Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  We got out of the car and watched it fly by past the tower and off toward Winnipeg. Looking more closely, I noticed it wasn’t the simple red ball we had first seen. The outer part of the object was red, but the inner section seemed to consist of a smaller white portion with the white extending vertically up and down from the centre. The object disappeared over the horizon in about three minutes.

  Two nights later I returned with one of the friends from the first sighting. Figuring that the object would come over the same area at the same time, we placed ourselves on a dirt road a quarter mile west of Friendship Field.

  When we arrived at the spot, we discovered nine parked cars and assumed it was the airport parking lot. That assumption was wrong. As it turned out, the owners of the cars were people from surrounding towns and Winnipeg.

  The 25 people, like us, were there hoping to catch a glimpse of the now-famous Charlie Red Star. It was 11:00 p.m. and the majority of people had been there for more than an hour without seeing anything.

  Glancing around, we noticed other cars driving along the mile roads surrounding the area. Everyone was trying to get a good spot for the night’s air show.

  Strange lighting on a UFO craft.

  Midnight came, and some of those around us became discouraged. They left thinking that as long as they were there nothing would appear. As 1:00 a.m. approached, there were only two cars of hopefuls left. The other car that was there was also preparing to leave when I told them that two nights before a sighting had occurred five minutes before 1:00 a.m., so they decided to wait.

  Just before 1:00, Charlie materialized on the western horizon. First came one flash, then another eight inches down in the field of vision. Shortly after, there was another flash over to one side. Whatever was coming appeared to be jumping all over the sky. Minutes passed and the flashes became closer together. Finally, it was near enough that we could recognize it as the same object we saw two nights earlier. It flew straight toward us and looked as if it would fly right over. When it reached within a half mile of us, the object turned northeast toward the CBC tower.

  As it crossed our field of vision, the object again seemed to bounce up and down. Once it was downrange, it started to jump all over the sky again. Nine people saw it and all were speechless. What the others thought about their sightings, I don’t know. I do know that I told myself that after all these sightings in Carman it was about time someone found out what was going on.

  I had two definite sightings in two nights. Little did I know that on my third trip I would have my third sighting in a row. With two good sightings in the week prior to June 4, I and two other friends headed to Carman early on the fourth to see if we could again see Charlie. The two previous times he had appeared close to 1:00 a.m., so we left Winnipeg shortly before midnight to be just in time.

  At 12:25 we passed Sperling and then drove the last dozen or so miles to Carman. Suddenly, I spotted Charlie flying a mile north of the highway above a line of trees parallel to the highway and along a set of power lines running in the same direction.

  Of the dozen sightings I had of the mysterious object, this opportunity provided the best view of it. We were well within a mile when we first spotted it, and it gradually moved farther and farther away as it crossed directly north of us. The object was no more than 100 feet in the air, and its size seemed intense compared to the two previous times we had viewed it.

  The pulsing of the object was slow and extremely evident. It almost gave the impression that it was changing shape. Because it appeared to be flying the same flight plan reported by Carman residents and because it was the same object we had seen previously, we figured the nightly trip had occurred early and we would see nothing in Carman. Nevertheless, we waited in Carman until 1:10 a.m., but nothing appeared.

  Eight miles directly north of us, though, something was happening. Joseph and Anna McCann were returning home at 12:15 a.m. when they spotted a red light to the west of their farm near the Haywood tower.

  “We followed it for a ways,” Joseph told the National Enquirer, “but then we lost it. We kept on going, and all of a sudden, there it was in the field, Abe Trenja’s field. It was a huge red thing. The neighbour boy, Alex Dufferin, saw it, too. It was slowly revolving and there was a silvery pink colour around. Suddenly, it disappeared. I don’t know how. We didn’t see it rise.”

  “I never saw it disappear,” Anna added.

  “That’s the end of it,” Joseph said. “Maybe it was our imagination. I’m going to finish my seeding.” At 1:00 a.m. Joseph was planning to head out to finish seeding his fields.

  The McCanns then turned their truck around and drove home. Just south of their farm, they spotted the object again in the field northwest of their farmyard. “We thought it was in our field at first,” Anna told me. “But when we got to the yard we saw that it was on the other side of the road. We had about 20 horses around the yard and they were real scared. There were some stallions in the barn, and we swore they were going to knock out the side of the barn.”4

  “There were some horses in the yard,” she continued, “and the object wasn’t far away. After the horses calmed down, we noticed that the light from the object was shining down on one of the horses and he looked bronze because the light from the object was pink. The object itself was very bright, bright red in colour, and it was revolving very slowly.”

  Anna McCann told the Dufferin Leader that she wasn’t sure whether the object had landed or whether it was hovering, but it was close to the ground and sitting on an angle. What caused it, she didn’t know, but it appeared to her that there had been some movement of objects that resembled human forms around it.

  “The light, it turned slowly, slowly, slowly,” she told the National Enquirer. “I said to Joseph, ‘I think there is someone walking around it.’ And then I said, ‘No, it must be from the lights.’”

