Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  In the countless tales of UFOs that fill book after book, there are references made to UFOs being attracted to power lines. In Manitoba we had many similar cases not only with hydro lines but even more frequently with telephone wires. Just before the first sighting occurred in the valley near Carman, Mr. Hay, who lived in Starbuck, witnessed a saucer-shaped craft fly low along a string of hydro lines north of town — the first of many such cases.

  As mentioned previously, brothers Jerry and Tracy Moore witnessed a UFO as it hovered over the lines near their farm close to the border with Saskatchewan. “It shot down two rays to the lines,” stated Leslie, the brothers’ sister. “Where the rays touched the lines, the lines turned red.”

  It remained there for a few seconds after which it then travelled north to a second set of power lines near Jerry, who was working in the field. This time the red-and-silver craft shot eight beams onto the hydro lines.

  “The beams were thin at first,” Jerry told the local newspaper, “but got bigger when they touched the lines. The beams didn’t retract. They just disappeared after five seconds.”

  Ufologists generally keep an eye out for this particular type of sighting report because it shows how the object might get its power or how it works.

  As well as stories of UFOs being attracted to hydro lines there are accounts of them hovering around telephone wires. These stories aren’t researched as much because there are no known effects such as the blackouts often attributed to UFOs and their attraction to hydro lines.11

  Because I actually heard noise during a sighting and taped it, I think there is relevance to examine similar incidents to get an idea why UFOs sit above hydro and telephone wires. My own particular case involved telephone lines rather than hydro wires. That might seem unusual, but in Manitoba there appeared to be as many reports concerning UFOs and telephone lines as there were for hydro wires and UFOs, which led me at the time to believe communications might be just as important as power to the visiting craft.

  In late July 1976, I was driving to the abandoned road south of Sperling where the ground light called Little Charlie was usually found. Danny and Toby Penner and Rob Wheeler were with me. It was just after dark, and there was nothing on the road except the two tiny green lights that were present when Little Charlie wasn’t flaring. After unsuccessfully trying to get the object to flare, we continued west toward the Pembina Hills to see if we could spot anything flying around the valley.

  We returned at 2:30 a.m. and discovered Little Charlie sitting on the road at a point where the telephone lines end going south. After taking five pictures, we moved to the next mile road east and watched another ball come down the road and collide with Little Charlie.

  Because my only success getting near ground lights was to follow them on foot, we decided to take the movie camera and hike the mile across the field to see if we could get close to the lights. Danny explained what happened next.

  We kept on coming closer and closer and shooting some more film. When we got to the road, they seemed as far as when we had started after it, and that’s after walking a mile across a farmer’s field. Then we heard what we thought to be hydro lines, but they actually were the telephone lines humming really loud. We looked around and came to the conclusion that maybe the object was taking power, but it couldn’t take power from a telephone line.

  We then saw these two objects that we knew as “the objects at the end of the road” right on top of the telephone lines. “I don’t know why,” said Danny, “but we saw so many objects that night. They were all over the place.”

  Asked what the appearance of the two objects was over the lines, Danny responded, “The ones that were sitting over the telephone lines were both an orangey colour and further down the road you could see the green ones that we had seen earlier. They were bright orange lights, but they were so bright that they looked white — close to white.”

  “When we first went after them, it was close to 2:30 in the morning,” Danny explained. “It took us 15 minutes to walk down there, and we spent about five minutes trying to figure out what was causing the noise.”

  Later calculations at the sight placed the objects 13 telephone poles south down the road. Danny shot some film. “I finished the roll off,” he stated. “There really wasn’t much film left, so I finished it off. Through the lens you couldn’t see them too bright, but I could see the outline of the poles, and you could see them changing their intensity of light and colour — brightening and dimming.”

  Later in the summer of 1976 I was just south of Elm Creek with some university students when I heard a strange noise. This time I had my tape recorder and taped 30 seconds of the sound. The next day the sound was put on an oscilloscope to see what the wave pattern was. There, on the scope, was a double-wave pattern, one high-frequency and one quite low.12

  At one of the main hydroelectric developments at Kettle Rapids in northern Manitoba I was told that workers had reported numerous UFOs. During construction, they said sightings of mysterious lights flying up and down the river occurred almost daily.

  Two Manitoba hydro employees also let me in on the fact that during the long Carman flap of 1975 a major drain happened on the line heading to Winnipeg. However, a hydro spokesman who answered my questions about this report failed to confirm there was a heavy drain off the lines.

  A few of the landings that took place in Manitoba also seemed to indicate that high-tension lines played a central role in at least some of them. Mike Pomehichuk of Rossburn found 14 swirled spots in his grain field. Many were near a high-tension line running past his farm and one was directly under it.

  North of Portage la Prairie, Betsy Clinton and I discovered 12 ­horseshoe-shaped areas in a pasture where the grass was burnt out and refused to grow again. Many of these were close to high-tension lines following an east-west direction along the south side of the pasture.

