whole time. In many ways, I consider myself the person who worked the least to get Charlie Red Star published.
Introduction
Americans assume that facts are solid, concrete, and discrete objects like marbles, but they are very much not. Rather they are subtle essences, full of meaning and metaphysics that change their color and shape, their meaning, according to the context in which they are presented.
— Dwight Macdonald, Esquire, March 1965
This book is the recounting of my work investigating the numerous unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings that occurred in the Canadian province of Manitoba in 1975–76. The investigation initiated a long trip into the mystery of UFOs that has never ended.
I have held this manuscript for thirty-six years. The reason it is being published now is to put the events on the record. It is not to prove anything, but to detail a series of incredible events that occurred in a small Prairie town.
When the flap1 of sightings broke out in 1975 around Carman, Manitoba, I was a political studies student at the University of Manitoba. Prior to my first sighting, I can’t recall ever having thought about UFOs. I certainly don’t remember reading anything on the subject. The only reason I can recall venturing out on the first night to Carman was to observe what everyone else was reportedly seeing.
Once I was involved in the Charlie Red Star story, an evolution began in my thoughts on the subject of UFOs. When I first glimpsed the object, I went from ignorance to absolute amazement. My increased awareness and belief crystallized after speaking with many of the major witnesses in the flap area. It became apparent to me that something very extraordinary was going on.
The Charlie Red Star story is a unique tale. In terms of time and the number of sightings involved, it was one of the biggest UFO flaps ever to have occurred. It is perhaps for this reason that the National Enquirer, an American tabloid newspaper based in Lantana, Florida, considered calling Manitoba the UFO capital of the world after its initial investigation in the spring of 1975, followed by a two-week study of the sightings in 1976.
Despite the number of sightings that occurred, not many people have ever heard of the flap, since almost none of the sightings were publicized beyond local TV, radio, or newspaper reports. Even the largest local book publisher failed to help spread the word. When approached with a manuscript that would tell the rest of the world the story, the publisher wrote: “Mr. Cameron. You may believe in this sort of thing. Consider me among the unbelievers.”
The stories that follow will hopefully replace those constantly repeated in ufology, which have become thin through their constant retelling. It is hoped these stories will provide some researcher somewhere new information that might help solve the UFO mystery.
The majority of this book is simply a retelling of the many tales told to me by citizens involved in the sightings. Together, the witnesses and I agreed that the only proof existed in what we had seen.
Therefore, instead of this book being a vain appeal for others to believe what we saw, it looks at how others treated the witnesses, their personal opinions, and above all, their emotional reaction to a story that is personally theirs. The two-year flap is unique and worthy of being documented in book form.
In many circles the prevailing attitude is that sightings occur throughout a scattering of civilization when the witnesses are “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” In other words the general position is that “you don’t find UFOs — they find you.”
In Manitoba there was sufficient evidence to say that this model didn’t apply. On at least five occasions, mobile TV crews from Winnipeg “went out to find UFOs” and did indeed do so. That was how CKY-TV in Winnipeg captured what came to be considered one of the most famous UFO nocturnal light movies in the world at that time. Nine different photographers made it a point to regularly seek out UFOs and photograph them. Hundreds of other people did likewise.
The story of Charlie Red Star is also a look at what has been learned with the perspective of more than 40 years after the sightings happened. It appears that the Manitoba experience didn’t follow the general rules in a number of categories. Most UFO studies have shown that sightings are random, and yet for some reason the Manitoba ones weren’t.
The Manitoba UFO flap was also different from other historic ones in that the UFO became personified. The object that appeared almost nightly became known as Charlie Red Star. People and newspapers alike called it Charlie rather than a UFO. Charlie became a legend and was even part of advertisements placed in a local Carman newspaper by companies selling their goods.
As to what Charlie was, no one really pushed a pet theory. Many thought it was extraterrestrial, some believed it was an angelic phenomenon, and a few were convinced it was demonic. Usually, the object was simply Charlie, who meant no harm to anyone and whose course for the night just happened to bring him into t
he Pembina Valley, around Carman where the vast majority of the sightings took place.
