After flagging down Allen and Dell Shade from Starbuck, they continued to watch the “second one.” Ben explained: “It was like it just faded into the sunset. It just moved quickly right into the sunset and was gone. The other one stayed for about 20 seconds and then took off. It seemed like it probably veered off north of Portage la Prairie. We followed it until it was just a pinpoint in the sky, and then it was gone.
“Allen said that it was a plane, but where was the vapour trail, where was the noise, why was it moving at 900 miles per hour? I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to argue. Dell said, ‘Yeah, it looks like a small cloud,’ the same thing I described it as, and she said it was right over Starbuck and then it started to move.”
At about 9:30 Allen got to a phone, called CFRY in Portage la Prairie, and told his story. “He told the same thing I described now,” Ben said to us, “and he says before you go any further, that’s pretty well the same thing a dozen people described last night.” Just after making the call, Ben told us a jet came over, leaving a vapour trail. The plane was about 2,000 to 3,000 feet lower.
“The object took off northwest and the jet was going west?” Coleman asked.
“No, the object was gone,” Ben replied. “The jet came over about 30 minutes later.”
“There was no comparison between this thing and the jet?” Coleman pressed.
“Absolutely not. I would say the jet was 10 times the size of this thing.”
Beams and Circles
After investigating hundreds of sightings in the two-year Manitoba flap, such stories as the previous one became a dime a dozen. Then there is the following bizarre case related to me by Chris Sedaris, a prominent UFO researcher in Winnipeg who spent hours tracing some of the hundreds if not thousands of sightings.
The incident, Chris told me, happened in October 1976 on a farm south of Austin, Manitoba. It was a pleasant fall day, and the farmer involved was out disking at about 2:00 p.m. There were no clouds in the sky. Suddenly, as the farmer was driving along, it started to rain. Perplexed, the farmer glanced up and confirmed to his startled mind that there were no clouds, yet lukewarm rain was falling in a circle in a radius of about 20 feet from his tractor.
He got off the tractor, walked to where it wasn’t raining, and felt the ground. It was dry. Then he went back into the rain and touched the earth. It was damp. Not knowing what to do to correct the situation, he got on his tractor and drove out of the circle, at which point the rain stopped. The farmer told Chris that the rain lasted three to four minutes.
While lecturing at Starbuck Junior High School, I ran across a very similar case. Completing my lecture, I answered questions for about 30 minutes. Then, after five attempts, the principal finally got the students back into their classrooms. One small, timid boy remained behind. “Can I talk to you?” he asked.
He told me that he and his family had been driving at night on the highway outside Starbuck when they suddenly found themselves surrounded by a circle of green light that extended beyond the edges of the two-lane highway. The family, quite astonished by the turn of events, got out to see where the green light was coming from.
“It didn’t come from anywhere,” he told me.
“You looked above you?” I asked.
“Yeah, there was nothing there.”
“And yet this light extended all the way around the car? Was it bright? Could you see the road easily? Could you read a newspaper by the light?”
“Oh, yeah, it was really bright.”
As with the farmer south of Austin, the whole affair lasted three to four minutes. Then the lights went out, the family got back in their car, and drove off, probably wondering what the world was coming to.
Then there was Michael Perreault’s case at West Hawk Lake east of Winnipeg. This area, as opposed to the flat farmlands of Austin and Starbuck, is on the Canadian Shield and is hilly and forested. It was the fall of 1974, about the same time as the famous UFO landings at the Edwin Fuhr farm in Langenburg, Saskatchewan (see beginning of Chapter 6, “Landings,” for a more detailed description of these incidents).
“There was a light hovering above me and Brock Taveras,” Michael told me. “There was a low cloud ceiling and the object was in the clouds.”
Both had the impression there was a light revolving around a circular object in the clouds and that the light projected down a beam fixed on some point on the cliff.
“It seemed like some guy on the ground with a flashlight, a high, intense flashlight, which he was rotating in the air,” Michael continued. “The round object was in the clouds, and it was moving around in a circle. I figure the beam would be about a foot and a half across. It was a very strong light. It lit up everything. You could really see the light. Boy, Brock and I were just vibrating. We were shaking.”
The object followed the car for a while, rotating, and when they stopped, the beam suddenly appeared on the cliff beside them. “People are always talking about UFOs,” Michael told Brock. “If there’s one up there, I want to see the cotton-pickin’ thing.”
Michael told me: “The point was no more than 200 yards away from us, 100 to 200 yards. Brock left the car running and we headed up the cliff. When we were on our way up, the thing took off. It didn’t make any sound, really. It just took off like a shot. I’ve seen some fast things, but that was the fastest. We watched it disappear. As we were on our way up to it, it sort of shut the light off, but there was still a light in the clouds, whatever it was. You could still see a light in the clouds. It sure was something that would put a spooking into a guy. It was something else!”
