Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  Within seconds the object was back over their car. “It came back,” Marnie stated. “We saw it put its lights on and it came back, sat above us, and followed along with us.”

  At the main highway Marnie sped across the intersection right through a stop sign and into town. As for the object, it lifted and accelerated northeast toward Winnipeg.

  Beams

  One of the odd similarities that became apparent after studying hundreds of UFO reports across Manitoba was that in a significant number of cases the UFO reportedly projected one or more beams onto the ground for one purpose or another.

  This phenomena, it should be noted, has been mentioned in other cases around the world. In the famous Travis Walton abduction in November 1975, the five witnesses near Travis stated that he was hit and lifted from the ground by a blue-green beam projected by a saucer-shaped object just off in a forest clearing.

  At the same time the Manitoba flap was starting in April 1975, John Womack told his own story about a UFO contact he had in the Tennessee Valley:

  The most incredible thing happened. From the bottom of the machine, a beam of light several feet thick began moving slowly toward the ground. After a few seconds had passed, the column of intense light reached the ground. I couldn’t believe my eyes when the light, instead of stopping at the ground, continued to spread out over the meadow. The light flowed over the area like some sort of foggy spirit until it almost reached the road.9

  After Womack’s experience, beams of light were reported in connection with Manitoba’s sightings. It was mid-May 1975 when Anthony Britain, Martin Rugne, and 12 other witnesses watched from the Pembina Hills as Charlie projected a triangle-shaped beam of light onto the ground before dropping into the trees.

  “We were looking toward Morden,” Anthony said, “and it was moving slowly south toward the U.S. border. Suddenly, it started zigzagging across the bush, lower and lower with every zigzag. It got down over the bush and stopped. It stopped pulsing red and turned solid red and then there was that beam that came out from it. It was like a triangle, but it had definite edges. It wasn’t a light. It was a definite beam. The beam was so intense that it took on a reddish-white tinge.”

  In August 1975, more witnesses five miles east of Carman saw the same thing. Larry First, one of the people, described the zigzagging, the beam, and the sudden vertical descent. The only variation from the object seen from the Pembina Hills was that this time the beam was blue.

  On July 13, 1976, Anton Olson and Hubert Drosen were just about to turn into Cardinal, Manitoba, when they noticed a peculiar light in the northeast. “It had form,” Anton commented. “It wasn’t just a light. It was an object. It was peculiar. It was red — mostly red with some blue lights. It was moving west toward Elm Creek. It was swerving back and forth at a very high rate of speed, stopped, then started pulsing in the sky. They were bluish-white [pulses] and it started to drop down.”

  “It would move down,” Hubert said, “and then stop. Then it would move down a bit farther and stop. All the time it moved down, there was a beam of light projected down to the ground. The beam was moving around. It looked like it was trying to find a good place to land.”

  “It came down about Elm Creek,” Anton added, “and we watched it until it was down.”

  In another August 1975 case, Dufferin Leader reporter Kerry Kaelin reported seeing Charlie on the morning of the 17th at 12:35 a.m. “The movements of Charlie were erratic. It would drop down to the ground quickly and rise up again, moving occasionally horizontally but remaining in the same general area.”

  In connection with two smaller objects that had left the craft and descended to the ground, there was, as Kaelin reported, “a tail of light that shone down from it.”

  There were other cases in which beams were reported being emitted from craft. In the dramatic triangle case I was involved in (see the “Triangles” section earlier in this chapter and “Charlie Fights Back” in Chapter 7), Danny Penner reported that the object in the air projected a beam of light down onto (or close to) two ground lights we had been annoying with flashlights a half mile south of our position on Highway 205 East, south of Morden.

