Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  “There were five windows on the side I could see,” Tony said, “and there was whitish light coming out of the rectangular windows. The light was brilliant, even though it was far away. The light was as bright as holding a 60-watt light bulb a foot away from your face.”

  Immediately after the craft flew over the horizon, Tony went to his father and asked if he had seen the craft. His father reported that he had noticed nothing, but at the time Tony had observed the craft, his father was having trouble with the combine. The combine had begun to sputter, and Tony’s father figured that a gas line had clogged. Although the combine almost stalled out, Tony’s father managed to keep it going, and after a minute or so, the trouble suddenly disappeared.

  The next day Mr. McGowan discovered a rash on his left side, which was the same one the craft had passed over. It appeared only on the left side and only on the exposed areas of his face and neck.7 “It stayed for quite a while,” Mrs. McGowan told me. “It was fairly itchy for three or four days and then it went away.”

  One mile east of the McGowan farm Don Zalusky and his wife, Beverly, had numerous encounters with UFOs but didn’t tell anyone about them until March 1, 1978.

  “We watched those things fly around here every fall,” Don told me. “It was at harvest time in 1975 that I saw it the best. It was a huge saucer-shaped thing with five windows on the side I was looking at. I saw lots but that was the only one during the day.”

  I showed him a drawing that Tony Douthitt had done for me and asked him if it looked the same. “Yeah,” he said, “exactly. That’s it.”

  From his trailer on Portage Creek, Don stated that he spent many nights watching the glowing red UFOs fly around near his place. As in many descriptions of Charlie Red Star, Don told me the craft jumped around in the air, zigzagging as if playing tag with each other.

  Like so many who made vain attempts to chase Charlie in Carman, Don said the UFOs seemed to know what he was thinking and played games with people who attempted to chase them. “I tried to race after them,” Don told me. “I would drive down the road with my lights off and get fairly close to them. Then, just when we were about to get a good look, the thing would shoot another mile away from me.”

  Beverly Zalusky had a terrifying experience with a UFO in the fall of 1975. She was one of two people chased north down Highway 240 toward the delta. Driving from Portage la Prairie one night, she noticed a brilliantly lit object right behind the car over the trunk. The huge object lit up the whole area and kept pace with every move she made to lose it.

  Her car was going about 80 miles per hour when suddenly the object backed off until it was just a small light down the road. Figuring the object was gone, Beverly slowed to 60 miles per hour and continued down the road. Then, in mere seconds, the dazzling object was again behind the car, following her.

  Beverly attempted once more to lose the object, but it remained behind her. Not only could she not shake the object but now she had to make a right turn onto Highway 227.

  “I almost didn’t make it around the corner,” she said, “because of the speed I was going.” Nevertheless, she did make it, whereby the object flew away from the car for good. Rattled and shaken, Beverly returned home to tell her husband about her experience with “those UFOs.”

  In addition to the other person who was chased down Highway 240, there were also people pursued west of Portage la Prairie near Brandon. At Kenton a woman with a van full of children was paced one morning on the way to school. At Carberry, 50 miles west of Portage la Prairie, two women were trailed back to town one night by a brilliant whitish object. The experience, which lasted many minutes, terrified the women to the point where they refused to talk about what they had experienced.

  Thirty miles south of Carman, Ralph Driedger, who lived just off the Canada-U.S. border, also reported one of these bizarre close encounters with a low-flying UFO. The Driedger family farm was a large one, and because of the short season, there were harvesting shifts throughout the night.

  “It was three or four in the morning,” Jacob Driedger told me. “It was a mile and a half from me, but my father was close up.”

  Jacob was combining in the field when suddenly the object appeared, lighting up the whole countryside. It was so bright, in fact, that Jack stated he could tell where it was even when it was behind him, due to the brilliant light it gave off.

  On the mile road west of Jacob, his father, Ralph, was driving a truck loaded with grain. The object, no more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground, darted in front of Ralph’s truck.

  In the account he gave me of the incident, the object moved northeast very low to the ground. It was cone-shaped and multicoloured, with the major hue being red. He estimated the object was 30 feet in diameter.

  “It came fairly close to me,” Ralph stated. “It was extremely bright, and yet I couldn’t take my eyes off it. In all my years I’ve never seen anything like it. It was frightening. I hope I never have to see anything like that again. I was watching it so closely that when it disappeared into that big cloud I noticed that I wasn’t watching where I was driving. The truck was halfway into the ditch, and I just about tipped the whole load.”

  In October 1975, there were more landings in the Pembina Valley. One of those, at the farm of Bill Wheatley, was only 24 miles north of the Driedgers’ farm. This landing near Roland was the second for the town in four months.8

  Farther up the valley, 14 miles north of the Wheatley farm, the McCanns notified Rachael Britain that “they were back.” The record shows there was a sudden and short score of sightings in the Elm ­­Creek–Carman–Sperling area between October 16 and 22.­

  The McCann family had sightings on October 16 and 19. Both involved objects looked like Ferris wheels, which mystified the family to no end. The McCanns were so disbelieved by the people of Elm Creek and Carman that a lot of the residents of the farms around them kept quiet about what they had seen. It seemed logical that if the McCanns were actually seeing so many UFOs that the people around them would have witnessed the objects, as well. It took a long time to get the McCanns’ neighbours to talk, but eventually in interviews they admitted they, too, had seen these UFOs all along.

