Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  It was 4:15 a.m. on May 4 near the farm of James and Tina Stevens. The couple had just returned from closing down and cleaning the drive-in movie theatre they ran in Morden. Shortly after going to bed, Tina was awakened by a bright light passing north into the valley over the house.

  “It was suddenly like a bright sunny day,” she told me. “I was really scared by what was happening and I tried to wake up James to see the light, but he didn’t get up in time.”

  The object moved low over the Stevens’s house heading toward Howard Rempel’s farm a mile down the road. “The dogs woke us up with their barking,” Mrs. Rempel told the National Enquirer. “We looked out the upstairs window and immediately noticed there was a bright light in the corner of the driveway out there about 50 yards from the house.”

  “It wasn’t a bright light,” Mrs. Rempel added. “It was more like a fluorescent glow with no focus to it or anything. It was twice the size of a car, maybe 15 to 20 feet long and 10 to 12 feet high. I didn’t notice any edges to it, so it’s hard to say exactly what.”

  The Rempels watched the object for 45 minutes until shortly before the sun began to rise. “In a very short time,” Mrs. Rempel said, “the glow just faded away and was gone. There was no movement that we could see. It didn’t take off or anything. It just faded and was gone.”

  Two days later in another part of the province there were other sightings. In a major one, Roger Pitts and two other pilots spotted three disks in daylight flying right at their plane one after another.

  “There were two pilot sightings reported the day before,” Pitts stated. “We were southbound from Churchill, Manitoba, with a DC-3 at 6,000 feet and we were coming up on Berens River. There were three of us on board. All of us were pilots, and we spotted an aircraft coming at us at quite a distance. It drew closer and closer. We were both watching it [pilot and co-pilot], trying to determine what it was. We noticed that it wasn’t flying straight and level. It was flying on a 45-degree angle, but it was still flying straight at us. As we watched, it didn’t turn around. It just went directly the other way straight away from us. It just went off into the distance away from us, and a puff of smoke appeared — an odd shape, like a small cloud, and it disappeared in that.”

  Then a second object appeared, flew at the plane, reversed its direction, and disappeared in a puff of smoke. A third one appeared with the three pilots watching. It did the same thing.

  The evening after the pilots were being challenged by the UFOs, the Britains, along with Wayne Teal, Bob Skelton, and David Rosenfield, were repairing the landing lights on the runway at Friendship Field when they noticed Charlie coming toward Carman from the west again. As quickly as they could, they scrambled into a car and chased Charlie out to the north end of town where he sped up and continued northeast toward Winnipeg. The time was 11:15 p.m.

  The next night the Britains, Teal, Rosenfield, and a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force were again at Friendship Field when they spotted Charlie approaching the airport. Wayne and Anthony climbed onto the roof of one of the hangars to watch the object fly. “This night the object was lower than the previous night and proceeding at 60 to 80 miles per hour,” Anthony told the local newspaper.

  This made three sightings for the Britains in only a couple of days, all of the same red bobbing and pulsating ball.

  “The first time we saw it,” Anthony recalled, “it was 10 minutes before we phoned the RCMP. We were sort of debating whether we should report the thing. We didn’t get much reaction the first time. It wasn’t until I phoned on the eighth that there was a reaction. I was sort of ­kicking my tail for phoning because it kicked up such a hornets’ nest.”

  RCMP Constable Ian Nickolson drove out to Friendship Field to see what was going on. As he arrived, he spotted the object in the west, three to four miles away, about 1,000 feet high.

  “I drove a mile north to Highway 245, which goes west out of town,” he told the National Enquirer. “Then I went another mile west where I stopped the car. Off to the northwest, there was an oval-shaped red light. There was a white halo around it, not connected to it. The light was somewhat like the colour of a traffic safety light — a stop light.