  Later I questioned Anna on this point and found that she believed the shadows were caused by large rotating lights on the bottom of the craft, and because of the movement of the high grass around the craft.

  Joseph and Anna McCann’s barn 35 years later.

  The McCanns watched the craft until 3:30 a.m. At no time did they try to get closer. “We were too scared to get closer,” Anna said.

  When they finally decided to go to bed, Anna covered up the windows on the west side of the house because of the pinkish red light filling the rooms. They had recently built the house and hadn’t put up drapes yet.

  Randy Neuman, a 17-year-old who lived with the McCanns, was awakened by this red light, as well. He told the National Enquirer about one of two encounters he had. “I wouldn’t have believed them [the McCanns] when they told me about seeing them, but I saw it myself. I saw it about 4:00 a.m. [after the McCanns had covered the windows and gone to bed] out in the field. I just woke up and saw the red light. It was about a hundred yards off the road. It was huge. Like from that end of the room to over here [30 feet]. It was red, steady red. I watched it for five minutes and then it just took off. It was still red when it took off. All of a sudden I couldn’t see it anymore. On the Sunday night I saw the object, it was almost in the same place. It was flashing Sunday night off and on. I thought it was a cop car outside, so I looked and this thing was sitting in the field. It stayed about 20 minutes that time and then it took off.”

  A little more than four hours later, 55 miles west of Carman, Henri François joined the group who claimed to have seen a UFO close up on that day. “It was daylight, twenty to eight,” he told National Enquirer reporter Daniel Coleman. “I was going east on the road that passes my house, going toward Route 34 where I turn and go south 30 miles to St. Leon, where I work building houses. About 200 yards from the highway, I saw this flashing light, real bright, on the dirt road directly ahead of me, a half mile or so beyond Route 34. I didn’t know what it was. I was looking for a tractor or a car or something, and th
e closer I got to the highway, I knew right away what it was from reports I’d heard.

  “I was a little frightened. You don’t see these things every day. The object was right in the middle of the road, but not on the road. It was maybe a foot or two off the road, because I could see a little bit of the road underneath it. The light was on top, just bright flashes, so bright I couldn’t see anything in the centre of the object, but I could see the sides and they came out like wedges, like the edges of a disk, out over the sides of the road. The edges were sort of greyish, like the atmosphere.”

  François rolled down his window but heard nothing. He drove south 100 yards and stopped. The object was still there. He then headed to the nearest farmhouse and brought back a woman as a witness, but when he returned to the scene, the object was gone.

  There was another daylight sighting nearby that occurred hours later. The case again involved the McCanns and it happened in their 160-acre pasture about 20 miles north of the main farm. Dr. Hill, a Carman veterinarian, was with the McCanns checking their horses pastured there for swamp fever. It was between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon.

  Suddenly, Anna McCann spotted the top of a round silvery object settling behind some trees north of them. She thought it was a weather balloon and put it out of her mind. The “weather balloon,” however, was very close to her husband.

  The huge craft passed 20 to 25 feet from the truck Joseph was in at treetop level. Joseph described it to me as consisting of two “domes” making up the top and bottom of the craft. In between these two domes there was a section of clear material resembling glass. The top was silver and the bottom was milky white. “Like the belly of a fish,” he told me.

  Joseph was naturally quite shaken by the unexpected appearance of the object and tried to get the truck home as fast as possible, but it stalled and wouldn’t restart. (He had bought it new only the day before.)

  “Maybe it stalled because I tried to get away so fast,” Joseph told me, “but it wouldn’t start.” He sat and watched the object as it flew slowly east, finally disappearing behind the treeline.

  The object, as described by Joseph to the media, was 80 to 85 feet in length, but that wasn’t the actual size. His wife told me, “It was the size of the barn — at least 200 feet.”

  I asked Anna why her husband had only reported 80 to 85 feet. She explained that Joseph was quite rattled by the sighting. He had had two sightings the previous night and still had one to come later the same night. Joseph figured that with so many close sightings in such a short time nobody would believe him if he told them the thing was 200 feet — and he was right.

  The majority of the people in the area didn’t believe the McCanns’ numerous encounters, even though most of them were seeing the same things. The incident at the pasture became only one more story the family would have to live down.

  That sighting wasn’t the end of the experience. “About 15 minutes later,” Anna told me, “there was a big whirlwind and everything was moving around. The branches were breaking off the trees. There was a rumbling sound, and you could feel the ground shake!”

  In addition, ashes from an area that had been burnt a year earlier swirled up about 30 feet into the air. She gazed north toward the trees and saw a large greyish object rising quickly into the sky, which seemed to shrink rapidly as it flew north away from them.

  Seeking a witness to this bizarre occurrence, Anna approached Dr. Hill, who was near her. He had seen nothing because he was busy checking a horse. “Had he heard the noise?” she asked.

