Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  The object moved from my left to right, which meant there should have been a green navigation light visible if it was a plane. There was none.

  The speed seemed much too slow for a plane.

  To land at Carman the object would have had to be a small plane. In that case, it wouldn’t have been flying in thunderstorms.

  Nevertheless, at 11:25 p.m., I raced back to Carman to see if the runway lights were on at either of the two airports. Not surprising, both airstrips were shut down for the night. I checked the sky and saw nothing, so I headed for home driving east on Highway 3.

  At Homewood, Manitoba, nine miles east of Carman, I spotted a brilliant light. The orange crystal light hovered just over the horizon as I grabbed my camera to take a photo. I released the shutter and caught it, believing it would be a good one, because of all the UFOs I had ever seen, this was the biggest. The object seemed to continue its movement toward me and at the same time got brighter.

  Mysterious orange glow and small orange object.

  I gave the first two shots (frames 10 and 11) a 10-second exposure. Worried that the film might be overexposed, I pushed back the exposure to one second for frames 12, 13, and 14. I didn’t aim the camera, since I was watching as the shape of the object began to form. Then, with a brief glance at my camera, I looked up and the object was gone.

  Taking out my notepad, I copied the exposures of the five photos I had just shot. Then, when I panned the horizon with my binoculars, I noticed the object was still there — now a small white ball against a black overcast sky. It was higher on the horizon and was moving east about 10 degrees from its previous position. The object then turned red without a flash or pulsation. It wasn’t very bright, so I shot a 60-second exposure (frame 15), hoping to pick it up.

  As I watched the object, I noticed it was about to cross behind a telephone pole on the highway. Figuring I could get a good point of reference, I shifted to the next frame and snapped a 30-second time exposure.8

  By this time, the object had moved quite far down the road. I quickly put the camera in my car and sped after the UFO. At Highway 248 I turned south for a half mile and set up my camera again. The object turned once more and headed back toward the highway in the direction of Sperling (four miles from my position). I shot a 40-second time exposure and then a 60-second one. The object changed from solid red, to a pulse every two seconds, and then to a brilliant crystal-white light. When I studied the shot later, the transformation in the object was very apparent.

  The UFO then turned north at Sperling, and I snapped frame 19, which was a 15-second exposure. It was now 12:20; the major part of the sighting had taken 20 minutes. I had shot 13 pictures of the two objects in the sky and felt they were good, perhaps even better than Tannis’s photos.

  I delivered the film to a photo shop in downtown Winnipeg and requested that it be left uncut. In this way, no one could claim the photos had been assembled from a number of different pictures. All the frames would be numbered, and I had a history of exactly what had occurred on each frame, which would provide evidence of an hour of UFO sightings in the main flap area.

  When I got the developed film back, I rushed home to view it. Placing it near a light and using a magnifying glass, I could see the prints quite clearly. The lights of the towns showed up well and there had been enough time for the film to pick up the horizon, as well. Second, the film showed that the object had only trailed across three-quarters of the frame during the three-minute exposure. Here was proof of just how slowly it had been travelling.

  Nine of the 13 prints were good, the best I had taken up to that date. The five of the brilliant crystal light were very clear, and the differences in the time exposures between frames 10 and 11 and frames 12, 13, and 14 were obvious.

  Four of the pictures had horizons because of the high humidity that night. The surrounding towns had cast up round circles of light into the night sky. That, combined with the other things in the picture, gave me excellent points of reference.

  In my eagerness to get backup support for the pictures, I immediately mailed them to Wendelle Stevens in Tucson, Arizona, for analysis. It was said that Wendelle had perhaps the best UFO picture collection in the world. What’s more, he had published several UFO books and written articles for many publications in the field.

  Later, through the National Enquirer, I learned that the photos never arrived at Wendelle’s place. I wrote him to find out if that was true, and he replied in a letter: “Pictures lost in the mail is a maddening situation. No other mail gets lost, but when you send a new and sensitive picture through the mail the chance is high that it will never reach its destination.”

  Then, in reference to a possible “men-in-black” connection, he added, “I have a case now where pictures were separated and mailed in separate envelopes from different mailboxes, and neither reached me. How do you account for that? Also at the time when these photos should have arrived, my house was searched professionally from top to bottom, completely, and nothing was taken. I was told that four conservatively dressed men were seen in front of my house during the one and a half hours I was gone. Nobody ever saw them before or has seen them since.”9

  The CKY-TV Movie

  We just wanted to go out because this intrigued us. Wednesday we got the film, and the next night we had to beat people off with sticks, the ones who wanted to come out.

  — Dorsey Roberts

  The story of the CKY-TV movie was probably the biggest and strangest one of the entire Manitoba UFO flap. Once the film was taken on May 13, 1975, and was aired to Winnipeg’s nearly 600,000 residents, it caused a deluge of people and cars to appear on back roads around Carman, searching for the object.

  The CKY film was a mixture of peculiar occurrences, faith, perseverance, and luck. It was one of those times when everyone and everything worked to create a nearly perfect state of being. Those involved had their own spin on capturing Charlie Red Star on film. Martin Rugne, who took the footage, said, “The film was a disaster for me from start to finish.” Dustin Hope, a former producer at CKY who was involved in the filming, called the movie of Charlie “a fluke.”