  One farmer defended the silence of the farmers in the area by stating, “You don’t talk about things like that in town. People call you cuckoo. They’ll call us another bunch of McCanns.”

  The initial sightings of the other farmers also occurred in October 1975. Ronald Middleton, for example, was out disking on October 31 at Kitty Corner, only a few miles southwest of the McCann farm and 12 days after the McCanns told me about seeing objects that looked like Ferris wheels.

  It was 4:00 a.m. when Ronald first noticed what appeared to be a bright star in the east. He drove in that direction down the field and saw the light get larger and brighter as it came toward him. As he watched the light, it moved until it reached a set of trees a mile east of him where it stopped.

  Ronald couldn’t see the shape of the orange-white light because of the intensity, but he could plainly see that it was illuminating the entire bush. There was a bright flash radiating from the object and sparks shot off one side of it.

  He shut off the tractor and found that the object made no noise. Just then it began to move again, and as he stated, “I decided that it was time to stop for the night.”

  As quickly as he could, he started the tractor and turned around, but by then the object was only about 500 feet behind him. It was now so bright that he couldn’t even look at it. All around him he saw the light being cast by the object on his tail. He drove as fast as the tractor would go, but minutes seemed like hours until he finally reached his farm. Just before he arrived, the object backed off into the east, becoming smaller and smaller as it moved away.

  Still, as is the case with everyone who has been chased by UFOs, the shock for Ronald didn’t set in until the experience was over. Once in his
farmyard, he tried to light a cigarette as he gazed eastward where the object had retreated “but I couldn’t because I was shaking that badly.”

  That November Manitoba took second place for a week due to sightings that happened in the neighbouring provinces of Saskatchewan and Ontario. In Ontario a radar tracking was made from North Bay of two objects moving straight up from 42,000 to 72,000 feet. Jet fighters from U.S. bases were scrambled to check on the radar contacts. After some investigation, the involved parties admitted they had tracked two unidentified objects, and wire services were alerted. Later, after the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) read all the reviews of the incidents, it explained the whole incident as a mistake. The objects on the radar screens were only ice crystals.

  In order to check if this radar sighting was linked to any of the sightings that occurred in Manitoba, I managed to get a friend to question NORAD about its involvement with UFOs. The only positive comment we received was from a member of the organization stationed in North Bay who simply said: “You wouldn’t believe what goes on here.”

  National Enquirer reporter Daniel Coleman tried to confirm the Manitoba sightings with NORAD as part of his paper’s investigation of them. He spoke with Lieutenant Doug Caie, information officer at the Canadian Forces Base in Winnipeg.

  When Coleman asked Lieutenant Caie if the Canadian Forces had followed the sightings in the Carman area, the officer said they had but that no targets were picked up on radar screens. “I checked about five or six of the different sightings,” he told Coleman, “and times with our own radar and with the 24th NORAD region at Minot, North Dakota, and we didn’t get any correlation whatsoever.”

  “There was no correlation at all?” Coleman asked.

  “Nope,” replied Caie. “No, as far as I know the phenomenon has been reported to us, and we have a research centre in Ottawa. It has been reported to them.”

  The November sightings started in Manitoba on the 13th when Rachael Britain stepped out of a hangar at Friendship Field to see Charlie come at her on the “beer run” from the west. She called her husband and Sam Brazil from the hangar to see the object, and as the three watched the pulsing red ball, a second one appeared travelling in the same pattern.

  Immediately, Anthony Britain phoned the local RCMP detachment, and the office dispatched Constable Wotherspoon to witness the flyby. He made it to the airfield in time to see the third object arrive on the horizon and watched it through binoculars as it passed by. While viewing the object, Wotherspoon doubted it was anything he had ever seen before, but when a newspaper asked for a comment he was less anxious to be definite. He thought the object could have had something to do with a NORAD exercise he had read about.9

  After the third object flew by, the Britains went to the RCMP office to file a report. They did so not knowing that the Staggs, another family in town, had continued the chase.

  Greg Stagg was warming up the family car for a trip to Winnipeg when he, too, spotted the first object as it passed by. He called his parents, Art and Frances, who came out to see the three objects moving northeast toward Winnipeg. They jumped into the car, and the chase was on.

  Frances described the objects as doing a docking manoeuvre. The Britains had explained the strange actions as “appearing to jockey for position.” The two outside objects around the main one made big loops just before linking with the opposite side of the centre object.

  “The distance was as though they were measured,” the Staggs told me. “Before the outside objects moved, they were white, and then one at a time they would link up. ‘A’ would make a loop and come together with the centre object and then turn red [the one in the centre was always red]. Then, after a few minutes, it would loop back to where it was and turn white. Then ‘B’ would do the same thing. It was kind of queer.”10

  Strange action of smaller satellite objects.