  Finally, in a case that occurred in Riding Mountain National Park northwest of Carman, Carl Bachmanek and Paul Dawkins reported to me that they were standing on the edge of a lake one night when they noticed a peculiar light on the opposite shore. The object moved toward them to the centre of the lake where it projected a beam of light into the water. The beam, according to Carl, penetrated the lake right to the bottom. Slowly, the beam started moving toward them. Both Carl and Ron watched as it travelled up onto the shore and right onto the two men. “I knew the beam was on us,” Carl told me, “but I couldn’t feel anything.”

  The beam began to retreat after a few moments onto the ground at their feet and again into the water. Where it went next, neither man could tell me, because they had long since turned and run from the area.

  Animal Reactions

  Just outside Ottawa there is a government communication station called Shirleys Bay, where in 1953–54 the Canadian government gave ­authorization for a bizarre experiment. A small hut supplied by the Defence Research Board (DRB) was moved onto the property. It was known as the “flying saucer observatory.” Its purpose was to detect “flying saucers.”

  Five different monitoring systems were set up to detect (1) change in the gravitational field; (2) change in noise; (3) change in magnetic field; (4) change in gamma ray background; and (5) mass changes in the atmosphere.

  Likewise today small companies in Canada and the United States put out a vast array of “UFO detectors” designed so that UFO investigators are alerted when a UFO flies by. Most of these detectors work on the principle of change in magnetic fields.

  It was found through cases such as the one at Falcon Lake, Manitoba, on May 20, 1967, where a UFO landed that magnetic fields could be affected by the presence of a UFO. In the Falcon Lake incident, Stefan Michalak, a geologist, discovered that the needle on his compass spun erratically when he was in the forest opening where the UFO had landed. As well, a former member of the DRB told me that animals were used in the 1950s in Canada to detect the presence of UFOs.

  The sighting reports of the Manitoba flap reveal a similar ability of animals to sense UFOs. The reactions of animals seem particularly strong when UFOs land. The evidence both from Manitoba cases and from former government work show that animals are somehow capable of detecting sounds humans can’t distinguish.

  In the Falcon Lake case, the animal response that alerted Stefan Michalak was the “frightened cries of a flock of geese.” When the geese reacted, he looked up in time to notice the object landing 50 yards from his position.

  Probably one of the most dramatic animal reaction cases in the 1975 Manitoba sightings occurred when a glowing red craft settled down in a field a half mile northwest of the McCann farm, north of Carman. Present at the farm were 20 of the 200 horses owned by Joseph McCann.

  “We thought it was in our field at first,” Anna McCann told the National Enquirer. “We had about 20 head there. The horses were real scared. It was hovering not far from the horses. They stampeded, but later settled down.”

  Months later I questioned the McCanns about the reactions of the horses and discovered something quite interesting. On their farm is a 200-foot-long barn where the horses were kept. Of the 20 horses present at the time, only a couple were in the pasture west of the house and south of the object. The remainder were in the barn and had no visual contact with the object. According to Anna, these horses were unable to see the object, yet were the ones that had the most severe reactions to the hovering object.

  “They really went wild,” she told me. “Joseph and I thought that they were going to pull the barn down. This lasted only for a minute and then everything stopped. No more than a minute, then dead silence. You could hear a pin drop.”

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sp; The horses couldn’t see from inside the barn, so most likely they heard the object. This noise had to be outside the human audible frequency because the McCanns reported hearing nothing from the object when they were only 500 feet away.

  The McCanns’ account of the short period during which the horses reacted and the unusual silence are observations common to other landings. Consider, for example, Mary Berezuik who sighted two objects with four windows in each that settled in a swamp three-quarters of a mile north of her home in Sundown, Manitoba, just north of the U.S. border.

  At 3:15 a.m. on February 15, 1977, Mary heard her dogs howl and hurried out of the house with a .22 calibre rifle in anticipation of finding a stray dog attacking her cows. Arriving outside, she fired two shots into the air to scare away whatever was bothering the animals. Then she looked at the cows and noticed they appeared to be extremely frightened by something. “Their eyes,” Mary stated, “were glaring bright red, like flashlights.”