  At the time of the CKY filming there were probably only about three dozen UFO movies around. It was in the days before video cameras and cellphones revolutionized UFO filming. Now there are thousands of UFO movies. In 1975–76 you either talked a TV station into shooting footage or you used an 8 mm camera with a small three-minute roll that wasn’t good for nighttime filming and was very expensive.

  The CKY movie is one of two taken during the Manitoba UFO flap. The other features one of the ground lights in the spring of 1976. Both are unique because the cameramen went out specifically to shoot UFOs and weren’t reacting to random events.

  Opinions of the CKY film vary. The most quoted one was expressed by J. Allen Hynek of the Center for UFO Studies when he was in Winnipeg on February 7, 1976, to give a lecture at the University of Manitoba’s Festival of Life and Learning. CKY and the Winnipeg Planetarium went out of their way to screen the footage for Hynek, who commented after seeing it that it was “the best nocturnal light film he had ever seen.” Hynek asked for and received two copies of the movie. He was supposed to make an announcement about the film later, but he never did. It is doubtful if any investigation took place, because Hynek didn’t interview any of the witnesses involved in the shooting of the footage.

  People who participated in the shooting contacted Hynek to obtain his analysis of the film but were unable to get a reply. The Winnipeg Planetarium and I also attempted to reach Hynek concerning the movie, but we, too, came up empty.

  In March 1976, I spoke to Dustin Hope on this matter. “I think that’s almost rude of the professor,” he said, “because that’s his forte. I know he’s a busy man, but not too busy to answer. I waited for him, too. He promised to send back his hypothesis but never did.”10

  Martin
Rugne had a similar comment: “I don’t know if he [Hynek] was serious about the whole thing. I never heard from him again.”

  The film itself got little play when it was first shot. CKY aired it for two days and did an 11-minute special on it. They then forgot about it. The Dufferin Leader, which had one of its reporters as part of the team that did the filming, only gave the movie 21 lines. The National Enquirer heard the whole story but only referred to the footage in passing when it published an article on the landing radiation patches found where Charlie had sat.

  Those who were present for the actual shooting were: Martin Rugne, a CKY cameraman and film editor; Dorsey Roberts, a CKY television reporter, and his wife; Jeff Bishop, the publisher of the Dufferin Leader; Kerry Kaelin, a Dufferin Leader reporter; Anthony Britain, the Friendship Field’s owner, and his wife, Rachael; and Al Harpley, another newspaper reporter.

  Although many people saw the film, the full story of how it was shot was never released. What follows is the whole account of exactly what occurred.

  In April and May 1975, Charlie Red Star was flying his famous “beer runs” out of the Roseisle hills west of Carman toward town and then turned around to the northwest side of town. Anthony Britain and his wife knew more than anyone about Charlie’s pattern and were acting as tour guides, leading teams of people around Carman to watch for a Charlie flyby.

  Anthony contacted CKY and assured the station that if it sent out a camera crew, he would show them Charlie Red Star. CKY took up the offer and dispatched four reporters to Carman on Monday, May 12. Dorsey Roberts, then a reporter for CKY, later CBC-TV where I interviewed him, was one of the few to spend four consecutive nights on the back roads around Carman. “We were out two nights prior to the filming,” Roberts told me, “the night of the filming and the night after. So I was out there a total of four nights. Monday night we saw nothing. Tuesday night we went out, and that’s when we saw the thing down at the end of the roadway. The people who had seen this thing before said, ‘That’s it!’

  “There was a fellow with us by the name of Eddie Griffin. He was another reporter from the station who was out on his own. He got his car and went flying down the road toward it. We saw the thing and kept our eye on it, but then it disappeared. We never saw it again that night, but I understand someone else saw it in a different location, but still around Carman.”11

  On the evening of the filming, 10 people showed up, hoping this would be the night. According to the article that appeared in the Dufferin Leader, “The sighting was made about 11:00 p.m., with the first UFO sighted on the ground northwest of Graysville, Manitoba.”12

  Everyone was gathered two miles north of Carman when the object was first sighted. Jeff Bishop, Kerry Kaelin, and Al Harpley got into their car to chase the object, which was down the road west of them. They headed a mile north to stay out of the way of Martin Rugne, who was at the CBC tower with his camera pointed down the road at the light. The men also realized that the previous night the light had disappeared when people drove right at it. When they were a mile north, the team of men travelled west toward Stephenfield where the object appeared to be sitting.

  “We went west five miles and then went south,” Bishop said. “Just before we got back to the road that the UFO was on, I said, ‘Stop the car before we get to the mile road because we don’t want to jeopardize our position.’”

  The Britains, along with reporter Dorsey Roberts and his wife, had gone south and then west to approach the object. “This thing was just down the road from us,” Anthony told me. “It kept rising and falling like a blood-red moon through the trees. So we said, ‘There has to be something out there.’ Just before we left, the cameraman [Rugne] was running down the road with his camera. I was standing there right beside him, and I said to myself, ‘Boy, is that guy wasting his film.’ That’s just before he got the shot of the thing lifting off and lighting up the whole horizon. Talk about a surprised fellow when I saw that [the CKY film] on television. Weren’t we surprised!”

