Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  Dorsey Roberts concurred. “The portion that Rugne panned for some reason never turned out.”

  “Why,” Martin told me, “I don’t know. The chemicals on the film react to light. They can’t tell the difference between a UFO and something else.” Yet only when the camera was stationary, the object was on the ground, and Martin had stopped at midnight to get a point of reference with a star he saw in the north did the film capture the light emitted by Charlie.

  Even more spectacular were the strange things discovered when the 16 inches of film was studied frame by frame. The portion where the object jumped into the sky consisted of only three 1/24th-second frames. On the CKY film the object can be seen resting on the ground.

  “It was rising up and down,” Martin said. “I was using a farm light for reference, and every time it would rise I would push the camera a little to the south and shoot. This part of the film can be seen for about a dozen frames before the object jumped. It was suddenly there. It made its motion to jump.”

  Dorsey described to me the three frames of film that made up the jump. It was part of an 11-minute special he produced about the film later for the station. “In the first frame, the object was right in the corner and then for one frame the whole horizon lit up and you could make out the trees and the rolling land. In the third frame, it moved up into the left corner … the actual movement had taken place in 1/24th of a second.”

  In viewing the film, one can see that in the second flash frame the UFO has already jumped over half the frame and the object is more than five miles away. Because J. Allen Hynek and NASA never released their analysis of the footage, the exact number of feet the object actually shot upward still isn’t known.

  The flash is the most interesting part of the film. For one 1/24th-second frame and one frame only the whole western horizon lights up, just as the object lifts off. There are two distinct sections of light cast on the horizon — a large arc in the south and a similar smaller one in the north. Directly below the UFO on the frame there is a space where no light is cast.

  Dustin Hope, the CKY spokesman for the film, described the flash and surrounding events. “How I can best explain it with the little physics that I know of is warped time. I asked the professor [J. Allen Hynek] about warped time and the flash on the horizon with a foreground and a ­b­ackground, and the UFO between them, so that I couldn’t say that it was a car light or anything like that. It wasn’t a car light because the beam was shining in two different directions, just as strong as when it so called disappeared, [the way] UFOs would have to do to get from one place to another. That’s what I found interesting — that it might have defied the speed of light.”

  Even though there were 10 witnesses who were present when the object lifted off, the only person who claimed to have picked up the flash when it did so was Dorsey Roberts.

  “At this point,” Dustin Hope told me, “we don’t know what warped time is — the speed of light? If they were able to break it, that’s what a UFO would have to do to go from one place to another. That’s what I found interesting — that it might have defied the speed of light.”

  “You know,” Dorsey told me, “I kind of thought that I saw something at the time, but nobody else standing around me at the time saw it or said anything, so I thought that maybe my eyes were playing tricks. I said to myself that I hadn’t seen the flash, then I saw it on the film. I remembered that it reinforced what I had seen. It happened so quickly. It was only one frame in the film.”

  The only possible natural explanation for the appearance of the flash on the horizon is what is called a flash frame. Martin Rugne brought up the idea and then immediately ruled it out as a very weak possibility because it only appeared on one frame. “It had 50 feet to do that,” he said. “It seems unreasonable that one should suddenly appear at this point in the film.”

  The more logical explanation for the flash frame is that it was caused by the massive energy that would have been involved in lifting a 50-foot craft high into the air in 2/24th of a second.

  On the second portion of the film, there is another perplexing sequence. Martin had stopped the camera to allow the UFO to fly through the frame. He remembered peering through the viewfinder. “It wasn’t going too fast. It just seemed to float by.”

  This brief eight-inch piece of film also showed an odd wave pattern. It wasn’t flying in a straight line. Instead it appeared to move up and down from crest to trough to crest.

  Charlie Red Star had been observed flying this way even with the naked eye by many observers. The action is called bobbing, akin to what a bobber on a fishing line does in water. On the night of the CKY filming, the speed was fast enough that no one reported bobbing visually. The assumption was that the slower the speed the longer the frequency of the wave and the more apparent the bobbing would be.

  When the CKY film is slowed correctly, the bobbing wave motion becomes apparent. The object travels from the left (west), drops into the wave, then rises once more as it passes clear out the right side of the lens’s field of vision.

  “The object,” according to Martin, “was actually flying a second wave. When the film was slowed down frame by frame, it was found that there was a small wave motion that followed the single large wave.”13 Martin pointed out another interesting aspect that was discovered in this section. He indicated it to me as we screened the film one frame at a time.

  As the object drops into the wave, it seems to rotate. The red object gets a small black line through its middle. This appears and disappears at regular intervals as the object moves to the bottom of the wave. Once the object starts to back up the other side of the wave, this phenomenon stops, but the object continues to pulsate.

  Double-wave pattern of UFO on the CKY-TV movie footage.

  The most unusual aspect of the second segment is the trailing objects (see echo pattern drawing on this page). Directly behind Charlie, at A, the film picks up a second object, which resembles the echo on a radar screen.14 To make the problem more complex, detailed analysis discovered there are more echoes. At B, below Charlie, there is another one, and one more at C above him. A NASA analysis, according to Martin, even shows an echo above and ahead of Charlie at D.