  She added that suddenly it became “quiet” and “unnaturally still,” so much so, in fact, that she became alarmed and hurried into the house. Seconds later, through the north window, Mary saw two objects slowly drop into the swamp.

  The third case I recorded that dealt with this curious silence was a similar event experienced by Anna McCann. She was awakened early in the morning by the barking of her two dogs. Getting up, she went outside, fearing that someone was stealing gas.

  Once outside, she spotted an object in the direction of the Haywood tower but figured that a second one was down the road behind a line of trees. She was quite frightened because the dogs were still barking and the birds were making a racket as well. Suddenly, all the animals stopped making noise, and for the second time in a year, Anna experienced a peculiar eerie silence.

  “There was absolutely no sound at all,” she told me. “I thought that that thing had landed again, so I started to walk out to the road to see past the set of trees in front of the house.”

  As she strode down the driveway to the road, the larger of the two dogs placed himself in her way. He pulled at Anna’s legs and wouldn’t allow her to go out to the road. After a few minutes of struggling to get past the dog, she gave up and returned to the house.

  A year before the Manitoba UFO flap began there was a famous landing case at Langenburg, Saskatchewan, a couple of miles from the Manitoba–North Dakota border. The farmer was Edwin Fuhr. His animals exhibited actions indicating they knew long before Edwin that something odd was at the farm. The reactions came from cattle that broke through a fence during the events as well as barking by neighbourhood dogs.

  Edwin’s sightings involved seeing “five small metallic domes” in his farm field. The incident occurred on Sunday, September 1, 1974, at about 10:45 a.m. An interview with Ted Phillips at the Center for UFO Studies reveals, however, that the object might have been in the field all night.10

  “Well, he [the dog] barked, when was it?” Edwin told Phillips. “Saturday night, they barked. The neighbours’ dogs barked, too. They all barked at the same time Saturday night, about midnight [the night before the reported event]. Then they barked at about 3:00 in the morning. Jack, our neighbour had a babysitter who was frightened because the dogs were barking, and when Jack came home, he said the dogs were still barking.

  “On Monday night about 10:30, the dogs were barking. My dog had been out in the field and he had backed up to the house. He wouldn’t go into the field. He usually follows me, but this time he wouldn’t go out there. On Tuesday morning, I found the ring there. When I heard the dogs barking Monday night, I thought, It could be out there again, but even if it is, no way am I going out there.”

  Phillips asked Edwin if the neighbours’ cattle were disturbed.

  “Yes,” said Edwin, “the cattle were making a lot of noise that Sunday morning. The fence was broken in four places. The Saturday night after [September 7] the dogs were barking again and we found that one [UFO].”

  An interesting point to consider is the type of barking done by the dogs. Usually, they bark to protect their property or the property of their masters. They will charge a mailman and come as close to him as is safe. Here, however, we find barking that exhibited fear.

  “My dog had been out in the field,” said Edwin. “He backed up to the house.” The dog wouldn’t go out into the field again, though in the past he usually did. This reaction is hardly one of a dog protecting his master. It seems more out of fear or an irritation caused by some unusual noise.

  A very similar event happened at the farm of Howard Rempel, south of Carman. It was 4:15 a.m. on May 2, 1975, eight months after Edwin Fuhr’s experience. This time all the animals in the valley were affected.

  The Rempel farm lay at the base of a valley high in the Pembina Hills. The reported craft passed low over two farms before it finally settled on Howard’s front lawn. The other farms belonged to Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Stevens.

  “The two dogs at Wheeler’s farm and my dog started howling long before the object appeared,” Stevens told me.

  It was Tina, his wife, however, who first became aware that something strange was occurring. She awoke to find that it was suddenly daylight, even though it was only 4:00 a.m. The light seemed to fade, and Tina realized something quite out of the ordinary was travelling over the house. Her husband didn’t wake up in time to see the object, but though it was gone, he, too, had a weird feeling. “By the way my wife was reacting, and by the funny feeling I had, I figured that something must have been in the yard.”

