Other Common Elements
As well as the numerous similarities in Manitoba UFO reports already mentioned, there were many other shared characteristics in the accounts. These, too, were just as hard to explain and therefore equally as indicative of an actual reality.
Take, for example, the numerous stories of UFOs flying at a car, beside it, over it, or close behind it. During a three-year period in Manitoba, there were at least 17 such accounts. All those questioned referred to other peculiar similarities that seemed directly linked to their experiences. In every case, their cars were the only ones around, as if every other vehicle usually on the road had disappeared.
In almost all of the incidents, the driver either tried to catch up to the UFO in front, or away from the UFO beside, over, or behind. It was no surprise to hear of frightened drivers racing down a dirt road at 80 or more miles per hour.
Witnesses in all the cases failed to catch up or get away. They reported that if they stopped, so would the UFOs, and if they sped up, the UFOs did the same. In the five cases in which witnesses chased UFOs, everyone reported: “It knew what I was thinking.” The common opinion was that the UFOs were playing with them, letting them catch up, and then pulling away.
Another major parallel that surfaced in cases in which trailing UFOs were involved is that the incidents occurred at night. Four witnesses reported that it seemed to be the lights of their cars that attracted the UFOs. Twice during the 1975 flap Joseph and Anna McCann mentioned a UFO that flew directly at their truck at tremendous speed. When Joseph turned off the car lights, the object halted and backed up down the road.
A couple of months later a group of seven teenagers reported exactly the same phenomenon. They were travelling down an abandoned highway when a huge saucer-shaped object flew to within 100 feet of them. “It was moving back and forth,” Bob Sanderson told me. “When I shut my lights out, it started to leave. When I turned my lights back on, it would come toward us again. So I left the lights out.”
Nine months after that Linda Chociemski sat with her husband watching a saucer hover near their car on Highway 8, north of Gimli. “We were watching it,” she said, “and it seemed that every time lights would come down the highway, it would back up. When there were no lights, it would come closer to us.”
Ufologists have always questioned why a UFO would travel from another solar system simply to chase cars around. In the 1990s, Dr. Steven Greer, who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI), received endless criticism for leading groups of people to various U.S. locations to attempt contacts with UFOs. One of the key elements employed to communicate was to flash lights at the objects.
Greer had no support in the world’s UFO community, but in Manitoba, witnesses who had close encounters with UFOs would have likely approved of him. There was a clear link in Manitoba sightings between light and UFOs.14
Finally, oddities arising from the Manitoba reports include the fact that UFOs flew within an inch or two of houses, trees or hydro lines. UFOs reported at night were almost always described as moving very slowly, between 10 and 80 miles per hour. Numerous times words such as crawling and floating were used to explain the snail’s pace made by nocturnal craft.
On the other hand, UFOs spotted during the day were portrayed as hovering or moving extremely fast. Independent witnesses told me there were likely many daylight UFOs, but they were hard to distinguish because of their high speed. Luck was a word usually equated with seeing a daylight disk.
5
Cameras, Photographers, and Charlie Red Star
That’s the best [photography] you can do at night. You can’t do any better unless the thing ends up in my own backyard at noon hour, but that’s a different story. Then I’ll give them lunch, too.
— Tannis Major, Carman Professional Photographer
It had a pattern to it that wouldn’t have been any meteor or comet or anything like that. It changed. It moved so quickly across the screen. It was calculated by NASA, and NBC also looked at it, and about 20 scientists in the United States at the time it was hot. They estimated it to be going 32,000 miles per hour. My calculation was 120,000 miles per hour. I was plotting coordinates as the thing moves across the screen, and you’ll never get a picture like that again. There’s no way that you can try. There it is. Get it. It just went right across the camera while it was running, which was something else. A fluke.
— Dustin Hope, CKY-TV Producer
We always conjured up new and different thoughts that someone was playing tricks on us … we didn’t know where we were going to get on it. I think it was 100 percent luck because that was Martin’s [the cameraman’s] first filming.
— Dorsey Roberts, Former CKY-TV Reporter
One of the most important aspects of the Manitoba UFO flap was its great regularity. In early and mid-1975, Charlie Red Star flew low over the same general areas of the province, and many photographers took time from their lives to be present.
As I discovered in the photographs I took, it wasn’t a simple matter of going out, getting pictures, and publishing them around the world. In fact, looking back, the problems greatly outweighed the fact that Charlie was around.
In the mid-1970s, there were no digital cameras, video cameras, or VCRs. All we had at our disposal were 35 mm cameras and 8 mm movie cameras. Television stations such as CKY and CBC from Winnipeg had 16 mm television cameras, but their interest in filming Charlie always centred on a crew getting paid to film. Those who tried to photograph Charlie knew that was a lost cause, since a lot of waiting was required and a great deal of luck was needed to be in the right place at the right time.
Taking pictures at night in an almost pitch-black countryside was an art in itself. The camera required a tripod and a cable release to achieve the necessary time exposures. Moving a tripod around and then getting a camera set up on it quickly if something was seen often proved comical. A tripod also cut down on mobility, since the camera had to be moved from one place to another and had to be focused on different parts of the sky.
