Pitts was asked by the National Enquirer to comment on the whole affair in light of his experience in the air. “We’d just heard rumours of some sightings in the Sioux Lookout and Thunder Bay, Ontario, area the previous day. It’s a few hundred miles to the southwest of where we saw the sighting. I thought to myself that in view of the rumours I’d actually say that I felt that I had seen something that I couldn’t describe, that I could say that that was a UFO. This is what my thought was.
“I’ve never gone out of my way deliberately to look for them, but we’ve had some reports from some of our airline pilots on Transair. We’ve had some people who have seen them. I felt at that point that mine was an actual sighting, something that I couldn’t explain in any other way than that it could have been a UFO. I’ve wished ever since I saw it that I had gotten a better look at it, but certainly what we saw was something that I couldn’t explain in any other way.”
A Disk Visits Friendship Field
Jackie Answers, an audiovisual technician at the University of Manitoba, and I were driving into Carman on July 23, 1976, in an attempt to film the ground lights. It was about a half-hour before sunset. Jackie and I had hoped to be in position eight miles north of Carman before the sun set so that we could watch exactly how the “ground lights” at that particular location appeared.
Coming up to Haywood, about eight miles east of Carman on Highway 3, we both noticed an egg-shaped cloud south of our position in a line that placed it near Roland, Manitoba.
“What’s that out there?” asked Jackie, who was driving.
“I’ve been watching it for a while,” I responded. “It looks funny, but it’s probably just a cloud.”
Jackie retorted that there were no clouds in sight, and when I glanced around, I could see that he was right. He wanted to stop to shoot some film, but I insisted that we keep on driving so we could arrive at our appointed spot by sundown. “We can watch while we drive,” I added.
It was a solidly outlined object sitting 15 to 20 degrees off the horizon. It was quite dark, almost black, but I attributed that to the angle of the sun. We watched it for about five minutes during which it never changed shape. Suddenly, at a point when neither of us was looking, it disappeared. We continued on to Friendship Field without stopping.
Two nights later I walked into Anthony Britain’s main hangar and found a crowd of people talking. Anthony spotted me and said, “Boy, did you miss a beauty!”
Hunter Ames, one of Anthony’s assistants, had seen a UFO during the day, his boss told me. “He was always telling us we were seeing things,” Anthony said, laughing, “and now he says that anything we’ve seen is a wheelbarrow compared to the thing he saw.”
When I was told that it had appeared like a cloud and that the cloud “was the only one in the sky,” I cut Anthony off and asked if Hunter had seen the cloud in the south.
“Yeah,” Anthony said, “how did you know that?”
“I saw it,” I replied.
I checked the time of the sighting and found that Hunter had seen the object 15 minutes after we had. A couple of days later I met Hunter, who told me the whole story, including references to “wheelbarrows” and “hanging pictures.”
“You never seen anything like it,” Hunter told me.
As he said this, Anthony chided him about his former skepticism. The criticism didn’t bother Hunter in the least. He simply continued with his story until he was finished.
When the National Enquirer’s Daniel Coleman was in Carman, I suggested that he talk to Hunter. We taped the interview in the Carman Motel. “The sun was just setting,” Ames began. “I was out at the airport. I go there quite often to visit. I never noticed anything until I walked out into the field. While he [Anthony Britain] was taxiing down the runway [toward the south], I noticed this grey cloud above him. It was a long way away and egg-shaped. The first thing that I thought was, Gee, that’s a funny-looking cloud.
“Britain took off, and as soon as he took off, this grey thing was underneath him. He made a circuit east, and I could see this grey thing again. I was standing there looking right at the cloud, never turning my head. My eyes subconsciously followed this grey streak in the air and my eyes were looking at a saucer right over the sunflower field [halfway down the runway]. That’s how fast it moved, you know. My head was still facing where I was watching [the cloud], and my eyes were on the saucer [overhead].