  The Britains and Dorsey Roberts headed south in the opposite direction of the Bishop car in order to come out on the other side of the object. “Instead of going west,” Anthony told me, “we went east, not realizing that we had to go two miles before you could get back onto the road we wanted.”

  “We put the binoculars on it and you could see it clearly,” Dorsey said. “It seemed to be more or less sitting there.”

  Anthony tried to close in on the object when suddenly in his own words “It popped into the air. It jumped straight up. It hovered and then moved over a bit, hovered again, and then headed for the CBC tower.”

  The two couples watched the objects with binoculars. “It wasn’t moving fast,” said Anthony, “so we started racing back. I kept telling Dorsey, ‘Those guys at the tower are going to look right in.’”

  Meanwhile Jeff Bishop, Kerry Kaelin, and Al Harpley appeared to be the ones who had scared Charlie into the air. The problem was they didn’t know where the object had gone. They were looking around for it when it was now high above them.

  “I could see this big glow behind some trees less than half a mile away off to the right and ahead of us,” Jeff told the National Enquirer. “It was smoky red, with a hazy glow, and to me the thing was higher than the tree, maybe 50 feet tall. It was about 20 feet thick and was sitting at an angle of about 45 degrees. The edges were fuzzy and not well defined. It was much like seeing a drive-in movie screen from the side.”

  At the same time Al was using the microwave tower at Haywood to get his bearings in the dark. “I swung back,” he told the Enquirer, “and the glow was gone. It was gone before I could see it again. We drove around the section, but we never saw anything else.”

  Charlie in the trees: “It was much like seeing a drive-in movie screen from the side.”

  The car with Jeff, Kerry, and Al had come within half a mile of the object. This was confirmed when the Winnipeg Planetarium found significant radiation in the field where the object had rested. (See Chapter 6, “Landings,” for a full report of this.)

  Meanwhile, Martin was back at the tower, his camera pointed down the road at the glowing light that alternately increased and decreased in intensity. He was trying to determine when to shoot. It was completely dark, so he had no perspective. All he could see in the viewfinder was the light. He decided that the next time it brightened he would shoot, which turned out to be a lucky decision.

  As the object brightened again, Martin started shooting his first-ever television clip. As he began to do so, the object suddenly jumped into the air and flew northeast back toward the camera. When it did, Martin panned the camera, following its flight path.

  “Rugne told me that he had seen it come tracking across the sky, and that’s when he followed it,” Dorsey Roberts told me in an interview later. “He panned it and then stopped the camera. That was great foresight on his part — to stop the camera and let the object move through the frame so that later someone could tell how fast the object was moving.”

  “I shot, I would say, roughly between 30 and 50 feet of film by the amount of time,” Martin said. “Let’s say about 80 degrees from left to right. From 10:00 p.m. right up to midnight, the camera was moving. I was panning with it. After midnight and up to 12:10, between those three or four degrees, that was the only time the camera was stationary. Once it went through the camera, I picked it up again and followed it up through to about 2:00 a.m.”

  Martin and Dorsey made it back to Winnipeg at about 2:00 a.m. They drove by CKY and dropped off the film at the station for processing. Neither was prepared for the controversy that erupted, or the fact that the weirdest part of the story was yet to come.

  The most bizarre aspect of the developed film was the order of sequences. “We always conjured up interesting things, that someone was playing tricks on us,” Dorsey told me. “All the filming was done on the same roll of film and it was shot in thi
s order — one, the light at the end of the road; two, the flash and the jumping into the air of the object; and three, the tracking across the sky.

  “Yet when we got the film back from the lab the whole sequence was reversed for some reason. The film hadn’t broken in the lab. It wasn’t that they had edited it back together wrong. When it came to us, the tracking across the sky was first and the other portion was on second. It was backward.”

  From any standpoint of camera logic, this was impossible, but those who saw the film claimed it happened. Unfortunately, the evidence was about to be lost.

  “When I shot the original footage,” Martin angrily recalled, “there was 45 to 50 feet of film or something like that. I was out till 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. About noon all these characters [CKY film editors] had already chopped the film up, and the only thing that was left was two-eight inch pieces, and they had thrown the rest away. Now I’ve got the last two eight-inch pieces, the pieces that everyone sees, but they had thrown everything away before and after. I tried to find the rest of the film, but no one could tell me where they had thrown it.

  “Everyone said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Those suckers, either through gross stupidity or something else, they threw it out. I cannot to this day comprehend how anyone could be that stupid, but they apparently were that collectively stupid. The reversal of the sequences can’t be proved now because they threw away the rest of the film. If they had left the film from start to finish in its entirety, a whole set of circumstances could be brought forward. There were a lot of things that were strange about this film. It just goes on and on … rather strange.”

  The reason that 97 percent of the footage ended up in the trash raises the next odd aspect about the film. There was nothing on it when Martin panned the camera, even though he could see it in the viewfinder while he was shooting. When the station editors saw nothing on these portions, they simply cut them out and threw them away.