1
The Arrival of Charlie Red Star
Once you see the thing, you know it. When you see this thing once, you never forget it. Just the way — the heartbeat of the thing. It’s a luminous light. You’d like to see through it, but you can’t.
— Art Stagg, Resident of Carman, Manitoba
Except for some of the world’s best wheat, the Winnipeg Jets hockey team, and being among the coldest regions in the world, the city of Winnipeg, and the town of Carman 35 miles southwest have been famous for very little. It was therefore unusual when, in February 1975, Manitoba suddenly become the focus of a series of almost nightly UFO sightings that lasted nearly two years. During that time, the province was on the map as the place where aliens came to visit.
Manitoba, however, wasn’t totally unfamiliar to UFO phenomena. There had been a flap of sightings in 1967 that included one of the most famous UFO cases ever — that of Stefan Michalak, the Polish-born prospector who came in contact with a UFO that had landed outside Falcon Lake.
The Michalak case occurred on May 20, 1967, about 40 miles north of the U.S. border on the edge of Whiteshell Provincial Park. The area where the event took place is desolate, hilly, rocky, and treed.
Michalak was prospecting for quartz veins associated with silver deposits when the incident happened. Just after noon he heard the cackling of geese, sounding as if they had been disturbed. Looking up, he spotted “two cigar-shaped objects with ‘bumps’ on them.”1 They were descending from high above him.
One of the two objects landed on a large, flat rock about 160 feet away. The other object “hovered for a short while, then departed as well, flying into the west, where it disappeared behind the clouds.”2
Shortly after the approximately 40-by-10-foot craft landed, Michalak noticed that a two-by-three-foot door had opened on the side of the craft. He could see light inside the door “and heard two humanlike voices, one with a higher pitch than the other.”3
Believing the object to be an experimental American aircraft, Michalak walked up to the vessel and called out, offering help. When he didn’t get a reply, he tried other languages he knew but got no answer in Russian, German, Italian, French, Ukrainian, and then once again in English.
Still not receiving a response, Michalak walked up to the craft and stuck his head inside where he saw “a maze of lights on what appeared to be a panel, and beams of light in horizontal and diagonal patterns. There was also a cluster of lights flashing in a random sequence ‘like on a computer.’” Then, as he moved back, “three panels slid over the opening, sealing it ‘like a camera shutter.’”4
At that point Michalak touched the side of the craft and noticed no joints or welds. It took only seconds to realize that his rubber glove had melted.
Next, the vessel began to lift off. As it rose, it started to spin, and as it did, a six-by-nine-inch grid like a vent shot out a blast of hot air against his chest as it rotated by him. The hot air ignited his clothes, prompting Michalak to tear them off as the craft flew away.
Once he had removed his burning clothes, he had a new problem. He had become very sick and was vomiting, and struggled to get back through the rugged terrain to the Trans-Canada Highway.
After returning to his home in Winnipeg, he made many hospital visits for his burns and other physiological effects. The case was investigated by several government and UFO organizations, became one of the most investigated UFO cases ever, and has been the subject of numerous articles and documentaries.
The 1975 Manitoba UFO flap was the second big UFO event in the province. When the sightings first began, the phenomena went unstudied for quite a while before people started to visit Carman and record the events. Most media and UFO investigators didn’t really get involved until May 1975 after the nightly flybys had been occurring for a couple of months.
My personal involvement in the flap was similar to that of the media. I had heard reports of sightings in the Carman area, but like most people, I watched with curiosity from afar.
At that time in my life I was a member of a group of young men in their early twenties who spent most of their free-time hours driving around Winnipeg doing not much of anything. None of us had an interest in UFOs. No one was a science fiction buff, and none of us had any scientific leanings. Our interests were focused on football, baseball, and playing cards. My only related activity was the field of parapsychology, particularly the stories surrounding the psychic Edgar Cayce, and in research related to the study of death and dying.
Map of southern Manitoba.
The only UFO story I knew that was connected to my interest in parapsychology came from research I had done into the life and “readings” of the “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce. It was an account that still pops into my mind when people talk about the possible date for UFO disclosure. In a book about Cayce, author Jess Stearn describes a strange dream Cayce had about what appeared to be a UFO:
As happened so often in his life, a significant dream came during a great emotional crisis. Cayce had been arrested in Detroit for “practicing medicine without a license,” and had been subjected to the ignominy of public trial as a charlatan.
