Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  I was now at the point of decision. We were near enough to make a run at the object, so I braced myself to do so, whispering my intentions to Matt.

  He was looking around us with the binoculars. When I told him I was going to rush toward the orange ball, he said, “It looks like there’s something coming down the road.”

  I turned and saw what at first I thought was another car coming from the north. Exchanging my camera for the binoculars, I squinted through them to see what was happening. What I saw amazed me. It seemed as if the sun was rising over our car. One intense blaze, a sort of semicircle, sat on top and was as wide as the car. Down the sides of the vehicle all the way to the ground was diffuse orange light that struck me as being a bit like smoke except it didn’t dissipate. It looked as if a small fire had broken out inside the car, caused by the glow streaming down the sides.

  “Matt,” I said, “there’s one sitting right on top of your car!” I began to race toward the vehicle, and Matt joined me. I was sure I hadn’t taken more than a half-dozen steps when I realized what had occurred. Glancing back at the bridge, I saw that the orange ball was gone. We had been tricked! Halfway to our car, I stopped and shot some more footage.

  I also took the opportunity to look through the binoculars at the car once more and now it really appeared to be on fire. The object had moved and was sitting on the hood. The interior of the car was still glowing, and the same smoky orange light flowed down its sides.

  Now that the object at the bridge was gone, we resumed our scramble toward our car. By the time we got there, though, the orange ball was no longer there. We suspected it had slipped into the water.

  The first thing I did when I arrived at the car was to put my hand on top of it to see if it was hot, but there was no noticeable warmth. I took out my flashlight and beamed it at the top of the car, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. My heart was pounding both from the run and from the bizarre nature of events that had taken place. Saying very little, Matt simply surveyed the interior of his car.

  After a few moments, I glanced back at the bridge, and lo and behold, there was the orange ball. “It’s at the bridge again,” I informed Matt. “Let’s go back.”

  Matt said he had no intention of returning. I insisted, since I was certain we could get even closer. Matt resisted, insisting he wanted to go home. Since the car was his, that was exactly what we did. The only comment he made during this frenzied period was “How did he know we’d left the car?”

  I took a long pan shot of the western horizon to capture how many orange lights there were, then we headed home to tell our story. On the way back, Matt said nothing about what had transpired. Obviously, he was quite shaken. He hadn’t been involved in any of the 1975 UFO sightings around Carman, so this was something new to him. He did tell me that the first thing he did when we returned to the car was to check twice for the keys, which he had left in the ignition.

  During questioning by friends the next day, Matt’s brother, Darryl, asked him whether he actually believed the second object at the car had been used as a decoy to pull us away from the one at the bridge. “It sure gave me that impression,” Matt replied.

  Ground Light Photography

  During March 1976, a whole series of ground lights were encountered on the back roads of southern Manitoba. Most were within 20 miles of Sperling. A lot of photography was done on the ground lights because there were quite a few of them and they didn’t really move around unless bothered by cars. We could take as many photographs as we wanted. So a great number of people got cameras, with film that varied from 200 ASA right through to infrared. Lenses ranged from 50 mm to powerful 3,000 mm (60x zoom) extender ones.

  On the night Matt and I discovered the ground lights, I wasn’t sure what we were seeing because we were dealing with a totally new phenomenon, one first spotted at about 10:45 p.m. on the evening of March 23, 1976. Jonathan Black, Reg Peters, and I were driving north of Elm Creek headed for the Trans-Canada Highway and Winnipeg. Down the road, we suddenly noticed a set of weird lights. The intensity of them varied from nothing to a flaring brilliant orange.

  The number of lights also changed. Whenever a car came in behind it, the bottom light disappeared and the remaining orange one shifted a few feet off the west side of the road. As soon as the car passed, the objects reappeared and returned to their original positions.

  After watching the lights for five minutes, we made many vain attempts to find “natural explanations” for what we were seeing. We considered parked cars, someone fixing a tractor off the road, and the possibility that the road wasn’t level and we were glimpsing a series of cars approaching us from miles away.

  Front two lights of a triangle object creating a wave pattern in the sky.

  As soon as we snapped some pictures of the peculiar lights, we moved up the road to determine if it was level and whether or not there were two cars ahead of us. All of that would give us an explanation for what we were witnessing.

  We drove to where we thought the lights were and found nothing. The road was flat and straight all the way to the Trans-Canada 20 miles ahead of us. Only a single car passed us during the whole time we were there, leaving us with no explanation to explain the odd lights we had seen.

  It wasn’t until April 1 at the drainage ditch with Matt Cline that I was able to understand what we might be dealing with. However, I did receive a report about ground lights in the Pembina Valley from Rocky Reimer on March 31. He told me he had noticed “orange lights” while driving in the Sperling area and assumed they were the rear lights of snowmobiles but did find it curious that they were all over the place.

  The night after I shot the 8 mm film of the ground light at the bridge Matt and I, with Matt’s friend, Johnny Deakin, returned to see if we could ­duplicate our experience. I brought the movie camera and a new 50-foot roll of film. We approached the bridge from the east this time but never got to it because there were orange lights all over the countryside that distracted us. Besides us there was another car chasing the lights, so we got out of our car and tried to walk up to the objects to shoot them with the movie camera but were never able to get as close as Matt and I had the previous night.

