Important to the “common factor” is that some of the elements described were very unusual facets that wouldn’t be expected to pop out of the minds of multiple people. It is for that reason that I chose to include this chapter on things characterized by “it’s funny they should be the same.”
Many witnesses, for example, told me that when a low-flying UFO passed over them or their houses it lit up the countryside. Such experiences are totally unknown in the everyday world. Such a description is common only to UFO-sighting reports.
Now if I had heard the “lit up the countryside” story only once, I could go along with the notion that it arose from the mind of the viewer. The description, however, was actually quite common and supports the hypothesis that UFOs brightening the countryside as they appear is a real event supported by a collective reality.
One man told me that a UFO a mile away was “so bright that you could only look at it for a few seconds before your eyes started to water.” Again, it was a tale that sounded far-fetched until the fact is raised that I heard five other people give the same account.
In Manitoba in the 1970s, many witnesses described saucer-shaped craft with small windows around the middle. This sounds like something people might make up, even though more than 40 years later observers still report windows in UFOs.
The most frequent oddities reported by Carman witnesses were triangular disks. “It’s not what everyone else saw,” I was told, “but I’m sure it was a triangle shape.” I myself saw this object a number of times, including once close up. In 2014, triangle sightings were the most commonly reported UFO shape, but in 1975 accounts of triangle UFOs were almost unheard of. The peculiar shape being described seemed again to point to a collective reality.1
What I hope to convey in this chapter are the “common factors” in the southern Manitoba sightings during 1975 and 1976. Taken on their own, they made no sense. They were unusual things not seen in daily life.
If the human mind was the key factor in UFO sightings as maintained in the inter-dimensional theory, then cross-indexing the sightings should show very few mutual elements. Moreover, the reported events should be related to everyday human experience or to the modern understanding of technology.
In many cases in Manitoba, this expected situation didn’t dominate. Instead of people, for example, telling me the object flew in a straight line (based on the common knowledge that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line), they said it bounced up and down or zigzagged all over the place. Instead of people saying the saucer flew straight and level like all flying machines in the modern world, they insisted it flew at an angle of 20 to 45 degrees.
The people who shared their sightings with me had usually done very little reading about UFOs. The weird “it’s funny they should be the same” items they told me about were typically referred to in passing. Witnesses often said, “You know one funny thing I noticed was …”
What arose from the various UFO sighting reports was a series of common occurrences that made no sense. They were things as distinctive and odd as a bank robber with red nail polish on his fingernails, or a man wearing glasses with no lenses. They became collective reality observations that represented events that probably happened as described.
The Small Disks
Keith Chester was describing to us what they looked like. We were looking and he said, “Holy Moses, there they go now!” There were three of them in formation and they were all wobbling. They were wobbling and were deep red or blood-red.
— Mick Yexley
Of all the collective reality oddities reported in Manitoba, the most impressive took place in the summer of 1975. In 10 independent observations, witnesses recounted seeing a large craft drop off and later pick up smaller vehicles. As usual most of the sightings were never reported to authorities, and it was only after extensive interviewing in the area that the similarity became evident.2
The first person who spotted the small disks was Jennette Frost, who lived south of Sperling, Manitoba. The sighting occurred on May 12, 1975, just as the Charlie Red Star flap was starting up.
On the same night that Jennette said she saw the craft and smaller objects, numerous people were with a Winnipeg television crew in Carman trying to film Charlie Red Star. They sighted Charlie but didn’t get any film. Had they been in Sperling 11 miles away they might have got the movie of the century.
“I rubbed my eyes a couple of times,” Jennette explained. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
Gazing north toward the town, she watched a red disk approach from the direction of Carman. Reading from one of her notebooks, in which she filed the many sightings she had during the 1975–76 UFO flap, Jennette described the beginning of the bizarre experience:
There was a red light the size of the rising moon. Sighted about one and a quarter miles west of Sperling travelling in a bobbing undulating fashion as it approached the grain towers [in Sperling] where it suddenly glowed a bright red and increased in speed terrifically. Then the light disappeared into space, and as I looked for it, it reappeared in the near vicinity north of town.
As she watched the object, she noticed that its east side (right) suddenly glowed brilliant red. “There was a short interval and then this thing glowed and the disks came out.”
She pointed at the diagram in her notebook as I looked on. “They came out this side. All four came out there, and as they did, the east side of the craft glowed. It would really glow when the disks would come out. Then when the disk would come down [toward the ground] it would glow at the top.”
Jennette continued. “As I sat rubbing my eyes a couple of times, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Then the next one came out, so I kept looking and looking. There was an interval of about five minutes. Then it glowed on the east side and the next one came out. There were four of them, and they came in intervals of about five minutes [each].”