  Echo pattern found on the CKY-TV movie footage.

  It was, however, the main echo behind Charlie that everyone was interested in. When J. Allen Hynek first viewed the film, he stated that this effect might be linked to the inter-dimensional theory.15

  It was plainly apparent, but nobody wanted to interpret just what the echoes were. Most people didn’t even have an idea, and it might have been the appearance of the echoes that scared everyone off when it came time to hypothesize.

  Those present at the filming said nothing. “I watched it all the way,” Anthony Britain told me, “and there was only one object. That I’m sure of, and yet the film picked up two.”

  Dustin Hope at CKY told me his theory that the echo might have been a burn. “We had several photographers look at it over the years since it was shot. This could have been a burn on the film because, after all, this is a movie film. There could have been a trail left on the emulsion.”

  When Martin Rugne and I screened the film, we checked the burn aspect and found that it had to be wrong. After Charlie leaves the frame on the right, the echo is still there and remains so for many frames to come until it, too, flies out of the picture. The echo was something talked about by everyone but explained by no one, merely becoming another mysterious occurrence on the CKY film.

  According to Dorsey, all sorts of people played back the film. Like those personally involved, they believed what they saw, but could give no explanation whatsoever for what their eyes viewed.

  “We showed it to people at the planetarium,” Dorsey said, “and we showed it to some air force pilots that the [Canadian] Armed Forces base sent over who were trained in night flying and night observation. They
took a look at the film, and all they could say was that ‘As far as we’re concerned, it was definitely a UFO.’ They couldn’t explain what it was. We ruled out every other possibility such as swamp gas and helicopters because we checked all the places where there were helicopters and got nothing. It wasn’t an airplane. That’s the film we got, and there wasn’t much of it, but what there was [was] very exciting.”

  The film made CKY famous in Carman. As Anthony Britain told me, “The CKY guys got so that they wouldn’t come to our place. They wouldn’t come to the airport because they wouldn’t dare go through town with the CKY car. As soon as anyone saw the car, whether they wanted to watch for UFOs or not, they would follow it.”

  Dorsey described what happened the night after the CKY film was shot. “Martin and I were out on our own. We were receiving no pay. We just wanted to go out because we were intrigued by this. The next night we had to beat people off with sticks, the ones who wanted to come out. We had three cameramen, Martin and two others. We set ourselves up in a triangle pattern so that if we sighted this thing we’d get a fix on it with three cameras and be able to pinpoint its location. Unfortunately, we never saw it again. We stopped after that. I was getting to the point I was spending eight hours out there. Physically, we just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  One would think that after all this interest and work on the brief three and a half seconds of film, CKY would have told the world how good the footage was, but that wasn’t the case. The station’s attitude was as unusual as the film itself. “As far as I’m concerned,” Dustin Hope said, “it was legitimate, and everything that he [Martin Rugne] did, as well as how he presented it, was legitimate — that’s over and done with now. We haven’t heard of someone who’s a physicist or an astronomer who’s had a look at it, someone who says that this explains the unexplainable. I haven’t heard of anyone.”

  The unexplained mysteries of the film didn’t end there. When I interviewed Martin back in the 1970s, I also hoped to get my own copy of the movie. At first he was very cautious about admitting that he had the film. Finally, he admitted he had the original and that so many strange things had occurred with the movie that he wished sometimes the whole affair had never happened. In making copies of the footage, for example, some went missing. “I’m terrified of getting those things printed again,” he told me, “because they almost lost them the first time I got them printed.” Finally, he agreed to make a third-generation copy for me, and when I went to pick it up, screened a second-generation copy for me.

  It was during this interview and screening that Martin also told me a story that had been kept secret during the controversy surrounding the film. This new fact was that he had never operated a TV camera for a story prior to capturing Charlie Red Star for all to see. On the night he took the footage, the station’s acting news director said that no one could go out and shoot unless he went on his own time. But when Martin returned with the movie, it suddenly became a priceless possession.

  The Second Movie

  A second movie was shot in addition to the one done by CKY. It was taken by me on April 1, 1976, and has never been aired. To date, fewer than 12 people have seen the footage.

  Like other photographers who got film of UFOs, I considered the shooting of my footage to be an accident. The film was taken at night with an 8 mm Bell & Howell camera using 160 ASA colour film. The location of the shoot was a bridge 10 miles south of Highway 3 on the McDonald Municipality Line.

  With me at the time was my friend, Matt Cline. On that particular night we stopped at the intersection of Highways 3 and 205 East to wait for UFOs to fly by. It was just outside Sperling shortly after 7:00 p.m., with the sky beginning to darken. We had arrived at dusk, the time UFOs usually appeared.

  After 10 minutes of patient waiting, we saw nothing remarkable. We did notice, however, that there were strange red/green lights starting to materialize near us. They looked like airplane navigation lights. At first there were just three — two south of us in the direction of the town of Kane, and one northeast toward Brunkild.