It was hard to take notes describing each photo while working in the dark. It was also difficult to keep track of exactly where in the large valley you were at any one point because of the dark and because there were few landmarks. There were often no trees, farmyards, or anything else.
My personal experience is that it was essential to know the camera as if you were blind. Light couldn’t be used to set up because night vision always seemed to fail when it was most needed. When things started to happen, they occurred terribly fast, leaving no time to fiddle with dials and focus settings.
No one can better attest to the problems shooting UFOs than Tannis Major, a professional photographer in Carman who spent every night for a month outdoors to get the one picture of Charlie that would prove he wasn’t a figment of the imagination.
“I saw the darn thing,” she said. “I was at Anthony Britain’s airfield and saw it there at a distance. Low and behold, he [a CBC cameraman] had to put his bright spotlights on me. Well, you don’t see anything for a long time. So finally they shut them off and I got my night vision back.
“[Then] I saw it again. Bingo, on went the lights again. Three times they pulled that stunt. I told them that if they didn’t get lost with that thing I would knock the spotlight right out of their hands. I said, ‘Get lost. I don’t want you here.’ But they wanted news. I told them they were going to get news.”
Another of the major difficulties that arose attempting to film Charlie Red Star was putting up with the paranormal occurrences that took place, an aspect every photographer in the area would swear to.
A good number of the films and pictures didn’t turn out, and no one was ever able to answer why. It seemed that if a situation could go wrong, it did. It was safe to say that those who tried to take photos often spent more time trying to figure out why they failed than shooting them.
Tannis, the most active photographer in the early days of the UFO flap in the Carman area, spent four to five hours each day for 27 nights in May 1975 in the countryside waiting for a chance to take one photo that would pay off. “I was out there all the time with my camera,” she told me, “because I just didn’t believe … well, first of all, I was a little skeptical till I saw it. It’s the same as a chair. You have to believe it because you see it. It’s just there.”
She felt that if she could photograph the object, the result would show the true nature of the phenomenon. “There will be a number of non-believers, you might as well say. To make sure of it, I was going to put it on film,” she told me, sitting in her kitchen. “That was my aim — to put it on film in case it’s a phenomenon — but then it wouldn’t show up.”
When I first met Tannis, I was taken by a story she told that outlined her experience with the paranormal aspect of catching Charlie on film. “Wherever you go to film it,” she said, “make sure that there is a piece of glass between you and the object.”
I stared at her in disbelief, but it was apparent she was serious.
“There must be something with glass,” she continued. “It might work in the same way as radar and tinfoil. If you don’t shoot behind glass, you aren’t going to get a picture. Charlie knows what you’re thinking.”
This whole idea of glass, thought waves, cameras, and flying saucers sounded insane at best, but I realized Tannis had something going for her. She had (and still has) the best UFO photos out of the many pictures that were taken. I, too, took photographs and brought with me nine different photographers at one time or another, but we got nothing as good as Tannis did.
To back up her contention that glass was a necessary component for successful photos, she told me a story I eventually heard many times — the tale of Charlie “taking off” on the second night.1
The people present on the evening in question were Tannis, Anthony and Rachael Britain, and Sam Brazil. The car they were in was just north of Morden when Charlie appeared to fly right at them. “It was coming lower and lower,” Tannis recounted. “I said to Anthony, ‘If I can get a darn good shot that’s clear and we can see the shape of it, then I’m going to get myself a nice silver-coloured station wagon.’ Everything was ready. I had it in the viewfinder when Anthony says, ‘Tannis, here comes your station wagon.’ But when I was ready to shoot it was lights out.”
“Lights out,” as Tannis described, was an event most Carman witnesses had experienced. It had happened to Tannis many times, and it was experienced by me and to the photographers who accompanied me.
“One time I went out sighting with Mrs. Frost,” Tannis said. “We stayed in the car because the mosquitoes were waiting for a good banquet. Then we saw the darn thing. I had it in the viewfinder and I shot a picture of it through the windshield. I said to Mrs. Frost, ‘I wonder if that theory is correct? I’m going to get out. I’m going to find out.’” As she went to take another photo, the object disappeared.
A couple of months later I experienced the same thing. During the spring of 1976, I had mentioned to people in Winnipeg that UFO sightings were so heavy in the Carman-Sperling area that I could take them out and show them a UFO every night.
Carl Bachmanek, owner of a camera repair shop in Winnipeg, and his assistant, Paul Dawkins, took me up on my offer. They quickly gathered their high-speed film and telephoto lens and picked up a third photographer, John Losics, and were ready to go. In turn, I called Robin Davies, who at the time was a student at the University of Manitoba. I told him tonight was the night, since he had expressed an interest in photographing the phenomenon.
Robin and I were driving out of the city when we noticed Karl standing at the side of the highway. He flagged us over and said they had brought the wrong telephoto lens and had to go back to the city to get the right one. Since it was almost dusk, we agreed to meet up at the Fireside Inn in Carman.