She wrote that the small disks came out at a 45-degree angle, westward toward the ground. “They were not quite as big as the big saucer, but you could definitely see that the smaller ones were saucer-shaped on top, like a saucer upside down. It wasn’t a flat disk. They were a metallic colour, sort of metallic blue, a bright metallic blue or bluish-green. I looked out that window many times after that to see it again, but I didn’t.”
During the same month, the exact thing was seen in two more towns in the area. One of them, Elie, is 37 miles directly north of Sperling; the other, Carman, is 11 miles west of it.
The witness in Elie was Wilson McKennett. Again, like most of the sightings that were made, it wasn’t discussed with anyone outside a small group of friends. In August 1976, Daniel Coleman from the National Enquirer came to the area to interview witnesses. Together Coleman and I went out to talk to Wilson.
When we arrived at his place, we were under the impression that he had been the only witness, but when we spoke with him we discovered a dozen others had experienced the event, which occurred near the end of May 1975, a couple of weeks after Jennette Frost’s sighting.
“It happened about 11:00 p.m. or midnight,” Wilson began. “We saw it three nights in a row. We were seeding. We were going around the field, eh? So one time we got around there’s nothing, and the next time we turn the corner, there it is.”
Just as in Jennette’s sighting in the south, the Elie witnesses stated there were four smaller objects. “It was west of here,” Wilson said, “close to the [telephone] microwave tower. The mother ship seemed to be close to the tower.”
“How long did you watch it before you saw the smaller ones?” Coleman asked him.
“Oh, not even five minutes. The four small ones came out of it. When they first came out, they seemed to be in position, you know, four even positions. There were two above and two below. The two below were explorers. The other two above it just stayed on guard above it. From there one of the explorers headed toward Win
nipeg [east] and one headed toward Portage la Prairie [west].”
Wilson reported that when the two explorers flew away and returned they travelled in an up-and-down motion “just like little waves.” This would be something many people seeing Charlie Red Star described as one of his main characteristics.
Immediately, I realized how close Wilson’s account was to the story told by Jennette, so I asked Wilson about the colour of the objects.
“All pretty much the same colour,” he replied. “They were brighter than a star but the same colour. The mother ship was real bright. It was the brightest and the biggest. It’s hard to tell how much bigger than the small ones it was, but it was so bright that if you watched it for a couple of minutes, it would make your eyes water.”
According to Wilson, the small objects that flew toward Winnipeg and Portage la Prairie seemed to get where they were going in two to three minutes. After about 30 minutes, they returned, gathered themselves around the glow of the larger bright craft, and then the whole army of objects moved west toward Portage la Prairie. At that point Wilson said “it seemed to move quite fast.” The whole event had taken about 45 minutes during which Wilson stopped his tractor and watched.
Other witnesses to the incident were Wilson’s father and mother, who lived a mile east, his two brothers, and a hired hand who was so upset over the sighting that he refused to leave the tractor during the entire affair.
The next two nights Wilson and many of his witnesses watched exactly the same objects do the very same thing.
Meanwhile, in Carman, Freda Waterman stated that she had seen something quite similar in the spring of 1975. She lived on the Boyne River, which ran through Carman, so she had seen Charlie many times, because the river was on Charlie’s beer run. During an interview with me in May 1976, she related that one night Charlie wasn’t alone.
“There were three objects. There were two red and one big silver one The big silver one used to hover over my house every night. You could hear it. It made noise, something like a tea kettle. The two red ones were always around when we heard this big silver one. You’d go out and look, and they would be around, except they were flying lower down along the treeline. Sometimes we would see the small red ones dock up with the big silver one.”
Freda described the complex docking manoeuvre in which the small UFOs took turns linking to the big silver object. “The middle one was always the silver one,” she said, “and the red ones always linked to the top, never to the bottom.”3
The final reference to the small disk stories came from Kerry Kaelin, a reporter for the Dufferin Leader. This incident took place in August 1975 during a brief flurry of sighting activity along Highway 13 between August 11 and 21. Kaelin and his fiancée, Janet Robertson, spotted Charlie Red Star as he hovered over a field northwest of Carman.
The Dufferin Leader reporter wrote: “We saw two pairs of lights rise up into the UFO and one pair of red lights come out of it. They descended to the ground in the half-hour that we watched the object.”
He estimated the time they first noticed the craft to be about 12:35 a.m. on a Sunday evening. “The movements of Charlie were erratic in that it would drop to the ground and rise up again moving occasionally horizontally, but remained in the same general area. The UFO was a small white light with a pulsating red area. At times the whole craft would just about disappear and then the light would brighten.” He said there was a tail of light that shone down from it. Eventually, the UFO disappeared to the northwest.
Triangles
If I were asked to design the classic model of a UFO, I would undoubtedly base it on the many reports since 1947 that describe a disk-shaped object with a cupola on it. It was for this reason that I was confused when I first heard Joseph and Anna McCann tell me they were seeing triangle-shaped UFOs. I hardly knew what to think. Looking back more than 40 years, it might have been the beginning of something new, since triangles are now reported much more frequently than saucer shapes.