  The next day Betsy and her son found a new horseshoe mark that had just been made where the grass was burnt and pushed down. This was also right under a hydro line.

  Finally, Jennette Frost reported that when she saw the large craft that nearly hit her house there was a noise associated with it. Roger Timlick, who participated in the interview, asked her what sound the craft had made.

  “None at all,” replied Jennette. “The only noise I heard at the time was the hydro wires. They were really humming. That thing always affects the hydro lines. You can pretty well tell when it’s coming. It [the object] must have come over the wires.”

  A Peculiar Form of Light

  There are many different types of lights found in the sky on a clear night. Those of identifiable origin give off a light with a repeatable and well-known nature.

  Stars in the evening sky twinkle with a white to yellow-white colour. Planets, on the other hand, appear larger and glow rather than twinkle. While elevated high over the horizon, their colour is basically the same as a star’s, but when their nightly course brings them close to the horizon, they appear reddish-orange because of the amount of atmosphere the observer looks through.

  Planes, though, exhibit a series of lights to tell others in nearby airspace they are there. These are called navigation lights and are the same for all planes. The right wing tip has a small green light, the left wing tip a red one. In the middle, on the bottom of the fuselage, there is a larger red beacon that rotates once per second. On the tail a zenon strobe light can be seen. It looks like the flash of a camera and also repeats its cycle once per second.

  The only time these navigation lights aren’t visible is when the plane has its landing lights on. These resemble car headlights except they are much brighter. Some of the larger commercial jets have three landing lights.

  This list of lights, when compared to the numerous reports of nocturnal lights or nighttime UFOs, leaves a lot of lighting formations and types unexplained. They seem simply enough not to be products of our technology
unless government bureaucracy has secretly sanctioned a second group of flyers to travel at night with whatever lights they please.

  Yet, what if these unidentified lights belong to alien technology? If the aliens wish to remain hidden, why do they place lights around their craft for all to see? Are they afraid of a mid-air collision? Are these lights indicators that they want to land at our airports?

  These simple lights therefore pose a problem and deserve a much more important place in history than ufologists have been willing to give them. The majority of UFO reports involve light of one type or another. That is how they are detected. But what is the light’s source and why is it there?

  Of all the thousands of reports in Manitoba concerning light of one type or another, the most famous involved Charlie Red Star’s lighting. The object seemed to emanate red light from its entire surface. Those who saw Charlie close up weren’t even sure of his shape because of the great amount of light. “It looked,” many people said, “like a great big fireball.”

  Like most odd similarities found in UFO reports, the lighting formations seemed to have a purpose. Most people who had time to consider the problem related the light to the propulsion of the craft. Different formations and colours were translated into different manoeuvres and speeds. Red was slow and low; white was high and fast.

  Two lighting similarities arose, however, that appear rather unconnected to anything. They were daytime light and dead light.

  Time and time again, witnesses reported experiences to me in which UFOs they saw lit up the entire countryside. They stumbled around trying to express the unbelievable, but rarely did they find words to adequately describe the amount of light coming off the objects they observed.

  Usually, they explained it as daylight at night. “It came down the river,” Marnie Herb told the National Enquirer’s Daniel Coleman and me, “and it was just like the sun had come out. It was just as bright as the brightest day in summer. You could see the shadow of every tree in the bush.”

  “It was 500 to 1,000 feet in front of the tractor over the bushes,” witness Ron Middleton told me, “and it was so bright it lit up the entire bush.” Not only did it light up the bush, it illuminated the entire field Ron was working in. It was so intense a light that he couldn’t look at it without hurting his eyes, and at that point he decided to turn around and go home.

  “When I saw it,” Frederick Clinton told me, “it was just off our yard behind a set of bushes. There were four of five bright lights that lit up the entire bush. It was terribly bright. I woke up. It must have flown right over the house.”

  Tina Stevens also awakened one night in the spring to find that it was suddenly as bright as day at 4:00 a.m. “I didn’t see the object,” she stated. “I was much too scared to go to the window, but I did see the light. I tried to get my husband up, but by the time he got up, whatever it was, was gone.”

  In a landing in Letellier, Manitoba, near the U.S. border, a farm family was alerted to the fact that something was happening when in the middle of the night it suddenly became daylight. The next day a huge circle of young sunflower plants was found dead in a field a half mile west of the house.

  Finally, Brendon Eagle, a successful inventor, saw the brilliant light one evening at dusk. Watching it closely, he calculated what might be causing such a light. “It was at about the 1,500-foot level,” he said, “and it passed over the Jordan, Manitoba, grain elevator. It was so bright you could see every nail in the elevator. It had arc ray lighting on it. That’s what it was. It was arc ray lighting. It’s one of those arc welder’s lights. We’re starting to get lights somewhat like them now.”