As Robin and I passed Sperling on our way to Carman, I noticed a blinking light in a field and asked Robin to stop and get out his camera just in case. We pulled off Highway 3 onto Highway 205 East, and Robin began to set up his camera. After shooting 20 pictures, he commented, “That’s the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I hope this film picked it up.”
The photo session had taken quite a while, and we suddenly realized the other car with Karl Bachmanek, John Losics, and Paul Dawkins was now probably way ahead of us. We jumped into our car and raced to Carman. When we arrived, we discovered that not only were they ahead of us but they had been to the Fireside Inn and had already left.
John had been out with me before at the CBC radio tower just north of Carman. I figured that was where he’d gone, so we headed north out of Carman for the tower.
Soon after we started off, we spotted the red pulse of Charlie flying low along the treeline east of the tower. “If those guys went where I think they are,” I told Robin, “that thing is going to fly right over them!”
We pulled off the highway, and I asked Robin to take a picture quickly. He set up his tripod and prepared to photograph the bright orange-red object as it moved along the treeline, but milliseconds before he pushed the cable release, the object dropped below the trees. “It’s gone,” he said. “I don’t think I got it in time.”
Robin wasn’t able to get a picture at all, and as we discovered later, the other car of photographers didn’t, either. They had been in the place I thought they had gone and got a good look at the object, but no pictures.
John Losics and the others had been parked on a bit of a hill facing north. The object approached the car from behind. John saw it first. “Boy, it was close,” he said to me later. “I told the others, ‘There it is,’ but they asked, ‘Where?’”
Carl and Paul were in the front of the two-door car, while John was in the back when he spotted the object. He struggled to get out of the vehicle so he could get a better look. During all the commotion, though, Carl and Paul failed to take any of their equipment with them when they left the car.
“They stood there and just looked at it,” John told me. “Those skeptics had to convince themselves what it was before they would get out their cameras. When they realized what it was, they ran to the car to get their cameras, but before they could get a picture, it dropped below the trees. It was right there, half a mile away, maybe.”
After John told me about the object dropping out of sight before they could shoot it, I reflected on Tannis’s words when she told me Charlie knew what you were thinking and that you should try to have a piece of glass in the way when trying to photograph him. Charlie’s “disappearance,” she told me, had happened to her many times. Now we had experienced it, Anthony Britain was subjected to the same treatment, too, when he was at the CBC tower with his movie camera. It had occurred one other time for me when I spotted Charlie with my movie camera in hand at Elm Creek, north of Carman. Perhaps the elusive Charlie did know when to vanish.
This lights-out situation became so common and disturbing that those involved in photographing in the area did whatever they could think of to counteract the disappearing phenomenon. Anthony told me one day about his attempt with four other witnesses to shoot Charlie. “The thing is that those rascals, whoever they are, have a way of being known when they’re being watched because it didn’t change course until we jumped out of the car and were watching it. It suddenly reversed direction and sped away. I don’t imagine it was any more than about 30 seconds to a minute at the most when it stopped and went backward.
“In fact, we’ve gotten to the point when we see the thing we’ll think of how the weather is … everything but concentrate on it, which is impossible to do. If they were receiving thought waves, it doesn’t work when you’re sitting in a car, because you’re shielded. This has been our experience, anyway.”
Another bizarre occurrence was the relationship between the distance of the object and the numb
er of things that went wrong with the photograph. It appeared from the experience of the photographers that the closer the object came, the greater the chance something would go wrong with the film, or the lens wouldn’t be set properly.
As with the lights-out phenomenon, all the photographers in the area experienced this close-distance tendency, too. Tannis had it happen to her, as well, but not knowing that other shutterbugs were in the same company as she was, she blamed the film processor.
“Mrs. Frost and I took a whole lot of pictures at the Starbuck tower because there were quite a few of them there,” Tannis told me. “It was processed and turned up nothing. I gave them a piece of my mind. They told me that it had been underexposed and I told them that it hadn’t been underexposed. I said that it hadn’t been because I used the same ASA as I used for the black and white and I knew that the black and white could take it.”
Tannis had processed the black and white herself, and therefore, she told the film processor, “You just messed it up yourself.”
Regardless of who was to blame, future experiences by other people demonstrated that blank negatives weren’t a rare phenomenon. Take, for example, the experience of John Losics and two straight rolls of film that the processor told him: “Didn’t even go through the camera.”
I had been present while these 40 200 ASA colour slides were taken, and neither John nor I could believe the explanation for the lack of pictures. Both of us felt the tension on the film advance when we shot the photos. The first roll had to be loaded at John’s home, and therefore with ample light to see that the film was on the spool.2 Neither of us recalled ever not getting the film on the spool.
The objects were closer when Robin Davies and I went out that early spring night in 1976 than they had ever been before — under a mile away. We used time exposures up to 30 seconds long and therefore felt they couldn’t be underexposed. Nevertheless, when the two films were put on microfiche readers there was nothing there.
Charlie Red Star Page 16