Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  While all this was going on, Joseph had raced to phone Jeff Bishop, the Dufferin Leader’s publisher, for the second time in one day. He had phoned earlier about the incident in the pasture, and Bishop had gone there to search for clues, which he didn’t find. Now Bishop jumped out of bed and raced north from Carman toward the McCanns’ 1,100-acre farm. Once again he was unlucky and saw nothing.

  The craft also had a bizarre lighting pattern to it. “They weren’t just ordinary lights,” Anna said. “They were huge lights raised right off the saucer. They looked just like the lights they used to have on the 1956 Oldsmobile.”

  Joseph thought they seemed more like “the clearance lights on the backs of trucks, oval-shaped with alternating red and green lights. They were revolving, and my little girl woke up. She’s eight years old, and she said, ‘Mom, look at that diamond ring around that silvery thing.’ She came and watched. The other little girl woke up and said she saw a big white steam in a circle [the smoky white haze described by Jerry and his mother].”

  “It sat across the road for a while,” Anna continued. “Then it flew off toward Carman, and when it decided to go, boy, did it go!”

  Two nights later the McCanns had their last sighting for a while in what was becoming their own personal UFO flap. We had the baby [a one-year-old toddler] in bed between us,” Anna said, “and I was tired of having him kick. I got up to put him in his crib and the house was all lit up red, pinkish red. Everything inside was pinkish red. Joseph was asleep and I said, ‘Joseph, the barn is on fire.’”

  Anna continued the story at length:

  I went and looked and didn’t see anything, but I did see something red. It had a tail. It was the longest tail I have ever seen. It [the object] was an oval-shaped thing, but it disappeared real fast, in a flash.

  It went over the house to the east, and what shocked me was when it got on the other side of the road beyond my tree [a tree in the front yard 50 yards away], I thought I saw the Dufferin Leader cameramen taking pictures.

  I saw great bright lights, like what you see on tow trucks, but bigger, and they were lighting up all my trees all orange. They were turning and turning. I called Joseph and we watched through the garage door [on the south end of the house]. Those big orange lights were lighting up all my trees and then it came completely to a dead stop. That’s all there was to it.

  I phoned [Jeff] Bishop the next day and he said that neither he nor the RCMP came out, so I wonder what those lights were.

  The activity might have continued, but the next sighting report I received wasn’t until June 11 and 12, this time by Jennette Frost, south of Sperling. The first was a classic encounter (see the report of this sighting in Chapter 3, “Classics”), the object coming within feet of her and then disappearing. The next sighting was made by Jennette from a greater distance at 12:30 a.m. the next night.

  On June 20, the number of sightings again skyrocketed all through the valley. This part of the flap lasted up until July 9, with numerous sightings in Miami, Elm Creek, Sperling, and Carman. With the amount of publicity the whole UFO story had received, the Britains had retreated to UFO watching from Rachael’s parents’ place high in the Pembina Hills overlooking the valley near Miami.

  Charlie seemed to fly after 11:00 p.m. Jennette, who by now carefully recorded all her sightings in a book, reported one on June 20 at 11:00 p.m. and again on June 21 at midnight. The Britains worked until 11:00 p.m. restoring planes and then made the 20-mile trip to Miami.

  It was during this period that the Britains spotted UFO after UFO. One period during the flap they made sightings six nights running. Along with Tannis Major, they chased Charlie two nights in a row, the second evening seeing him “blast off into orbit.” They spent a night with CBC-TV personnel who had come out to see whether or not they could get film footage of Charlie as had CKY-TV.

  “It came out of the fog bank that night,” Anthony said, “right up along the hills. Of the three guys from CBC, only one would believe what he was seeing. The other two didn’t want to accept it. They came within two miles of the thing and they didn’t even run the camera. Instead, they were interested in taking pictures of us watching the thing. We weren’t interested in that, so we got in the car and chased the thing over the hill. We then got a good look at the thing. It was shaped like a football, not flat, and it was pulsing red.”