  “After losing them again, we picked them up again [east] at the Starbuck tower,” Art Stagg said. “One was just along the ground and the other was hanging over the Winnipeg airport runway. It was about 1,500 feet up and was glowing red. Every time a jet took off it would go up until it looked like a star. When the jet would make its turn, the object would drop back down again. When he was up he was white, and when he was low he was glowing red.”

  The Staggs were in a hurry to make it to Winnipeg for an appointment, so they left the two objects flying around in the west end of the city.

  Later, while the Britains were still at the RCMP detachment office, Wayne Teal, who had remained at Friendship Field, witnessed the three objects flying west in formation past the airport and back to wherever they had come from.

  November also brought with it by far the most controversial report of the entire flap. This was the disappearance of 32 registered horses from the herd owned by Joseph McCann. Combined with the many UFOs the family was reporting, this dynamic new development spread like wildfire and included a daylight sighting of a UFO in the pasture where the horses were located.

  Days after Joseph reported the loss of his horses he appeared on CBC-TV in Winnipeg. His story was short and simple. His father had been checking the herd in the north pasture one day when he noticed that the best horse was gone. When he and Joseph tallied the 200 head, they discovered they were 32 short.

  The loss was reported to the RCMP, which investigated the possibility that the horses had been stolen. Its report came up negative. The RCMP found no broken fences and or evidence of tire tracks other than from the McCanns’ half ton.

  “The interviewer at CBC wanted me to say that the UFOs had stolen my horses,” Joseph told me, “but I never said it. I stated that they were missing. They taped that section three times, but I wouldn’t say it.”

  Rumours spread throughout the towns surrounding the McCanns’ farm about what had actually happened to the horses, but none of them stood up. One account suggested that Joseph had sold the animals and was trying to collect the insurance, but that story didn’t stick because there had to be corpses to qualify for insurance. In fact, Joseph never did file a claim. The most he ever did was to list the missing horses as a loss on his income tax.

  The only other explanation worth considering involved the possibility that Joseph never had the horses to begin with, but this again was without factual backing. All the horses were registered. Therefore, Joseph had to produce the papers to the RCMP. Second, the six McCann family members I talked to were all able to tell me the names of at least five horses that were gone.

  Even with all the scorn surrounding the family, their story never changed. The ridicule was more than anyone should have had to live with. Frances told me that people she had known for years were suddenly not quite as friendly as before. At the post office, for example, people acted as if they hadn’t seen her and walked the other way. She swore to me that she would never report another UFO sighting publicly.

  I questioned the three older Stagg children and found they, too, had been mocked because of the sightings their parents had reported. “Some kids said that there was no such thing as UFOs,” Connie, the youngest, told me. “I said that I know there are UFOs. I’m sorry. They then said, ‘You don’t really see UFOs. You’re just making it up.’ When my father was on television, they said it was all baloney.”

  “When my dad was on television,” nine-year-old Lucy said to me, “some of my classmates asked me whether it was really true, and I said, ‘We didn’t say that the UFOs took them. That’s an assumption.’”

  “All I said,” Jerry, the oldest, insisted, “is that Dad never said the UFOs took the horses. He’s just assuming because there’s no tracks around there. Dad didn’t think it could be horse rustlers, but they’re good at covering their tracks, but we couldn’t find any tracks. When my dad was on TV, the kids at school asked me whether our horses were at the Big Dipper drinking out of it. Then would they be let loose.”

  Joseph himself
took some criticism from friends in town, but he, like the other members of his family, refused to back down. It was lucky for him that he was in business for himself because otherwise he would have probably become unemployed.

  I talked to the members of the family for countless hours together and separately. As was the case with all their UFO encounters, they never changed the story — not then and not two years later when I talked to them again.

  It seemed then that they were indeed telling the truth about what had happened to them during the flap. Maybe, as some people still contend, the horses were just stolen. In the end, I told the McCanns that if someone was able to steal 32 horses without a trace, “it became easier to believe that UFOs had done it.”11

  December brought two more flaps of sightings in southwestern Manitoba, but they were small in comparison to those in the rest of 1975. One of these sightings, however, is worth noting. It was December 22, mid-afternoon, and two government pilots were westbound into Winnipeg at 14,000 feet. One of them was my father, Robert Cameron, who told me the story. They were 20 miles north of Portage la Prairie.

  My father, the flight’s captain, was glancing out the window and saw a DC-9 outbound from Winnipeg at 15,000 feet above his plane. Then he noticed off the contrail of the jet a circular metallic object, which he estimated was 100 feet across. It was pacing the jet.

  “I sat there watching it for about a minute,” he told me, “and then I got the attention of the co-pilot. His first comment was ‘That must be one of those UFOs.’”

  My father radioed the Winnipeg tower to confirm the visual object on radar. “What have you got?” he asked.

  “I’ve got you, the plane behind you, and the DC-9 above you,” came the reply.

  “What’s behind the DC-9?” my father asked next.

  “Nothing,” the tower replied.

  “There’s got to be something,” radioed my father. “We’re sitting here looking at it.”

  “I still have nothing.”