  Anna said to me, “He told me he had heard and felt it but that it was just a bunch of moose moving through the bush. I told him, ‘There are no moose around here.’ And then he told me it was a lumber wagon going through the bush. ‘There hasn’t been one of those things around for 20 years,’ I said. I told him we don’t live in those days anymore.”

  I was extremely interested in what Dr. Hill really thought of the i­­ncident, so I visited him in his Carman office. At this point, to the National Enquirer, he had already discounted the incident as anything significant.

  After introducing myself, I asked him whether he remembered an incident that occurred while he was working on some horses in the McCanns’ north pasture. The McCann sightings were extremely important to me for many reasons — one being that the majority of people didn’t believe the couple.

  “It wasn’t a UFO,” Hill told me. He said this despite the fact I hadn’t mentioned UFOs yet. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told the last guy who was here [Daniel Coleman from the National Enquirer]. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t a UFO.”

  I continued to question him about what the McCanns had told me, and he confirmed all the basic details of the story. Hill had been looking down the whole time and had seen nothing, but he admitted he had heard the strange noise. The doctor also verified he hadn’t been glancing up when it happened. Therefore, he hadn’t witnessed the debris flying around in the air.

  When I asked him what the noise was and what it sounded like, he mentioned a third sound he believed resembled the noise heard in the McCanns’ pasture. “Like someone slapping a board against the bottom of a truck,” he told me. Hill then raised the possibility of a second unseen truck in the field.

  Daniel Coleman and I checked for the possibility of another truck in the McCanns’ pasture, but since there were no roads in the ­surrounding area, chances of a second truck seemed remote. “It’s not that I don’t believe in UFOs,” Hill concluded. “It’s just that I don’t think there was one in the pasture that afternoon.”

  For the McCanns, it was only the first of many encounters with UFOs. On that same night as the incident in the pasture, they had one of their most spectacular sightings. Anna was starting to say her prayers when her husband said, “Don’t say your nightly prayers. I’ve said them for you.” As Anna laughed, she turned to the west window and spotted a red light.

  The object was just south of the Haywood tower, and according to Anna, “I knew it was something because there aren’t two towers out there.” It was 1:30 a.m. on the morning of the fifth. As the object approached the house from the west, it changed appearance from a light to a two-and-a-half-foot “glowing red ball” to a “huge saucer.”

  “It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Anna told me. “It was flying at an angle with the top side flying at us. It was a great big thing with a silvery dome and alternating red and green lights all along the edge of the saucer.”

  I questioned Anna about these sightings on 10 occasions. Each time she described this one as “beautiful,” saying, “It was a great big thing with a silvery dome and alternating red and green lights all around it. I couldn’t see the bottom. It was just like the whole thing was a tilted top with its top to me and it was flying on its edge.”

  I asked the McCanns how many times they had seen the object flying at an angle, because this was a peculiar oddity that arose in descriptions of UFOs. The response was immediate. Every time they had seen such things they were on an angle.

  “I thought it was going to hit the house,” Anna said, “but it made it over and landed behind the set of trees across the road [1,000 feet from the house].”

  “It didn’t make any noise,” she told the National Enquirer. She knew there was no sound because when she watched it approach the house she had opened the window. As the object passed over the house, the McCanns rushed to the east window with their three older children — 11-year-old Jerry, nine-year-old Lucy, and eight-year-old Connie — to watch it. “It crossed the road [60 feet from the house] and settled in behind a clump of trees 1,000 feet east of the house,” Anna said.

  Now there were five witnesses watching the object rise above the trees and drift back and forth for 15 minutes before flying toward Carman.

  The most bizarre part of the story was yet to come. In three separate interviews with Joseph, Anna, and the three
older children when the parents were absent, I put together the story of the “whitish creamy stuff” given off by the UFO as it travelled over the house.

  “It was the colour of mother-of-pearl, like the northern lights, and it was beautiful,” Anna told me. “That’s the closest colour I can think of. It covered half the sky so thick that you couldn’t see the stars. It was very thick and you couldn’t see the part of the sky where it had flown. The other half of the sky toward Carman was clear and you could see all the stars. The kids wanted to go out and look because it was so beautiful, but Joseph told them to stay in because it might be dangerous.

  “The stuff came out of the craft and swirled around and around in big waves until it covered half the sky. Connie, my youngest daughter, asked me if this was the end of the world. ‘Are the heavens going to open and are we going to see God?’ she asked. I told her it wasn’t, but I didn’t know what it was.”

  All three children told me in a separate interview about their excitement over the object’s exhaust.

  “I saw the white stuff,” Jerry said. “It was like the Milky Way if you were close up to it. It was like the northern lights but brighter. Yet I think it was nicer in a way. It was darker, more together.”

  Connie described the exhaust as “white foggy stuff.” She watched the exhaust for about 10 minutes before going back to bed

  “You saw it?” I asked Lucy.

  “I wasn’t there early enough to see it,” she replied, “but I came just after it left. I saw this milky stuff, and it spread out more and more. When I saw it, there was a light blue colour to it.”