“So I looked at the saucer, and it hung there perfectly stationary for about 10 seconds. It hung there like a picture hanging on the wall. You could actually see it spinning. You could see the streaks where the portholes would be. It was spinning clockwise, I’m sure.
“There was a purple halo around it, and the saucer itself was the same colour as the sky. Like if it hadn’t been for the halo, and if it hadn’t been stopped, I wouldn’t have seen it, because it came up so fast. All around was this halo, the perfect shape of the saucer. The saucer was the same colour as the sky — invisible. You’d never see anything in the day. They go so damn fast.”
“Was it right side up?” asked Coleman.
“Oh, no,” shot back Hunter. “It was hanging with the bubble down. Well, actually, what it looked like was one of those kids’ toys, but it’s got this extra bubble on the bottom.” Later the spin was estimated to be 1,000 revolutions per minute.
“It was a lot deeper than the pictures I’ve seen,” Hunter continued. I guess it could be 80 feet in diameter, anyway … and I couldn’t get over the depth of it. I’d say it would be 60 feet between the top and the bottom of the bubble. I never realized it, but that thing … I’m sure it saw me watching it. As soon as it noticed I was watching it, it just backed off. It faded back into that same cloud formation, then all of a sudden, you could actually see the arc of it. It left black stuff, like the colour of the cloud part, just left behind little tinsels in the air.
“And fast! You never saw anything so fast in your life. It was just remarkable. It went away just as fast as it came. From the time I started looking at it, for about four or five seconds, it was only about another five seconds before it made this arc in the sky and was gone. Those things seem to take off from scratch. I imagine it was going 1,000 miles per hour, just like that. They really poured the coal to it when they took off. It was half a mile away before I even realized that it had started to move.”
Anthony Britain, who was flying the four-seat Mooney plane, saw nothing. “I was climbing at the time,” he told me. “Your nose is up and you’re lucky if you can see over the nose. It just knew where the blind spot was.”
Someone else, however, had seen it. Three days later Kip Faux, a carpenter in Carman, came up to Hunter Ames and told him he and his son had seen the whole thing from Stephenfield, eight miles west of Carman. He told Hunter, “You remember the night you saw that thing? My boy and I were looking at it, and we saw this grey cloud moving along the horizon. I told my son, ‘There’s a flying saucer,’ and as soon as I said that, it made this arc in the sky and was gone.”
It was a classic case: two witnesses eight miles west of Carman, two witnesses eight miles east of Carman, and one witness right under it, also in Carman. It would have been a much better case, however, if I had followed the rule I had laid down to all photographers I took out: “Shoot first, ask questions later.” Had I followed this rule, I would be showing a film instead of telling the story with words, which does the report no justice.
Charlie Goes to School
While I was a guest on the biggest radio talk show in Winnipeg — CJOB’s Action Line — a call came in from a woman in Kenton, Manitoba. She told us that she had had an unidentified object trail her during the day. I asked Peter Warren, host of the program, to get her number. After the show ended, I checked to see where Kenton was and discovered that it was 170 miles west of Winnipeg, where there had been a fair amount of UFO activity from August 1975 through August 1976.
The Enquirer’s Daniel Coleman was with me on the talk show. When I arrived at his motel room, I told him the case seemed good enough to investigate, so together we taped a phone interview with the woman, who refused to give her name for publication.
The woman was a housewife on a farm, and she had a part-time job driving children to school in a small van. It was the fall of 1975 at 8:30 a.m., and the woman was driving with three of her own children as well as other kids. The van was travelling south toward Kenton when one of her children suddenly cried, “Mom, look at the sun!”
“I looked,” she told us. “Then I looked again and told them, ‘Kids, that’s not the sun.’ It was fiery red and was in the shape of an ice-cream sundae. That’s what it looked like, like it had a cherry on top of it. We really couldn’t distinguish any marks on it except for a couple of strips around the top. We could see it rotating around, and it kept ahead of us a wee bit.”