  The Britains had another sighting during this period when Martin Rugne, a cameraman for the CTV affiliate, made a second trip to see if he could get any additional film footage. “During this time,” Anthony stated, “they were appearing in bunches. We would see four, five, and six a night. One night we saw six on the ground in the Rosebank area.”

  Numerous people made the trip with the Britains to their lookout over the valley. One gentleman, who brought his girlfriend with him to Miami, later wrote a letter back to Anthony, thanking him for giving him the opportunity to see Charlie: “It was the greatest night I’ve ever had without pot.”

  It was also on June 20 at 2:00 a.m. that Myles Lyttle, who was 12 miles east of the Britains’ position, looked southwest out of his Roland home and saw “a blue-and-red light that had a slight orange twinge on the top.”

  He told the newspaper he thought it was similar to a street light until it started to “rise up and then lower again.” According to Lyttle, it made “some north and south movements, then rose and went southwest at a fairly slow speed.” Only minutes later another resident of Roland reported the object as “a huge fireball” flying north very low along the east side of town.

  The next morning Lacy and Toby Christian discovered a clearly burnt cross next to a bush on their front lawn. The evening before, the volunteer fire department in Roland had been called out to fight a blaze. The fire turned out to be a blood-red object flying around town. Two years later the area of dead grass was still visible.

  The Christian family lived on the east side of town. They had seen nothing that night, but, as Lacy Christian told me, she and many others in Roland had spotted the objects. The stories of sightings at the end of May and June were therefore no surprise to her.

  “If there’s a heavy storm, then they’ll be out,” she told me. “It seems like the 25th to the end of the month — in that cycle.” True to Lacy’s theory, the sightings continued heavily to the end of June.

  July 1 arrived and with it there were two daylight sightings. The first was made by Brendon Eagle, who had built the relay tower in Carman and who had made quite a success with patents he held related to augers.

  “It was eight o’clock in the evening,” he told me, “and it still wasn’t dark. My son, wife, and I were travelling west on Highway 23, coming toward Jordan Corner [one mile west of Roland]. My wife was watching things bobbing up and down out her window. My son, Kelly, saw it and asked, ‘Is that a flying saucer?’”

  Mrs. Eagle told Kelly to keep quiet as his father drove, but Brendon heard Kelly and glanced out the side window. “Sure enough,” he told me, “it was coming in at, I’d say 1,200 feet. We got out of the truck, and watched it. It was coming across from the south-southwest at a 22-degree angle. It was sitting down, lifting up, and then going again. It was going up and down at terrific speeds, and it did this four or five times.

  “It passed over the Jordon elevator at about 1,500 feet,” Brendon ­c­­ontinued, “and it lit up the elevator so bright that you could actually see the nails in the elevator. It was about 85 feet in diameter and perfectly round — so round it was unbelievable. It was saucer-shaped, and what astonished me was that the top and bottom travelled in two different directions.

  “The bottom one spun, looking straight up to the right, and the top was spinning to the left. There was a centre section that didn’t move, about six to eight feet in width, and there were oval-shaped windows in it. I’d say that there were about 16 windows in the whole circumference, eight looking on the side we were on.

 
“It went over and landed in the field southwest of the corner where that runway is. He was in behind the bushes, and my wife wanted me to chase across the field after him. I’ve got a four-wheel drive, so we drove the mile after him. We came to this old hangar about 50 feet wide, but that wasn’t big enough, because that thing was three storeys high. We lost him.”

  Shortly after Brendon Eagle left, a second witness reported that the object reappeared just as the runway lights were turned on. This farmer’s runway, which was only a half mile away from where Brendon lost the object, had only gone into operation that night, and this was the first time the lights were being used for night flying.

  The object appeared and landed momentarily on the runway. It then rose, hovered, moved a little down the runway, and descended again, only to rise and land farther down. After seven touchdowns and liftoffs, the saucer-shaped object had covered the entire length of the runway. It then took off and flew away.