  Tina continued. “The dog was howling outside, and our two cats were at the window screaming. Not meowing, or crying, but screaming. I’ve never heard anything like it before. I went to the door to go out and see what was going on, but with the reactions of the animals and the weird feeling I had, I never did.”

  Moments later, the object landed a mile south in Howard Rempel’s farmyard. There, both the chickens and dogs were spooked by the object. The chickens raced around the yard, then gathered in bunches, while the dogs hid under the steps of the house.

  “The dogs woke us up with their barking,” Howard told the National Enquirer. “This usually means the horses are out or something. We looked out the window and immediately noticed that there was a light in the corner of the driveway out there. I was really tempted to go outside, but the dogs wouldn’t go down there. They stayed right by the house barking. I figured if they weren’t going out there, I wasn’t, either.”

  At Carman there was an interesting reaction from a horse involved in a close encounter north of town. Eight-year-old Bobby Baker stood on the deck on the south side of his house when a large saucer descended and sat inches above the neighbour’s tree, perhaps 50 yards away.

  Standing next to him as the saucer appeared was Bobby’s pet stallion, Sonny. Just as the child noticed the craft, he drew the horse’s attention to the object. “When he saw it,” Bobby told me, “he kicked up his heels and ran to his house.”

  In the summer of 1975 and April 1978, there were numerous UFO sightings and landings, as well as reports of Sasquatches near the former Southport Air Force Base, south of Portage la Prairie. It was the same area where 32 horses from the pasture of Joseph McCann had disappeared in 1975.

  Two Sasquatches were observed close to houses on a road south of the base fence, and there were strong indications that UFOs were involved. At both Sasquatch sightings the dogs in the area reacted strangely. One of them near the base perimeter was a vicious Great Dane and was therefore chained to the house at all times. Yet, when a Sasquatch was spotted peering in the kitchen window only a few feet away, the dog froze and didn’t even growl. It was a canine response similar to a reaction to the presence of a UFO.

  During 1975, Sasquatches were seen at the Native reserve southwest of Portage la Prairie and a dog there also froze. However, when the first Sasquatch was spotted near the air base at a house across the street, I was told the lar
ger of two chained dogs tried to take a run at it. The animal lurched across the length of his chain, attempting to get to the road. The dog’s owner reported that the creature almost choked to death, straining against his leash. When the owner let the dog go, he immediately headed toward the bush where 18-inch footprints were later found running along the creek and up into a clearing.

  Shortly before 6:00 a.m. on January 19, 1978, Mike Ryshytylo, his wife, and his son, Tony, watched eight small UFOs and two large ones hover over their farmyard in Rossburn. The objects were so close that they covered 30 degrees of the horizon. Because it was so early in the morning, the family would probably never have seen anything had they not been awakened by the barking of their dogs.

  And so, perhaps in the future, researchers will find a way to employ animals as their UFO detectors and discover what it is the animals pick up and react so strongly to. Such a method might allow researchers to arrive at a sighting while it happens rather than days or weeks after it occurs.

  Jennette Frost experienced many sightings during the two-year Manitoba UFO flap and used an animal detection method with her dog, Shep, to help her know when it was time to watch the skies.

  When you enter the Frost farmyard, there is a sign that reads DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CAR UNTIL THE DOG IS CHAINED. Shep wasn’t the sort of dog to be frightened by anyone or anything. When UFOs were around, however, the aggressive nature of the dog changed to cringing fear.

  “That dog always growls when things are around,” Jennette said. “He always gets excited. He’ll look up into the sky. He looks around. There’s something that he hears, and he’ll cry or whine deep down — a very high-pitched whine.”

  During the 1975–76 flap, Jennette spotted many UFOs thanks to Shep’s reactions. “Every time the dog acted up, I’d check the sky, and on every occasion, there’d be something flying around,” she maintained.

  Humming Hydro and Telephone Wires