“It took off like a flash,” Brock told me in a separate interview. “All you could see was this spark that went down the road along the bush line. It was above the trees on my side. I was even scared to come back.”
Although this case was similar to the previous two, it acquired its bizarre quality from what happened to Michael Perreault a few months later at his home in Winnipeg Beach.
“It was just after Christmas, January 1975,” Michael began. “I was sound asleep in my bed, and I couldn’t get out of my bed. It was as if you were to get this intense electric shock and you can’t let go. It was that feeling that I had. I couldn’t let go. In fact, I did smash my right wrist against my desk when I did break free of it. I was conscious while this whole thing was going on. I ripped the whole bed apart — everything. I thought to myself for damn sure those Martians are coming to get me, and I told that to the guys at work. They told me, ‘Now you’re really cracking up.’”
Charlie Goes Sightseeing
Anthony Britain was a prominent citizen in southwestern Manitoba, and as a public figure related to the UFO flap, he received a lot of calls from around the province telling him about UFO sightings in other towns. One such case phoned in to Anthony was a classic one told by a woman who had trailed a Greyhound bus driving down Highway 2, heading for Winnipeg. The date was January 21, 1976. The bus was just west of St. Claude when the woman said it stopped right on the highway.
The woman told Anthony that all the people suddenly got off the bus and looked north. She stopped her car, as well, to see what the commotion was about. There, in plain daylight, was a huge metallic disk flying along the treeline.
On the other side of the object, the woman further reported, a group of snowmobilers also halted their machines to watch the silver disk. That was the story that was given to Anthony.
I talked to Chris Sedaris, who worked on a lot of sightings in Haywood and St. Claude where the incident occurred. He told me the account had even captured a few lines in the district’s French newspaper. “I talked to the Ski-Dooers,” he stated, “but couldn’t get a straight story. Some said that they had seen it, but some said they didn’t see anything.”
We had been told the bus was a Greyhound, but that company denied being involved. The same disavowal came from the other two bus lines that tr
avelled along the highway. The woman who phoned Anthony hadn’t left her name, so the story, though a classic tale, was a dead end.
Estimates of the number of people who experienced the sighting ran as high as 40. Two ufologists, Chris Sedaris, and I followed every lead we had. Although we could confirm the whole affair, we couldn’t obtain enough statements to complete the report of what had happened and who was involved.
Charlie Powers Up
Then there was the case of the two brothers, Jerry and Tracy Moore, in Dunleath on the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. The object was sighted first by Jerry’s sister, Leslie, who saw the object hovering above high-voltage lines south of the farm. “It then headed for the power line that feeds our farmhouse, and while it hovered over the lines, it shot two rays to the line,” Leslie told the local newspaper. “When the rays touched the lines, they turned red, and the yard light dimmed.”
The object, described as red on top and bottom with a silver section in the centre, then headed north of the farm where Jerry was working in a stubble field. Jerry told the paper that he saw it coming from the south: “It moved so fast, it was just a streak with no sound at all.”
Over the three power lines at Highway 10, the craft again shot beams at them. “The beams were thin at first,” Jerry said, “but they got bigger when they touched the lines. The beams didn’t retract into the UFO. They just disappeared in about five seconds.”
From there the UFO took off at high speed and a sharp angle into the northern sky. Leslie was now on her bike, headed into the field to tell her brother what she had seen, but her brother had spotted the same thing. The kids remained in the house until their parents arrived. “After that,” said Joe Moore, their father, “they wouldn’t go into the field again.”
Joseph McCann at his farm north of Carman told a similar story. The McCann family had countless experiences with UFOs in the air and on the ground. It was one of the stories that Joseph took a lot of criticism for telling.
The McCann farm used a lot of power, but as Joseph told me during the Manitoba flap period, it started using a lot more. He fought the hydroelectric supplier but found it hard to convince the company that they should lower his bill because a flying saucer was stealing power when no one was watching.
And Yet More Cases
After two years investigating these classic cases, I found that they occurred in front of crowds of people more often than might be expected. Asked a thousand times to account for why UFOs were seen where they were, I usually responded that the sparse population of the area was a major factor.
Here, however, the opposite situation arose. Instead of an object doing its tricks in front of one or two persons, it performed its “thing” in front of huge groups, which only helped to confuse the situation.
Consider, for example, the case of seven junior high students in Starbuck who got the scare of their lives during a heavy flap of sightings in the area during the first three weeks of August 1975. The leader of the group, Bob Sanderson, told me the story. Later, while lecturing at the school, I was able to confirm the account with the others who were involved.
“They — Cathy Wall and three of her friends — were driving right behind me,” Bob said. “They were following me because my transmission was gone and all I had was reverse. I was driving backward down the old highway outside Starbuck. It was about a mile [west] down the road. I was backing up down the road when I saw this blue light. I thought that it was an airplane or something. It went over Starbuck where it circled and turned around. I could see that it was now a red light, and I noticed that it started to come toward me. It was pretty big. The length of it was maybe 60 feet. It came about 150 feet away.”