  Between July 1 and 9, the sightings came in a large flurry from Carman. Corporal Glen Toews, the RCMP spokesman for the Carman detachment, told the Winnipeg Free Press on July 8 that he had received five reports in seven nights. “And a lot of people just casually mention it to you without filing a report,” the corporal added. “There are still a considerable number of sightings, and the people that are seeing them are pretty well reliable people.”

  Those who had been active watchers in Carman again took up their posts to wait and watch. After a few nights in July, the reports came to me. I was told that it was still Charlie and he was arriving between 10:15 and 11:10 p.m.

  Tannis Major still hadn’t obtained the clear, convincing photographs she wanted, so when the sightings began once more, she set up her camera in the living room, looking out the front window west toward the Pembina Hills.

  It was early in the morning, July 7, when Tannis got her first chance at a good shot. She had gotten up to let her dog out when she noticed an object east of her house over the feedlot. Running back into the house, she retrieved her camera, pointed it out the kitchen window, and took four pictures.

  When Tannis developed the pictures, she saw four white bell-shaped entities, with the objects increasing in size with each shot. The one on the final number 4 frame was four times the size of the bell-shaped object in frame 1.

  The photographs and sighting report were sent by the RCMP to the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Ottawa where Dr. Ian Halliday in the Planetary Sciences Section analyzed them. Even before Halliday received the photographs, however, the Brandon Sun phoned him and asked whether he had seen the pictures yet. Halliday stated he hadn’t but that he would let the newspaper know when he had.

  When Halliday analyzed the photographs, he concluded that the object was the planet Jupiter, based on time, direction of the camera, and the exposure. The Brandon Sun printed a story, discounting the July 7 Major photographs, while a Winnipeg radio station followed suit and did a 15-minute interview with Halliday. Meanwhile, the Winnipeg Free Press published the biggest story on what the doctor had said, running the following headline on July 11, 1975: JUMPING JUPITER! IS THIS CARMAN’S UFO?

  It appeared that the hundreds of sightings would go down in flames as the planet Jupiter because of one analysis on one set of photographs.

  “Those mysterious saucer-shaped objects sighted recently in the skies of southern Manitoba,” wrote the Free Press, “have been identified as the planet Jupiter.” It then quoted Halliday as saying, “There can be little doubt about it … we got the report from the RCMP and we saw the photographs. The sightings were at the right time and in the right part of the sky to be consistent with the planet Jupiter.”

  The Free Press report gave many skeptics reason to say: “I told you so.” It also made a great number of people in Carman very angry, and there is little doubt they would have tarred and feathered any NRC scientist if he walked into Carman after the Winnipeg newspaper’s story.

  I contacted Dr. Halliday by mail for an account of his statement, and he informed me that the Free Press story deviated from his actual statement. “At no time,” he wrote me back, “did I state that all the reports were caused by Jupiter, although again the newspaper report may tend to generalize too much. Neither was I presenting any formal conclusions based on the Manitoba observations.”

  These comments by Halliday were contained in a letter addressed to me October 27, 1975. The letter confirmed that the Free Press account might have been completely inaccurate, but it was too late. The damage had already been done.

  Two days later Tannis shot three more photographs, this time of the famous Charlie.5 These pictures, like those on July 7, were sent to Dr. Halliday, but this time there were no newspaper banner headlines ­telling people what was “actually” seen. Other people explained the glowing oval object as a plane, but no newspaper printed that reason, undoubtedly because no one who had seen the pictures believed it.

  All through July the sightings continued in a line running east and west from Carman to Sperling. All dozen odd reports involved Charlie Red Star.

  During the first three weeks of August, sightings occurred almost nightly in the Starbuck area. Bob Sanderson, who lived just south of Starbuck, provided me with the names of 12 people in the town who had had experienced UFO sightings during the first three weeks.