  The lights had similarities to farm ones except they were definitely the wrong colour. We could clearly distinguish between actual farm lights and the ones we were now seeing. As it got darker, the number of red/green lights increased, so we decided to investigate, especially since there didn’t seem to be any UFOs travelling about.

  We drove east down Highway 205 and arrived at the first mile road where we glanced north and south but saw nothing. Continuing along the highway to the second mile road, we looked south — and there in the middle of the road was one of the red/green lights. I peered at it with 7x35 binoculars. It seemed to be about a half mile away.

  Matt, who was driving, continued south to the next mile road, and strangely, the object didn’t appear to get any closer. The red/green light, still sitting in the middle of the narrow gravel road, now turned into a brilliant orange ball. It was hard to tell the size, but we estimated it was much smaller than the road, which was about 12 feet across.

  The sky was now quite dark, and we were completely surrounded by orange lights. The one on the road in front of us was solitary, but most of the others in the fields appeared as double oranges sitting atop one another.

  After spending some time studying this peculiar situation, we ­discovered that all the farm fields were flooded with water. It seemed as if a huge lake covered both sides of the road right up to it. The reason, therefore, that the orange lights were doubled was that each one reflected off the water below it, giving the impression two objects were on top of each other. In other words, the bottom image was an exact replica of the top one. This might have been because there was no wind that evening and the water was quite still. The temperature was just above freezing, normal for that time of year.

  The roads in this area were completely flat. In prehistoric times, the region had been at the bottom of a huge lake, and topographic maps revealed almost no changes in elevation for miles. Being a mile road, it was completely straight; being Prairie farmland, there were no trees except for the odd one in a farm field. The road we were on only had two farmyards, one at the corner as you came off Highway 205 and an ­abandoned one six miles away on the east side of the road.

  We drove another mile south and halted again. The light still seemed to be the same distance from us and was just as bright. We continued driving both with and without our car lights until we had gone eight miles south.16

  At that point the road changed. A wooden bridge crossed a ­drainage ditch, the bridge rising perhaps three feet above the road. When we approached the bridge, we noticed the orange ball was sitting on the left side of it. In comparison to the size of the bridge, the light was small. It hovered above the water just below the bridge. When we arrived on the bridge, the light suddenly disappeared. We assumed the orange ball was somewhere under the bridge, so we got out of the car with our flashlights and started hunting. It was hard to see because the level of the water was almost the same as the bridge’s, and there were still piles of snow along the drainage channel, which prevented us from getting our heads low enough to actually peek under the bridge.

  Finding nothing after a short search, we continued in the car south off the bridge. No light was visible on the road, but there was a small farm off to the right at the next mile road. We travelled a half mile, and seeing nothing, turned to go north again. When we looked north, we clearly saw the orange light, this time sitting on the south dike.17 About halfway back to the bridge, I spotted the object moving toward it along the top of the dike. Its motion was erratic and bouncy, somewhat like a person with a limp trying to run.

  When we were almost at the bridge, I yelled for Matt to stop the car, then jumped out and began running down the road with my 8 mm camera. At that point the orange ball dropped between the two dikes and was lost to sight again.

  Once more, Matt and I got out of the car, and this time we thoroughly searched for
the orange ball. After looking around and under the bridge for a few minutes without success, we headed north in the car back toward Highway 205 where our journey had started.

  We had travelled north about a quarter of a mile with no further glimpse of the orange ball on the road when I glanced back and spotted it, this time sitting on the bridge. I told Matt to stop and suggested that rather than drive back to the bridge we should walk. Perhaps we could sneak up on it.

  So we headed south on foot to the bridge, with Matt holding the binoculars and me clutching my 8 mm camera. Knowing the object could fly off at any moment, I took seven steps and shot three seconds of film. Then I took seven more steps and shot another three seconds of footage. The object had taken off twice, and I was determined to record as much as I could before it vanished again. For a third time, I stepped forward seven paces and shot three further seconds of film. We were getting closer and closer as the tension built.

  When we approached the orange ball, I asked Matt what he could see in the binoculars, but not until we were 150 feet away did he say anything: “I think I see a shape.”

  “What does it look like?” I asked, but there was no response. In fact, to this day Matt has never told me what he glimpsed, even though we got a lot closer than 150 feet.

  The next thing we knew we were at the bridge and the object was still there, maybe 50 feet away. I took another three seconds of film. It was an eerie sight. The object was round and very bright, about two feet in diameter, and as orange as the fruit. The light was so intense that it might have been another shape. There were no edges visible that I could see. I assumed the object was inside the glowing haze.

  It was sitting on the right side of the bridge only inches from the structure’s wooden side. My mind could only think of one thing: why was this extremely dazzling object not lighting up the side of the bridge inches away? It was so brilliant that it should have lit up everything for at least 100 yards. Yet the object merely cast a soft radiance on the side of the bridge. It was for this reason that I have always referred to such illumination as “dead light.” It became a distinguishing mark of this kind of ground light.