Bob recalled: “This was at night. I opened my window to see if I could hear anything, but all I could hear was a sort of rushing sound. It was moving back and forth, and I shut my lights off when it came back on again.”
He told me that it had been rotating. It was shaped like two plates together — no dome. There was a blue light on one side and a red light on the other side. Other than the two lights, the craft wasn’t lit up. “It was dark,” Bob said. “All I could see was the outline against the sky.”
All five were now petrified, and Bob got in Cathy Wall’s car and they raced back to Starbuck to get two friends to witness this. “When we came back,” Bob stated, “it had started to leave. It was a bit in the distance. It always sat level, about 10 feet off the ground. When it left, it was gone. Just like one minute it was there and the next minute it was not there. While the whole thing was going on, I didn’t believe it. When it started in closer, it scared the hell out of me. That’s why I turned my lights off.”
In another case related to the Enquirer’s Daniel Coleman and myself, 11 people were involved. The incident occurred on July 23, 1976, in Arborg, Manitoba. Gary Maturchuk, a youth counsellor in Winnipeg and a third-year student at the University of Winnipeg, who related the story to us, led a group of teenagers to the area for a weekend of camping.
It was about 11:00 p.m. on a Thursday night. The group had just arrived from Nasa Beach, and most of the kids had gone to bed. Some of them, including Gary, had remained up and were talking in the van.
At about 3:30 a.m. one of the kids saw a very bright light above them. The people in the van got out and climbed on top to get a better view. After a few minutes, the object started to make erratic movements as it dropped into the south. Apparently, the kids made a lot of noise, because now everyone was out watching it.
In a jerking motion, the object plunged below the trees east of them.1 By now, according to Gary, everyone was staring. When the object disappeared, some of the kids returned to bed, but others remained, hoping to get another glimpse of the spectacular light display.
Five minutes later, in the same spot where the object had vanished, an incredible sight was revealed, and the few observing it got the fright of their lives. They now saw the object moving south through the trees.
The object was fairly close to them, and the five witnesses got three good views as it travelled behind the trees surrounding the camp on the east side. It appeared only when it entered the clearings in the forest, and according to Gary, everyone described seeing only parts of it. The object then projected a bright light onto the ground, which they described as simply white and quite intense.
Reactions to the sightings, according to Gary, varied. Seeing was, of course, believing, and the yells of the lucky five again woke up the rest of the campers, who didn’t see the second part of the sighting because it all happened too quickly. “Some,” Gary told Coleman and me, “couldn’t believe what they had seen, and some were quite terrified by the whole thing.”
4
It’s Funny They Should Be the Same
It is not reasonable to assume that hundreds of ordinary normal people whose words we would readily accept under more mundane circumstances, for instance as witness to an automobile accident, should suddenly become liars, fools, neurotics, and otherwise quite incompetent observers. I have interviewed many of these people myself and am convinced that they are sane, sober, honest folk who are reporting to the best they can something that they really did witness. I will concede that maybe some of these people did not do a good job of observing as someone who was better trained might have done, but within limits I believe they did honestly report what they saw.
— Wilbert B. Smith, Head of the Canadian Government Investigation of Flying Saucers, 1950–54
In the late 1970s when I was first putting together the manuscript for this book, a movement away from the extraterrestrial theory as the most logical answer to the UFO mystery began. The theory that came into vogue was the inter-dimensional one. It proposed that UFOs might originate in some other dimension and that they were merely popping in and out of ours.
Those supporting the inter-dimensional theory pointed out there were many paranormal events occurring around UF
Os sightings. They referenced cases in which UFOs disappeared into thin air, people near craft being cured of illnesses, and persons who claimed they were receiving telepathic messages from UFOs.
One of the main reasons for the withdrawal of the extraterrestrial theory was the wide variety of craft and beings being seen. It was as if no two UFOs were ever the same. Was it possible, critics of the extraterrestrial theory questioned, that so many different races of beings would suddenly appear at one time?
Jacques Vallée, one of the key proponents of this new paranormal theory, theorized: “UFOs exist in some other reality; that at least in part, its manifestations are shaped in the contents of the human mind. This is what we call the ‘reflective factor,’ which is the central tenet of the para-ufological hypothesis.”
There is no doubt this theory has a lot of evidence to back it up, and there are many cases during the Manitoba flap that can be used to bolster the multi-dimensional theory, or a theory that involves the human mind being a key factor in UFO sightings.
Like any coin, however, there is always another side. The Manitoba UFO flap evidence supports a theory that there is a common technological component at work.
In opposition to Vallée’s idea of a “reflective factor” are the many interviews with witnesses who exhibited “common factors” in their stories during the Manitoba flap. These shared aspects completely contradict a reflective factor as the core of UFO phenomena, and they also support the accurate reporting of what witnesses experienced.
Charlie Red Star Page 11