  “I sat there for two to three minutes just looking at the object, which appeared stationary at the time. Then I decided to get a closer look at it. I drove west on Route 245 in my police car — and I can say it was moving pretty fast. As I was going west, the object seemed to be flying in a northeasterly direction. I continued for approximately 12 miles, ­keeping the object in sight, trying to get somewhat abreast of it so that if the ­opportunity arose, I could have driven north toward it. About 16 miles west of Carman I stopped the car. I’d seen that there was no way that I was going to catch up to it, so I stopped the car and watched the object go out of sight over the treeline on the horizon.”

  The next day, May 9, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) phoned Rachael Britain and the story was out of the bag. “Of course,” Rachael said, “half the town of Carman was at the airfield when dusk fell.”

  The runway lights were on, and one of Anthony’s planes stood ready should Charlie appear. The large group of onlookers waited, and soon it was near midnight with no sign of Charlie.

  “Everyone had gone,” Anthony recalled, “when suddenly Paul Sanders came driving up. He was just shaking.”

  Sanders was sitting a half mile southwest of the Britains’ house near the garbage dump. As a reporter from the Dufferin Leader recounted in a story about Sanders’s sighting, Sanders had seen the object flying from east to west. He also had his field glasses with him, and as it turned to veer north, he observed potholes on the underside. In Sanders’s ­estimation it was as big as a DC-3. Then it disappeared from his sight below the trees at the cemetery.

  Charlie seemed to take May 10 off, but on May 11 he made a major sweep through the valley. The first people to spot him were the Britains, Wayne Teal, and Barry Johnson. They chased the ­saucer-shaped object as it flew north on a 20-degree angle. In a line between Haywood and Carman, the object hovered for a few minutes. It then flew toward the Southport Air Base at Portage la Prairie. It was 12:20 a.m. as the group drove to Carman.

  Those who had chased him in Carman had now gone to bed, but it appeared that Charlie hadn’t quite finished his work for the night. At 1:30 a.m. Jennette Frost spotted him from her kitchen window 12 miles east of Carman, flying over Sperling.

  The brilliant red object was reported just above the horizon and spent 20 minutes dropping four small blue saucer-shaped craft to the ground. (See Chapter 4, “It’s Funny They Should Be the Same.”)

  On the night of May 12, a large group gathered at the CBC tower on the northeast corner of Carman. They included pilots, professional photographers, and a crew from CKY-TV in Winnipeg. Although Charlie did show up and was seen by the group, he never got close enough for CKY to get good nighttime film.

  That same night Carl Major was travelling south out of Carman toward Roland when his wife said, “See, what’s that?” Later that evening he joined the large gathering at the tower and reported he “was pretty darn sure he had seen the darn thing because it was the shape of a Ferris wheel with lights all around.”

  The next night 10 people, including the television crew, showed up north of town. They spotted an object that appeared to sit northwest of town and wondered if they would be able to film it.

  At 11:00 p.m. they were certain the object was on the ground. While the television crew stayed at the tower, two groups left to surround the object. By the end of that night, the group had obtained one of the most important nocturnal light films in history. It became known as the CKY-TV movie.3

  Once the footage was played on TV, many of the staff at the station wanted to come out and get more. On May 14, the now-larger CKY crew arrived to obtain further film of Charlie but came up empty-handed. If they had stayed a few more nights, they would have had great
er luck. At 2:00 a.m., on May 16, Charlie visited the same area one more time.

  This dramatic sighting took place at Stephenfield Dam, only three miles west from where the object filmed by the CKY crew had jumped off the ground. It was early Sunday morning, and the Saturday night beach party was dragging on. Twenty-five people from the Carman area were gathered on the north shore of the Stephenfield Dam Reservoir.

  At 2:00 a.m. five men left the party and walked over the dam to the south side of the reservoir. They stood on the dock, overlooking the water. Suddenly, a huge, glowing red object the size of a full moon appeared over the dam a couple hundred feet away from the dock. The object remained there motionless for a few seconds and then shot a white beam into the reservoir between two buoys.

  The beam remained at that point in the water for a few seconds before the five men noticed that a smaller white object, six to 10 feet across, had formed below the spot where the beam had touched the water, about 100 feet from shore.