On the train back to Virginia Beach, he had one of his most singular dreams. He had been born again in 2100 A.D. in Nebraska.
“The sea,” he recalled, “apparently covered all the western parts of the country, as the city where I lived was on the coast. The family name was a strange one. At an early age, as a child, I declared myself to be Edgar Cayce who had lived two hundred years before. Scientists, men with long beards, little hair and thick glasses, were called in to observe me.
“They decided to visit places where I said that I had been born, lived and worked in Kentucky, Alabama, New York, Michigan and Virginia. Taking me with them the group of scientists visited these places in a long, cigar-shaped metal flying ship which moved at high speed.”5
It was partly these words spoken years before the initial Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting in June 1947 that convinced me UFO phenomena were real, and that by the year 2100 humans would possess its technology. I was now poised to become involved.
In May 1975, the media had been reporting since March that sightings were being made in Carman almost every night. I realized there was a chance I might see the UFO making such a stir as reported in local newspapers. It was a rare opportunity comparable to being given the opportunity to see Elvis Presley perform live, or to attend a royal wedding.
I suggested to my friends that instead of driving around the streets of Winnipeg aimlessly, we should head for Carman to see what everyone was reporting. The decision was made to go, but nothing happened until more than two weeks after CKY-TV in Winnipeg filmed the object. Three of us left late one evening to join hundreds of people crowding the roads around Carman, waiting for a flyby of the UFO residents were calling Charlie Red Star.
Like the general population, I had the impression UFO sightings were a random event that occurred to people who weren’t usually planning to see anything. Prominent researchers in the UFO community had clearly stated that one couldn’t isolate the UFO phenomena. UFOs, it was concluded, couldn’t be studied in a laboratory. They were random events among a scattering of civilization in the wrong (right) place at the wrong (right) time.
Because I also believed UFOs found you and not the reverse, I had grave doubts we would actually spot anything when we arrived in Carman. However, there was nothing better to do that night, so at 10:30 p.m. on May 29, 1975, we headed off to see a flying saucer or whatever the hell everyone was making so much noise about.
In Carman during April, May, and June 1975, it seemed that many people had abandoned their television sets to catch a glimpse of Charlie Red Star. Numerous cars were parked on the roads outside town.
Upon arriving in Carm
an, we drove around looking for the UFO. My friends and I had no idea what to search for. We knew many people had seen the object at the local airport known as Friendship Field, but we couldn’t find it because it was dark and the runway lights were off. Like typical men, we didn’t bother to stop anyone in town to get directions.
Then we saw what turned out to be Venus setting in the west. It appeared brighter and brighter as it neared the horizon. At the time we didn’t know exactly what it was but realized it had to be a planet or star because it wasn’t moving except in relation to the other planetary objects. We thought that maybe this was what everyone was talking about. If it was the reported object, though, it wasn’t very impressive.
Anthony and Rachael Britain’s Friendship Field airstrip in Carman, Manitoba.
Doug Wheeler, my long-time friend and the driver that night, finally put an end to the hunt. “We’ll drive back into town one more time,” he said. “If we don’t see anything, we’ll go home.” The rest of us quickly agreed. The whole episode seemed a total waste of time.
We were about two miles east of Carman when Doug made the final turn back into town. Then it happened. About a mile from Carman everyone saw it. “There it is!” one of my friends yelled. It was moving from left to right, coming from the south and crossing the road in front of the car.
As I have explained literally hundreds of times since in lectures and seminars, there was no question that what we were now gazing at was indeed Charlie Red Star as described in media reports. The red pulsing and bouncing object was quite low. It flew in front of us about a half mile down the road and was unlike anything we had seen before.
The mood in the car turned from silent pessimism to one in which the home team had just scored the winning touchdown.
What is important to remember is that there was no belief involved. There was no analysis of what we were seeing. No one asked, “Is that what everyone’s reporting?” We all knew UFOs were real and we were looking at one. Instantly, we left behind the percentage of people who had never seen a UFO and therefore could only choose to believe or disbelieve the existence of unexplainable UFOs through the accounts of others.