  Looking back, we probably didn’t succeed because we couldn’t concentrate on a single object. We would see one orange ball close to a road and give chase. Then, spotting another one on a different road, we would turn and pursue it.

  The other problem we had was that we didn’t keep an accurate log of what we were filming. Any orange ground light that seemed bright was shot. When screening the footage later, we realized we couldn’t tell what objects we had been filming because in the darkness there were no points of reference. So we ended up scrapping the movie.

  When the ground water was diverted away from the fields, the objects all moved onto the roads. The other thing they did was change colour to a brilliant arc-welding white light. When they weren’t flaring, they were a triangle of small dim lights (see Chapter 7, “Ground Lights,” for further details).

  Once the objects moved onto the road, their numbers dropped dramatically to perhaps a dozen or so around the valley. The best and most reliable light still seemed to be on the road south of Sperling where I shot my April 1 film. That gravel road was ideal for a number of reasons:

  Topographic maps revealed that the surrounding area was almost perfectly flat for miles, allowing for virtually unobstructed viewing.

  There was a seven-mile stretch of road where there were no farms, so there was little worry about cars coming along or of farm lights throwing us off.

  There was an excellent and very active light on the road dubbed Little Charlie because it produced a similar colour pattern to that seen in photos of Charlie Red Star. A photo was taken with 200 ASA colour film that was comparable to Tannis Major’s third picture of Charlie (white in the middle with a yellow and then red corona around it).

&n
bsp; There were many stories of attempts to get close to Little Charlie to obtain a good photograph, or better yet capture him altogether. Almost every imaginable plan was tried. Here I will deal with five of the ideas we acted on to get a better picture:

  1.Flashing lights at the object: This was by far the most successful method.

  2.Chasing the object: We tried this way the most and it was the least successful. On the night of April 4, when we got 50 feet from the object, we had two cars that chased numerous lights around for hours. These pursuits occurred at a few miles per hour, 70 miles per hour, with lights, and without lights. On one occasion, Anthony and Rachael Britain, Barry and Audrey Johnson, and I chased Little Charlie south down the McDonald Municipality Line for 15 miles and never got any closer. On the trip back toward Highway 205, Little Charlie flared brilliantly and followed the car closely.

  3.Jumping out of a car: Because Little Charlie had followed us along the road, we decided to try pushing him south and have someone jump out of the car halfway. The plan was that Little Charlie would trail the car past the person hiding in the ditch with a movie camera.

  We attempted this strategy when Jorg Poor from the University of Calgary and his brother asked me to drive out to the road to see Little Charlie. Along with Danny Penner, who had been there before, we visited the place where Little Charlie usually showed up. Once we got to our destination, we waited until Little Charlie flared, then headed off. After a few miles, Danny and I jumped into a ditch, while Jorg and his brother continued down the road.

  Danny and I could barely see the car when it made its turn three miles south of us on its way back to us. In a state of great excitement, we checked our 35 mm camera and 8 mm movie camera as the car approached. Little Charlie, however, didn’t arrive. It seemed like a long time before the car returned to pick us up. Just as the car approached, Little Charlie flamed into a full flare. After we got back into the car, the object followed us all the way to Highway 205.

  4.Approaching from a different direction: This attempt to get nearer for a picture did meet with some success on a couple of occasions. The first time it was tried worked quite well.

  I was returning to Winnipeg with Danny and Toby Penner and Rob Wheeler from a night of UFO hunting in the Pembina Hills west of Carman. The return trip led us right past the Highway 205 turnoff only a couple of miles from where Little Charlie sat.

  We turned south, but instead of going two miles east before going south, we drove straight south for three miles and then east for two miles to the McDonald Municipality Line. Little Charlie frequently sat a half mile south of where the telephone wires ended. (Past this point there were no houses and therefore no need for telephone wires.) I was hoping I might trick Little Charlie and get close, so I prepared the camera as we drove south.

  The trick worked. A short distance from us was an object that flared so much the light spilled right across the road. I stopped the car and pulled out the camera and tripod. Danny grabbed the binoculars and checked to make sure what lay before us was Little Charlie and not another vehicle.

  Danny affirmed it was Little Charlie, and I quickly shot one photo. The object immediately ended its flare and turned into the classic two dim green lights we had seen so often.

  I was about to pull out the flashlight to force a second flare when a dog from a nearby farmhouse began to bark. We moved another mile east and gazed back. Little Charlie was flaring again.

  When I set up the camera and tripod once more, someone started yelling that there was another object heading down the road straight at Little Charlie, who was a mile and a half southwest of us across the field. Watching with binoculars, I saw the object glide across the mile road we were on. There were no red taillights. When everyone realized we had another ground light travelling right for Little Charlie, pandemonium broke out. I raced to set up the tripod and camera for a shot, feeling something spectacular was about to happen.