  Sanderson himself was involved in three of them, the only ones of his life, all in this three-week period. The first happened with six friends on the old highway just outside town. A 60-foot craft flew toward the two cars where the six witnesses were. For 20 minutes the object hovered mere feet from the road.

  Shortly after that, Sanderson had three encounters in which he heard a beeping noise in a clearing in the woods behind the farm. “At first it was a low beep, but then it would go faster and then real high-pitched. Then it would go low again. Each night the beeping went on for 5 to 20 minutes. The third night there was a brilliant flash, and it looked like it had landed southwest where the bush ends and where the next field begins. I could hear branches breaking on the ground, and as I looked out my ­second-storey window, I could see this bright orange glow behind the trees.”

  “Did you check the spot?” I asked.

  “No, I told the people in town, but nobody believed me so, I quit telling everybody.”

  Near the end of the Starbuck flap, sightings started up again in the towns south of Carman. At Carman one of the many people to spot a UFO was Kerry Kaelin, along with his fiancée. Kaelin, a reporter for the Dufferin Leader, got a look at Charlie Red Star, who he had seen before.

  The reporter and his fiancée spotted Charlie hovering above a field northwest of Carman. In the half-hour they watched, they saw two pairs of white lights rise into the UFO and one pair of red lights emerge from it and descend to the ground. Occasionally, the smaller objects moved around horizontally as they glided under the larger white craft with a red pulsating aura. His fiancée also noticed a beam of light that shone down from the craft that didn’t seem to have any particular purpose.

  Jennette Frost, who lived directly south of Starbuck, also spotted a UFO the same day Kaelin did and observed another on August 28 after the rash of sightings in the area.

  September brought with it numerous UFO reports, especially ones that described landings, chases, and close encounters. That month is harvest time in Manitoba and farmers were in their fields, which might have had something to do with the number and type of sightings reported.

  On September 1, 1975, 12 witnesses at the McCann farm watched as a “red fireball” appeared to tail Joseph McCann’s truck as he approached his farm from the south. Joseph and his friend, Pete, didn’t see the UFO behind the truck. The 12 witnesses on two adjoining farms, however, all told me how the huge object raced after Joseph’s truck until he turned into the yard, after which “the object flipped over and zigzagged back into the south.”

  Two
hours following this dusk sighting, the McCann family watched a second triangle-shaped object as it sat in a field across from the farmyard. When this object finally left, it, too, flew “at a tremendous speed toward Carman.”

  There were also numerous sightings reported from the Delta area north of Portage la Prairie. In one location 10 miles north of town, dozens of people were involved.

  Tony Douthitt and his father, two wheat farmers in the area, became the latest witnesses. Both Tony and his father were harvesting wheat one evening when the former noticed two orange-white lights in the southeastern sky. “They looked like the old six-volt battery lights that they used on cars years ago.”6

  Thinking little of the lights, Tony made a few more swings around the field, and when he was at the south end of turning north, he gazed at the sky again. There, almost flying directly over him, only a couple of hundred feet in the air, was a 30-foot-diameter, circular-shaped object with two bullet-shaped doors or hatches on the bottom. They were about five feet deep on one end, tapering to nothing on the other end.

  Tony described a peculiar set of lights about four feet high set at a 45-degree angle into the craft on the deep end of the opening. These lights, according to Tony, were set so that the light would be projected out of the craft.

  “The lights were honeycomb lights,” Tony told me. “You could definitely see the dark edges of lights. They were bluish-white, but not too bright.”

  Tony watched in amazement as the craft flew northwest over his father, who was combining at the other end of the field. “I was too amazed to think anything at first,” Tony stated, “but the second I thought UFO, the lights were gone. It seemed that it knew what I was thinking.”

  No longer able to see the craft, Tony scanned the northern sky to relocate it. A couple of minutes later it reappeared a mile northwest as a black silhouette against the setting sun. Now he could see the top part of the craft as it flew away on an angle.