  In addition to these daytime lights, the accounts revealed a type of light reported as dead light, which failed to illuminate anything around it. For the main example of this phenomenon, I will draw from my own experience while researching ground lights in April 1976. Standing 100 to 150 feet from a ground light that was a couple of feet in diameter, I noticed it was sitting low between two dikes in a drainage ditch. It was also touching a white-painted bridge crossing the ditch. Even though the extremely bright object brushed the bridge, it threw no more illumination on the structure than two candles would.

  From this the “internal light hypothesis” was developed, which seemed best at describing what numerous witnesses and I had seen. Most, like me, reported that the entire object produced this light. In other words, it wasn’t a light on the object; it was actually the object itself.

  Thus many Charlie Red Star witnesses reported the light was “a terrific glow” or like “heated metal.” Again, as with the ground lights, accounts indicated that this glow all over the surface of the object made it hard to determine its exact shape.

  This characteristic is crucial, and many people have attempted to link this type of light to the propulsion system of the craft they observe.13 More important, the dead light phenomenon is significant because ufologists constantly confuse the distinction between “light” and a “glowing light” when filing reports. The light is thrown off; the glow just spills over. The difference between a dead and glowing light is vital because it eliminates almost all the natural light forms known to humans.

  Flying on an Angle

  Nearly all the hundreds of UFO books published include sections of pictures showing the vast array of unidentified objects people have been lucky enough to photograph. The majority of these reveal an object tilted to one side or the other, or in other words, an object flying on an angle.

  Logically, such a strange flying angle must represent an important purpose because it is uncommon in current aviation technology. Planes today are still basically designed on the principle of throwing a smooth rock and are therefore built to cut through the air as cleanly as possible.

  The strange reported flying angle is also of consequence because it rules out hallucinations and hoaxes as possible explanations of the Manitoba UFO flap. Those whose reports were hoaxes would be expected to describe well-known normal flying characteristics, and hallucinations would produce descriptions that would be all over the map without any common elements.

  For such a glaring characteristic about UFO flight, it is odd that little has been written concerning why saucers should be tilted in flight.

  In the Manitoba UFO flap experience, reports of angled flight were extremely common. In fact, of those people who saw UFOs during the day or were close enough at night to see them clearly, the observation of horizontal flight almost never occurred. However, a tilt was nearly always described in these accounts. Manitoba researchers whose interest it was to discover how UFOs are powered gave numerous explanations of this peculiar angle. Of these, only one hypothesis has promise.

  Regardless of why UFOs appear to fly on their “edges,” the fact remains that countless reports describe this phenomenon. Because of the scarce mention of the phenomenon in UFO literature, I am still able to use this oddity to validate the reliability of each account in Manitoba.

  It is very unlikely that any of the witnesses could have read about the angle feature, so they must have experienced the phenomenon. Such was the case with the UFO reports given to me by the five members of the McCann family. Because the family members had so many close encounters with UFOs, very few people chose to believe anything they said.

  I talked to Anna McCann about the half-dozen times she witnessed UFOs flying in and around the family’s farm in late May 1975. “It was a great big thing,” Anna told me concerning one UFO that almost hit the house. “It had a silvery dome on it with red and green lights around it. I couldn’t see the bottom. It was just like the whole thing was tilted up with its top to me, and it was flying on its edge.”

  “What do you mean ‘on its edge’?” I asked.

  “It was flying sideways. It was sort of on an angle.”

  “Just this one?”

  “Oh, no! All of the ones we saw did that. They all flew on an angle.”


  Statements like that convinced me the McCanns were telling the truth despite the disbelief they incurred in Carman. I was one of the few people who knew the object was flying on an angle, and I kept that to myself.

  It seemed to me that Anna and Joseph McCann were having actual experiences, but I wondered about their children. Would they report the same odd flying tilt described by their parents?

  In the spring of 1976, I got to talk to the McCann children without their parents present. Sure enough, the three kids told me that on four separate occasions they, too, had observed the particular tilt. Given their very limited life experience, this element common to their accounts appeared to back up their stories. The children also stuck to their stories despite the tremendous criticism they received from their peers at school.

  The degree of the tilt angle recounted by witnesses does vary from one report to another, rising from a low of 20 to a very commonly cited 45-degree angle. The leading edge being up and the bottom of the saucer facing the direction of motion were the most frequent descriptions of the angle.

  Mrs. Krutcher, who watched a UFO make four passes over Morden, told me the object travelled with its bottom side forward. Such a motion, she told me, reminded her very much of how a Frisbee flies.

  She was quite accurate in her description. A spinning Frisbee can be made to fly with its leading edge up from a horizontal axis. The similarity between a Frisbee and a UFO might mean more than we think.

  Perhaps the most dramatic example of the angle factor is found in a report that was part of the CKY film. The angle was even given a name — “the unloading position” — when Jeff Bishop, the Dufferin Leader’s publisher, spotted Charlie Red Star on the ground. He stated, “It was sitting at an angle of 45 degrees … much like seeing a drive-in movie screen from the side.” Bishop’s story, though unusual, shows that this tilt might have more to do with UFOs than in just the way they fly.