  Realizing I wasn’t going to get the camera set up in time, I watched to see what would unfold. My impression was that the two objects had collided. It was like witnessing an enormous explosion in absolute silence. The lights blazed with incredible intensity and then dimmed rapidly, as Danny Penner said later.

  I continued to set up the tripod, hoping the objects would separate again. After about 20 seconds, they did, so I used a cable release and was able to catch the event with a time exposure.

  It was 2:30 a.m. now. Despite this, Danny and I decided to walk across the field toward Little Charlie. It had already been a good night of filming and we hoped we could sneak up on the light. We strode through the field, which turned out to be very wet and muddy. Shooting some 8 mm film, we got closer. Little Charlie must have seen us coming, because when we finally arrived at the road, we noticed he appeared to be sitting.

  All of the still shots we took that night turned out and were some of the best we ever got. We shot all 50 feet of the 8 mm film, but it didn’t turn out, which was strange because Danny had said he could clearly see Little Charlie in the lens.

  5.Using a powerful 60x telephoto lens: The lens was provided to us by Carl Bachmanek and Paul Dawkins. They had a good look at Charlie Red Star just north of Carman at the CBC tower. When they came to see Little Charlie, they brought along a 60x telephoto lens to get a good photo. They had been warned that it was very hard to get close to the object.

  The date was May 13, 1976, exactly a year to the day after the CKY film was shot. There were scattered clouds, with a three-quarter moon. The temperature was chilly. Also present from Carman were Anthony and Rachael Britain and Jack McKinnon, who was employed as an analyst of aerial crop photographs.

  Through the telephoto lens we saw a single orange light with a reddish border. The picture was quite fuzzy and wavy because the lens not only amplified the object but also the dust and heat coming off the road.

  Anthony and I had seen ground lights dozens of times and had come to the conclusion that the reason this object was so far down the road was partly because of the lens being used. We got no decent photographs and learned nothing from this attempt to shoot ground lights with a powerful telephoto lens.

  6

  Landings

  They’re out there — no doubt about it.

  — Edwin Fuhr, Manitoba Farmer

  During the two-year flap of UFO sightings, there were to my ­knowledge probably 20 landings in Manitoba. Some were witnessed and others were discovered later as swirl patterns or burnt circles in farm fields. The different landings were part of a worldwide phenomenon that came to be known as UFO landing trace evidence.

  Late in September 1974 the landings in Manitoba might have been predated by a similar occurrence a few miles west in Langenburg, Saskatchewan, when five swirled patterns were noticed in the canola field of farmer Edwin Fuhr, along with a silver disk that was still spinning in one of the circles when Fuhr found them. The “saucer nests” and Fuhr’s sighting made headlines across Canada and the world. They were investigated by the FBI along with the RCMP, whose tracking dogs refused to enter the circles.

  The number of Manitoba landings wasn’t high considering how many sightings there were. The landings do, however, represent a phenomenon that has come and gone in ufology. At the time of the Manitoba UFO flap, UFO landings were common around the world. The same could be said for sightings of aliens in and around landing sites. Now, more than 40 years later, landings and sightings of aliens around landing sites are no longer recorded — a well-documented fact that generates little discussion in UFO literature.

  In order to obtain “trace samples” from a landing sight, the ufologist must be on the scene as soon as possible. In most cases, due to witnesses suppressing the event, this wasn’t possible for the majority of Manitoba cases. Members of the Winnipeg Planetarium, though, did some analysis.

  The Little Man

  One of the most bizarre landings in Manitoba occurred near Ba
got, about 20 miles northwest of Carman. Rather than writing up a summary, I include the full notes I made after interviewing the witness:

  This is the account of a UFO sighting made by Terry Orlando who lives in Bagot, Manitoba. The story of the event was given to me on March 15, 1978. The incident took place in 1972 or 1973.

  It was 1:00 a.m., and Terry was travelling east toward Bagot in a truck with his girlfriend when he spotted a light in a field north of the road he was on. Out of curiosity, he stopped his truck on a crossover road (a small crossing road over a ditch where tractors and combines drive onto a field from a road). He then walked into the field to see what was going on.

  As he approached the object, he noticed it was a saucer-shaped craft sitting in the field. Terry got to within 100 yards of the object and halted, fearing to go any closer. He saw heat waves coming off the object and heard a low hum.

  The craft was about 12 feet across and about eight feet high. Atop the saucer section of the object Terry saw a dome with something resembling three antennae sticking out. On the top of each antenna was a red light. The object glowed yellow and a brilliant white light emanated from its edges. Terry couldn’t see any doors or windows.

  Fearing to get any nearer to the craft, he circled it, looking for something to give him a hint about what the thing was. When he got halfway around the UFO, he suddenly became aware that the craft was now between him and his girlfriend in the truck. So he decided to turn back, taking the same path back around the saucer.

  Terry arrived back at the truck, which was parked 100 feet down a mile road off the main highway. To get back on the highway, he had to back up. As he turned, his lights naturally swung across the field. In the gleam, someone became visible striding through the ditch. The “Little Man,” as Terry described him, was completely dressed in silver.