It wasn’t very high in the sky because the bottom part of the object became blocked out when they passed behind some high trees. The trees, however, gave her an idea of the size. “To me it looked as high as an elevator,” she said. “It was enormous. It really was.”
“As high as an elevator?” Coleman asked in surprise. A grain elevator is 70 to 80 feet high.
“Well, I would say about as high,” she said. “You know that’s approximate because it was unbelievable, unbelievable … period. You could look at that thing, and when you turned your eyes around, you couldn’t see it at all. You were blinded for a minute or two.”
She told us that the object was flying along beside them on the east side, so Coleman asked her whether or not what she had seen might have been the sun.
“No way!” she shot back. “In my own mind, I’m positive that it was not. It wasn’t shaped that way, and we couldn’t see it rotate if it had been the sun.”
In addition to these items, the woman mentioned actions of the object that I was to find in other independent cases. “I stopped the van twice,” she stated, “and each time I stopped the van and backed up … I got a funny feeling when that thing stopped … and then when I moved it would move on.”
After about five miles, they turned west. Again she described a weird phenomenon that was common to other cases. “When we got to the corner where we turned off to Kenton to go west, we could see it a bit … it was still going south … the kids could hardly wait to get to school. After that the object had simply vanished.”
The effect upon the woman in this case was interesting. “I really didn’t believe in the darn things,” she told us, “but I’m so positive that it had to be something like that. I mean, seeing is believing. I was so excited. I didn’t know how to describe it. I was shook up. I had two girls in the van who were really terrified by this thing. They turned white and didn’t say a word. The boys were just the opposite. They were excited.”
This case is a good one — daylight, numerous witnesses, and small but important parallels to other encounters in Manitoba. It was referenced on an open-line show in Brandon that there were similar sightings the same day, but we were unable to verify those ones.
Seeing Them in Bunches
The following classic story is actually the account of a two-day rash of sightings that occurred in and around Starbuck, Elie, and Portage la Prairie. They happened during the first week of August 1976. The importance lies in the fact that more than one UFO was seen on each occasion and that all of them were travelling to the same point north of Portage la Prairie. In addition, all the witnesses described objects moving at high speed, which was rarely reported during the Manitoba flap.
First to spot the objects was a group of people who operated the Frontier Portage Motel on the east side of Portage la Prairie. Those involved were Mickey, Spencer, and Chad Watt, as well as Debbie Sanu and Dorothy Sanu. Debbie, a middle-aged woman, was the one who made everyone aware that a UFO would be around in August.
“I read everything I could get my hands on [UFO material],” Debbie said to me. “I’ve told the kids about them and gotten them interested. I told them about the August flaps around here. They’re supposed to be quite prominent in this district of Manitoba. The kids were looking for them and they found them.
“Mickey, the oldest, got to see them first. ‘For most of the night,’ he told me. ‘I noticed that there were about five lights in the eastern sky and that they were standing still. When it got dark, you could see them better, so I went and got my binoculars and looked at them. I asked Debbie what she thought they were, and she said they were UFOs, so we went into the house and got everyone out. They were there about two hours steady. Not moving. Then they started to move and they disappeared across the sky.’”
The five objects were stacked in the sky in the east over Elie. A common element to everyone’s story was that once the objects started to move, they began to multiply. Everyone told me that when the objects disappeared in the northwest there were nine.
“I was watching them when they got north of us,” Debbie said. “I noticed all of a sudden that there seemed to be all kinds of them. They were in a nice little formation. They were all individual. They weren’t captive or anything. They were all individual blobs.”
Mickey, who had the binoculars for the longest time, saw the “objects go into formation” and drew exactly how it happened. He was “amazed at how quickly they go into formation and with such precision.” The drawing he made had seven objects as they were lining up and nine when they assumed the tight formation. He, like everyone else, stuck to the story that the objects multiplied out of nowhere.
UFOs flying in formation.