The McCanns, more than any other witnesses in the entire flap area, were met with scorn and disbelief for their numerous and sometimes bizarre UFO sighting reports. I had talked to them and their children many times, so I knew they were probably telling the truth. I also knew that their farm north of Carman was in the general direction where many Carman citizens said they saw the object going when it left town.
Anthony Britain is the one who ignited the UFO fire with his high-profile sightings, but it was the McCanns who poured fuel on the flames and took the UFO stories beyond run-of-the-mill tales. As many of their accounts were controversial, it was perhaps only appropriate that the McCanns should have started the triangle stories. Yet, in the end, I only filed their stories and waited.
In the spring of 1976, I began to get other reports that indicated the McCanns weren’t alone in their triangle sightings. In May 1976, I spoke with Freda Waterman, who had been one of the many witnesses to the 1975 Charlie Red Star flybys. She told me Charlie was only one of two craft that flew at low altitude through the valley back then. “There was a big silver craft that used to drop off smaller red craft,” she said. “The silver craft used to sit right above the house every night and you could hear something like a tea kettle. On the top of this silver craft were two red lights and a green one which rotated like beacons.”
In our conversation, Freda stated that the silver craft with the triangle light pattern on it stationed itself over her house in Carman from April 10 to 30, 1975, so she was the first to mention triangles. The McCanns didn’t report seeing them until the last week in May. The family’s full UFO story included five separate triangle sightings between May and October 1975.
The McCanns reported that their first encounter with a triangle occurred when they saw an object with a solid yellow line forming the three sides of a triangle. They stated that there didn’t appear to be anything inside or outside the lines.
At the time the McCanns were returning to their farm a mile west of the main highway they were travelling on. They turned onto the mile road that went to their house when suddenly a huge yellow triangle flew over their truck. The triangle was on an angle and moved at high speed.
Joseph quickly slowed down and turned off the truck’s lights. Immediately, the triangle reversed direction rapidly and then remained stationary down the road. Joseph switched the truck lights back on and continued down the road. Instantly, the triangle raced toward him at a terrific speed, so he turned off the lights once more. The triangle reversed itself away from the truck and hovered over the road some distance away.
Totally unaware of what this might be and why it was happening, Joseph left the truck lights off and made the remaining trip to the farm in the dark. Upon reaching the McCann place, Joseph and Anna hurried into the house where they remained with the lights off and the doors locked.
Road where Charlie Red Star was attracted to Joseph McCann’s truck.
“It moved at a speed you couldn’t imagine,” Anna told me more than once. “It moved so fast back and forth. We kept the lights off in the house because we were afraid it would come to the house.”
Jerry, their son, stated that the triangle was still sitting in the field after the truck arrived home. “I watched it just sitting in the northeast field,” he said.
The second triangle witnessed by the McCanns happened not too long after the first. Similar to the first sighting, the border edges on this one consisted of a solid lighting pattern. This time the light was white as opposed to the yellow of the first triangle. The triangle flew at a very steep angle and travelled in a northwest direction from Carman. According to Anna, the triangle was very low and moved at a very high rate of speed.
Young Lucy McCann sighted the third triangle on Labour Day 1975. The McCann children were sitting on the front lawn with three cousins visiting from Winnipeg. Anna was in the trailer next door, and Joseph and a friend, Pete, were approaching th
e farm on a gravel road from the south.
In March 1976, I went to talk with the McCanns only to find they weren’t home. The children told me their parents would return soon, so I sat with them to wait. I used the opportunity to question the kids about what they had seen without any influence from their parents.
It was during this interview that I discovered that only Lucy had seen the Labour Day triangle. The other children thought she was talking about the first one that had followed the parents to the house in May. Lucy insisted this was a distinct sighting. Here is a section of that interview:
Lucy: Yeah, I saw it over there [south]. I can’t describe the yellow. It’s a yellow, but it flipped over, and I never knew how a triangle could turn into a red ball.
Grant: The triangle flipped?
Lucy: Yeah, and it turned into a red ball. It started to bounce up and down, and then it chased the truck. We thought it was chasing the truck.
Grant: Were the lights on the triangle connected or were they just spots of light?
Lucy: It was like a solid triangle. Not like the one across the road [referring to the first triangle seen by her parents]. It seemed to be coming slant down. Then it sort of flipped while it was coming, and then it was coming backward. It seemed to go behind the bushes at the Corans’ and then it popped up again. Then it zigzagged all over the place and left.
The fourth triangle the McCanns witnessed was seen east across the road from their farmhouse, sitting in a field. This triangle had red, green, and white lights forming the corners of the triangle instead of solid lines. In an area around the triangle, a red light bounced around.
Jerry McCann, who saw it, believed he remembered it the best and described it this way:
Jerry: The one across the road had red, green, and red lights on it.
Grant: Were the lights separate or connected?
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