Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  The tower radioed the crew of the DC-9, but they couldn’t see anything from their position. (There are, after all, no rearview mirrors on planes.)

  “We had the object for two minutes,” my father told me. “One minute I watched and the other minute both of us watched. We took our eyes off it for a second to look down, and when we looked up the thing was gone.” He didn’t dare file an official report of what he had seen.

  The sightings continued into 1976, but the reported number was nothing compared to those in 1975. The other thing that differed with the 1976 sightings was that they had spread all over Manitoba along a 200-mile line. The sighting numbers tended to be about 50 percent of those in 1975, and there were only 50 percent of the 1976 sightings in 1977.

  The 1975 sightings were the ones that were unsurpassed, especially those involving Charlie Red Star. Sightings continued into the summer of 1978, and they were numerous in contrast to any other part of the world. Yet, relative to Charlie Red Star, the rest of the sightings seemed dull.

  3

  Classics

  When you hear someone else, you think, oh, well, it might have been someone else. But after I saw this, nobody is going to convince me it was anything else.

  — Michael Perreault

  During the two years I spent covering the Charlie Red Star flap in Manitoba full-time, I heard literally hundreds of stories and met an equal number of people. However, my research method was different from the one employed by most UFO groups.

  Instead of waiting for sightings to be reported to me, I set up a system of sources, one or two in each of the small towns involved in UFO sightings in Manitoba. Each of these people had experienced sightings themselves and had come into contact with the stories of others. Their ears were always open when the topic of UFOs was discussed.

  This system worked extremely well.

  Every month I made a trip to my sources in the various towns to find out what the latest incidents were. In this way, I was able to actually follow the flap as it moved from municipality to municipality. In exchange for their help, I had to share last month’s most spectacular sightings with them. So I would sit back and, like a grandfather with his grandchildren, amaze them with the reports of sightings that had occurred elsewhere in Manitoba.

  Near the end of the second year I discovered that storytelling had become a major part of the job, so I decided to write down some of the better accounts in a book so that everyone could read them. Telling the stories to four or five people at a time had become costly; there were many days when I told them for six hours at a time when I should have been collecting them.

  When I was putting this book together at the University of Manitoba in the late 1970s, I wrote only at night to avoid meeting with friends who might force me to accept cups of coffee for the latest tidbits in the “saucer world,” for which I had become known. Not being able to resist telling a story, I sometimes killed an entire night of work telling them. My accounts became known as “classics” — stories with a new twist, or ones in which there was little doubt about what had been seen.

  Never did these story seekers ask for the latest graphs related to the number of sightings, or data about who saw what. What they wanted to hear was something weird enough to test their sense of believability. Then they were satisfied.

  About 20 of the following stories can now be considered classics and were the most popular. Each contains unique characteristics that bring them to the forefront of my mind when I am asked to share my experiences in the 1970s.

  I have let the persons involved tell the stories to keep them as close as possible to the original telling. They are accounts that were told to the National Enquirer and me. The Enquirer took a special interest in them because, as a tabloid publication, it deals in sensationalism.

  The Bobby Baker Case

  Ufologists are influenced by many factors in their efforts to evaluate the evidence related to the phenomena they study. Two of these factors are sightings they experience personally and the people they interview who have had dramatic UFO encounters. In connection with the second one, the Bobby Baker case stands out heads above most of the other incidents in the Manitoba UFO flap.

  Much of the story’s power lies in the way a timid eight-year-old boy, Bobby Baker, told me about the UFO he had seen. If it hadn’t been for his father’s questions and prodding, he probably would never have related it.

  In a field as questionable as ufology, one wouldn’t normally rely on an eight-year-old boy’s word, particularly if he was the only witness, but Bobby’s case was different. I can say with certainty that out of the hundreds of witnesses I have talked to, no one gave me more confidence of truthfulness than he did.

  The entire interview session with Bobby was done in co-operation with Lloyd Baker, whose concern for his son’s well-being caused him to report the sighting to Anthony Britain in Carman. Anthony in turn told me about the incident and suggested we talk to Bobby.

  The boy was present for the entire 30-minute interview but seemed detached from it as well as from the world. He looked as if he had been haunted ever since he had seen the object, even though it had occurred two weeks prior to our arrival.

  I received word from Anthony that the event had happened on February 6, 1976. Anthony simply told me that there had been a close encounter at a farm north of Carman. Two weeks after the sighting John Losics from Winnipeg and I arrived at the Baker farm to find out what had transpired.

  Bobby and his father met us at their farm. The boy was thin and frail-looking. His father appeared to be in his early thirties. It was a very small white house with a south-facing open deck. Lloyd escorted us to the living room where John and I sat by the front window. Then he went into the kitchen to get a chair, placed it in the centre of the room, and asked Bobby to sit. “Tell the men what you saw,” he told Bobby.

  Lloyd was eager to get to the bottom of what his son had experienced. Bobby, on the other hand, wasn’t. Instead, he chose to withdraw and sit on the floor at the far end of the room near the kitchen, hiding behind a chair.