Another element agreed on by everyone I talked to was that the objects didn’t accelerate, a common facet in other cases such as the Hunter Ames one. They were just suddenly going at an incredible speed.
“They picked up speed real quick after sitting there for two hours,” Dorothy Sanu told me. “Then they went voom!”
“Boy, they could go,” added Debbie Sanu. “When they wanted to go, there was no gaining speed. They just went.”
The formation was described by Mickey as “like a horseshoe with one side longer” and by others as sort of a rounded V. Concerning the drawing Mickey made, he stated that he could see the shapes of the craft and that he could distinguish that each had three lights on it.
As to the colour and position of the lights, Mickey didn’t want to say, since he wasn’t too sure. “It all happened so fast,” he said.
Chad and Spencer Watt were very skeptical of Debbie’s tales before they made the sighting, but they had both turned 180 degrees in their thinking.
“Mickey, the oldest boy, came in and drew them right away,” Debbie said. “Then he phoned Allen [an announcer] at CFRY [in Portage la Prairie]. He phoned because he had always scoffed at me. He said, ‘I’ve seen them. I can’t believe it.’ So he was really enthused, and he phoned the radio station.”
I checked with Allen at CFRY, who confirmed the bizarre account of being flooded with phone calls. He didn’t recall exactly how many came in during the two- to three-minute period, but it was a lot. He thought perhaps 10 to 12.
“They were all describing the same thing,” the radio announcer told me. There was no place to file the reports, so he simply phoned the Portage Air Force Base tower to confirm if they had seen anything. The answer was no. Allen then sent out someone to the area where everyone was describing the objects, but it was long over and the fellow returned empty-handed. The announcer hadn’t recorded the names of any of the people who had phoned. As he told me, “There was no need to.”
Allen’s involvement with UFOs, however, wasn’t over. The next night he received another call, this time from Ben Dyck, who was a resident of Starbuck and a third-year agriculture student at the University of Manitoba. Coleman and I happened to stumble onto Dyck when we were in Starbuck looking for directions to the farm of Wilson McKenne
tt.
We went to the restaurant to ask directions, and as we were leaving, I mentioned to the men there that we were trying to locate McKennett regarding a UFO sighting he’d had. The flap was heavy in this area, and I thought perhaps these people had been involved. Two of them jumped up from their table and told us about their involvement. Ben Dyck was the one we became interested in.
“My friend, Karl Bandeau, and I had been painting his car,” Ben told us. “We got thirsty and decided to go for some beer. We pulled out about 15 minutes before dusk. We just pulled out and had driven about half a mile when all of a sudden I saw a small bright cloud about to the northeast, and it was about 10,000 feet [in] altitude, 10 times the height of the Starbuck tower, which is 1,000 feet.
“I said to Karl, ‘Hey, look at that weird cloud. Have you ever seen anything like that?’ He said, ‘Yeah, that is weird.’ And I said to him, ‘I’ve never seen a cloud separate from the pack like that. That’s no cloud. Put down the throttle and go after it!’ So we went after it. It was a small cloud, and if you looked at it long enough, like maybe five to six seconds, you’d see that it was almost changing shape. It was pulsating. I don’t know, like a small pulsating cloud.
“We started following it. We couldn’t gain on it. We were heading west, and it was over to the northwest of us. We were doing about 60 miles per hour and we’d gone for two minutes. By that time it was 30 miles away. We stopped two miles from the La Salle River and got out to watch it.
“I was going about 90 miles per hour, as I calculated it. It was effortlessly gliding across the sky, and it was just going … no noise, no sound, no vapour trails, nothing. It just glided and then it went right past Elie, and I thought it was somewhere between Elie and Portage la Prairie. All of a sudden another one came up. Out of the horizon to the right of this object at about half the altitude of the first object, say, 5,000 feet, another one comes gliding out. By the sun’s rays, it looked like a small red cloud. It came up, this small object, and they sat there and maintained their position relative to each other.”
Charlie Red Star Page 10