  Next, the glowing white object beneath the surface of the water started to move slowly toward the dock on which the men were standing. It was extremely luminous, lighting up the water in the reservoir to such an extent that the bottom of the lake could be seen. The lake at that location was 15 feet deep.

  Ripples formed on the water as the object moved closer to the dock directly at the stunned five witnesses. When the object came within 15 feet of the dock, Wiebe, one of the five, picked up a rock, and in desperation, threw it at the approaching object.

  The rock hit the object, and in an unbelievable fashion, split it into four pieces. These broken four pieces then slowly assembled in a straight line. The row of pieces subsequently moved back, as if on a conveyor belt, to a place halfway between the two buoys where they had first appeared.

  The beam was still pointed into the water, and moments after the four objects arrived back at the point between the buoys, the beam and objects disappeared. The five men then turned their attention to the red object perched on the dam and witnessed a second incredible occurrence.

  The huge red disk abruptly broke into two pieces. These two pieces then flew east toward Carman. Each piece exhibited flight ­characteristics that would become commonly tied to descriptions of Charlie. They zigzagged back and forth, up and down, and appeared to play a game of tag with each other as they flew away.

  The five stunned young people raced back to Carman and reported their encounter to the RCMP.

  “Things were just starting to heat up in the two weeks previous to May 24,” Anthony Britain told me. “We were spending most of our time out at the CBC tower north of Carman.”

  Each night different people met to wait patiently for Charlie to appear. Some brought along sandwiches and coffee. Anthony was armed with a movie camera, the Majors with a still camera.

  Many good sightings were made in mid-May near the tower. In one case, five people watched as a huge 200-foot object resembling a Ferris wheel raced toward the tower, then reversed direction 180 degrees without anyone seeing it stop or turn around. In a second case, two people witnessed Charlie suddenly materializing out of dense fog to fly east close to the tower. It occurred only moments after the majority of the group returned home. In the most spectacular sighting reported during the middle weeks of May, Charlie was reported sitting at the top of the 570-foot tower, jumping back and forth from one side to the other.

  Tannis Major, the photographer, spent 26 nights in May and the first couple of nights in June trying to obtain a photo of Charlie. In those 26 nights, she witnessed 19 sightings and took close to 60 pictures. “A lot of them are too far away,” she told me. “All you get is a dot on the film.”

  The week following May 24 marked the heaviest part of the flap in the valley, and Tannis was finally able to get photographs of Charlie that were good enough to place in her slide collection.

  The sightings made from May 24 to June 1 numbered close to 100. It was an extremely hot week with temperatures in the high eighties. The media was on the Charlie Red Star story enthusiastically, and as a result, hundreds of people from Winnipeg drove around Carman every night attempting to see the object.

  Some people knew exactly where to be to get a good sighting. In the northwest corner of town, numerous people watched nightly as Charlie flew low past their neighbourhood.

  “The first time we saw Charlie,” Frances Stagg told me, “was when it flew low over our house. That was late May. I forgot the exact dates. Mrs. Major photographed that one. She was at the CBC tower, and it was one of the good pictures that she got. I phoned her afterward and she said that it was 11:06 or 11:07.

  “We were just having coffee, and Art [her husband] looked out the window and said, ‘There it goes.’ It just drifted over the house. It was a big red ball, just like a heartbeat. It was pulsating. It didn’t make any sound at all and it was very low. We ran out to the fence and watched it go to the south of us. It was quiet outside, and there was no wind. The thing was silent and seemed to be floating.

  “The next night we had just arrived home when it [the object] was moving into the north, higher up this time. A lot of people were outside on the street, so I called to them and they watched it with us.” On the following night, she added, “It came again — same time, just farther north of us.”