  In response to my first question, Bobby peered out from the chair and merely nodded. The look in his eyes and the fact that he was trying to hide sent chills up my spine. I had a distinct feeling that for some reason he expected me to attack him.

  “Bobby had me kind of scared,” Lloyd began, “so I phoned Britain and said to him, ‘Before I say anything to you, tell me what they look like.’ [He was aware through the local newspaper that Anthony had had numerous sightings in the previous year.] Anthony told me, and it was as if it was coming out of Bobby’s mouth. Well, I pumped him several times to see whether he was fibbing me or not. He kept telling me the same thing.”

  While his father talked, Bobby remained on the floor behind the chair, peeking out. He continued to stare at me but said nothing. He appeared not even to be listening. There was no expression on his face. His mind seemed somewhere else.

  “You see the next-door neighbour’s lights?” Lloyd asked me.

  Both John and I glanced out the window.

  “It was just over the bushes there … two hundred yards, I guess.”

  Looking out the window, we saw that the view to the set of trees was unobstructed.

  “Where was Bobby?” I asked.

  “On the front step,” Lloyd said. “Our girl, she’s 10 … I wish he’d have called her in time [to see the object]. She said his face was pure white. My wife and I were away at the time. So was the neighbour.” By the time Bobby’s sister found out what was happening, the object had disappeared.

  At this point in the conversation I asked Bobby about the colour of the object. He didn’t answer. He merely sat and stared.

  “You just tell him what you saw,” Lloyd urged, but Bobby said nothing.

  “How big was it?” questioned John.

  “It was big,” Bobby finally responded, his
face still blank.

  “Sit up,” his father said. “Don’t be shy.”

  “How big was it?” repeated John. “Was it as big as a truck or as big as a car?”

  “It was as big as a house.”

  I produced a UFO shape chart produced by the International UFO Registry and placed it on the floor in front of me. “Did it look like any of these? Can you come and take a look?”

  Bobby gazed out from behind the chair, his curiosity captured. He crawled slowly across the floor on his hands and knees and glanced at the chart of sketches. His review of the objects was quick. He pointed at a simple saucer with a rounded dome top. “It looked like this one. It had lights all over it.”

  He had finally decided to talk but volunteered very little. His father told most of the story.

  The boy had been on the front steps of his house facing south. He happened to turn west and saw a huge saucer sitting over the bushes at the neighbour’s house.

  When I asked him about the colour of the object he said, “First it was green all over. Then there were all kinds of lights [separate lights, not flashing], and when it took off, it turned like blood. Then it went straight up [about 50 feet]. It turned solid yellow and stopped. Then it moved over the road [100 feet south] and disappeared.”

  “Did it disappear or did it fly away?” I asked.

  “It just disappeared.”

  “Did it fade away?”

  “No, it just disappeared,” he insisted.

  “Did it happen instantly?”

  “Yeah, it just took off.”

  “Like turning off a light?”

  “Yeah, like turning off a light.”

  The only noise, according to Bobby, was the sound of a branch cracking and falling, just as the blood-red object took off. Lloyd had checked the area the next morning and stated there appeared to be a depression in the snow, but no one had bothered to verify the part of the story involving the branch.

  By the way Bobby was acting, I was convinced he had actually seen this bizarre sight, but he capped the story when he related an animal reaction to the incident.

  “You forgot to tell him what the pony was doing,” his father prompted.

  “I called him and he came around,” Bobby said, “and then … then he looked up at it, and then I said, ‘You see that, Sonny?’ Then he kicked up his heels and ran to his house [small shed].”

  According to Bobby’s father, just after the encounter, his son had constant headaches and the first nosebleed of his life.

  Concerned over this turn of events, the Bakers took their son to doctors in Carman, but none could account for either of the symptoms. Bobby missed school for the first couple of days, but the strange symptoms seemed to fade after the initial week. Upon returning to school, Bobby told his story to his friends. When they started to ridicule him, the teacher defended, explaining that the things Bobby had described could exist.

  I asked Bobby if he had experienced any nightmares about the event, but he didn’t answer. Later, from his father, I learned that after John and I left, Bobby told his father that he had had “dreams about them.”

  The Bakers were deeply worried about what had happened, but because his mother believed these things “to be of the devil,” we didn’t bother to confirming the medical symptoms incurred.

  “One thing for sure,” Lloyd told us, “he was scared. In fact, Bobby had been so petrified [while it was happening that] he was going to shoot the saucer” — with his father’s 30.6 rifle that was in the house.

  “The gun’s probably as big as he is,” Lloyd added. Then he addressed Bobby. “You’re lucky you didn’t try that. The rifle would have laid you right on your back end.”

  Bobby didn’t look at his father. He sat there quietly. There was no response, verbal or otherwise.

  Crashing Plane or UFO?

  While tracing some stories in the Carman area, I was told that Jennette Frost had experienced a sighting that was unquestionable. Checking with the Dufferin Leader, I found that the reason it had never been printed was because her son was the editor of the paper, and for reasons of objectivity in reporting, the story had been dropped.