  A night later, Frances told me, “Charlie came from the north and headed south over town. The people on the streets around us watched this one, as well. I quickly ran into the house and phoned my daughter [who lived near the centre of town]. Her husband came out and followed it for quite a while. He followed it south for 10 or 15 miles at 60 miles per hour. It was very low and was pacing the car. Finally, he [her daughter’s husband] got to the point where he was running out of gas and had to stop, but when he left it, it was going straight south toward Miami. Charlie was low, as low as he’d ever been.”

  The Staggs saw Charlie more than anyone else in northwest Carman. They figured around 12 times. Most of their sightings occurred in this late May period. Some nights, the Staggs told me, there were “several” UFOs “flying around the edge of town” at one time.

  Of all these sightings, the most interesting one was when Art Stagg, Frances’s husband, believed he had seen the RCMP chasing one out of town past his house. “Whoever they were,” he stated, “they picked it up before I did. They went racing by my place doing at least 80 miles per hour down the back road to the corner. I saw the object they were chasing, and I looked at it with my binoculars. It was close because in the binoculars you’d swear it was going to hit you in the face. It was just like a heartbeat. I wanted to see through the entire glow around it, to see the object, but I couldn’t.

  “I mentioned the incident to some Mounties a few days later, but they said it wasn’t them. They told me they weren’t out that night. But it was them. I know because the car had a white door with the emblem. When they got to the corner, they turned out their lights and one guy got out to look at it. He had something he was looking through, but I couldn’t tell whether it was a camera or binoculars. They stayed there for 10 minutes watching it because it had landed west of the tower. Then they got back in the car and went flying back toward Britain’s airport, looking around, but Anthony said he hadn’t seen them.”

  It wasn’t only the Carman area that was visited by UFOs that week. They were seen all through the valley. In Haywood, 12 miles northwest of Carman, there were numerous sightings of a pulsing red object flying around the two Haywood microwave towers.

  Ten miles farther north, at Portage la Prairie, a couple of daylight sightings occurred close to Southport Air Base. In the first, a woman who was an instructor on the base left after work to go home. She was driving south down a gravel road near the base when she spotted a saucer-shaped object travelling parallel to the car over the field.

  The woman was greatly frightened by the object and became paralyzed with fear when her engine suddenly stopped running. As
her car coasted, she glanced at the object and noticed it was rotating slowly. The object appeared to be red, but as the other side spun toward her, she saw that it was green. It seemed to her that it had a rectangular door without hinges or a doorknob.

  Her car slowed to a stop between two sets of trees on either side of the road. As she reached the trees that separated her from the object, her car suddenly started again. Without even a second look behind her, the woman put the accelerator to the floor and raced away.

  Another “hot area” where numerous sightings were made in the last week of May 1975 was the one between Elie and Marquette. The sightings around Marquette were described to me by one of those involved as “regular — it’s not uncommon to see them flying around this area.” Close to Brunkild, the sightings centred near the 190-foot microwave tower at the east end of town.

  The sightings at the Brunkild tower seemed somehow connected to three major ones at the microwave tower three miles south of Elie, or at least that was what Wilson McKennett thought. He was involved in all three sightings.

  “I heard about the ones at Brunkild,” McKennett said. “They were around the tower there. My impression was that the tower was the logical place for them to be sighted.”

  McKennett, his hired hand, and 10 other witnesses had watched a huge UFO appear over the telephone microwave tower at Elie three consecutive nights during the last week in May. Each time four smaller craft emerged, two to sit watch, one on top, and one to fly back to Portage la Prairie and Winnipeg.

  It was during that week that I initially became involved as an ­investigator in researching the numerous UFO sightings. I had heard the news reports that they were being seen throughout southwestern Manitoba like ­clockwork and figured that if they were actually there, I wanted to see them myself.

  On the night of May 29 and into the morning of May 30 some friends and I decided to travel by car to Carman where Charlie Red Star made his regular swing through the valley. None of us had ever seen a UFO before. Therefore, we spent more than an hour driving around Carman searching for something unidentified with no idea what to look for. At 12:55 a.m. it happened. As we journeyed west into Carman, we sighted a red ball advancing northeast over the town, moving fairly slowly in an up-and-down pattern.