  In talking with the white-haired but active Jennette, I discovered that the report was indeed a classic. In interviews, first with Daniel Coleman at the National Enquirer and then in a second one with Roger Timlick — a science student at the University of Manitoba — and me in March 1977, I got the whole story.

  Sitting in the living room of her home, Jennette located the incident in the first of two notebooks she used to keep track of the sightings of the past two years, the same period as the rest of the UFO incidents in Manitoba.

  As recorded in her book, the sighting occurred at 1:15 a.m., June 11, 1975, at the height of the first Carman flap. Because of a sick horse, Jennette had been up. Shep, her dog, had alerted her that something was nearby.

  “Even before you see the light,” Jennette said, “you know Charlie’s around because Shep growls in his throat. He always looks around when there’s something that he hears, and he cries and whines, a very ­high-pitched whine.”

  Jennette was on the back landing of her two-storey house when she gazed up at the western sky and the object suddenly appeared. The bottom of the object was lit up, but the top was against the night sky. It was some 40 feet away, flying about 15 feet in the air just north of the house.

  “Well, I couldn’t believe it, Jennette said. “I thought that it was a plane going down backward. I was holding my breath because I thought it was going to crash into the trees. It went behind the trees over the field that low. There was no danger at any time of it hitting the house. It was over the garden. It must have come over the wires. There was no noise … the only noise that I heard at the time was the hydro wires and they were really humming.

  “This thing was big. Well, it looked as big as the granary out back [18 by 20 feet]. That’s how big it looked. You could tell just from the width. You could see along the back of it, and I think it extended farther along the side, but that is what I could see.

  “There was a little light and that thing flashed. It was sort of ­yellowish-orange. The big ones were more like car lights, the old types of cars like the old Model Ts. They sort of had yellow in them, an orange glow to them. The big ones were about two feet across and the little one was about a foot across and there were three or four feet between the lights.

  “The thing in the middle was a brassy gold colour. It was shaped like a bullet and there were these black stripes, which I could see real well. They looked about an inch broad, looking from the back step.

  The “Model T” UFO.

  “I ran off the steps after it cleared the trees,” Jennette continued, “to see where it was going to land and there was nothing there. It was just gone. It sounds crazy. I guess if I hadn’t seen it and someone came and told me that they had seen this, I would tell them that they were crazy. Anyone would because it sounds so stupid.”

  Three Pilots “Just Astounded”

  “Well, it seems to me that he had seen them before,” Mrs. Roger Pitts told me, “but I don’t think that they impressed him as much as this one. They could have been this or they could have been that. But this one I really think shook him up. He kept hearing about them, but to actually experience one that closely, to see the shape.”

  That, in short, is what was told to me by the wife of Roger Pitts, a pilot for Ontario Central Airways, 27 years in the air with 17,000 hours flying time in all types of airplanes from small aircraft on floats right up to Boeing 737 jets.

  The incident took place on May 6, 1975, only seven days before the famous CKY film was shot in Carman, and during the period of the heaviest flap in Manitoba history. Instead of the sighting taking place over the flat wheat fields of Southern Manitoba, Pitts’s encounter took place at Berens River, 200 miles northeast of Carma
n. Here, bush country and lakes extended for hundreds of miles. Only the odd isolated settlement gave indications of any people inhabiting the area.

  The three pilots, Roger Pitts, Ralph Dickenson, and Manuel Hernandez, were bound for Aspen Air Base in Gimli from the port of Churchill on Hudson Bay. As Pitts described the weather and time, “It was about noon. It was clear and there was very little cloud, scarcely any cirrus. It was a clear day.”

  Pitts continued: “There were three of us. We were southbound with a DC-3 at 6,000 feet and we were coming up on Lake Winnipeg. Over to our right we spotted an aircraft, or what appeared to be an aircraft, coming toward us at quite a distance. It drew closer and we [Pitts and Dickenson] were both watching it, trying to determine what it was. We noticed then that it wasn’t flying straight and level. It was flying at an angle of 45-degree bank, but it was still coming straight toward us.

  “It didn’t turn around. It just went directly in the other direction, straight away from us. Without changing its angle of bank or anything else, it went away 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 another one appeared over toward our right, approximately 20 miles farther over to our right, and all we got out of it was a dot and a puff of smoke. It disappeared. Then the one that we ­previously watched ­re­appear­ed and came back toward us and did the same thing — ­disappeared again. There’s just no way that anything I know of could come directly toward us and not turn around to retreat.

  “The first and third ones, 10 degrees off their track, were the best ones to get a look at. Dickenson and I watched the first one. We drew Hernandez’s attention to it, and he came from the back to look at it. By this time it was receding and he couldn’t see it as well as we could. We yelled at him, but he took his time coming up. It was slanted down to our right.”

  Asked if he got a good look at the shape, he said, “Actually, yes, well, I would say just a flat cylindrical shape. I didn’t get a real good look at it to see if it had any windows. I couldn’t distinguish colour [except to say it was dark]. All I could see was the form at that distance.” When he was asked about the size, he said, “There was really nothing to gauge any size to it, but we could plainly see that it was coming toward us.”