Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  The hydro line ended only a few feet south of us. I looked north and south down the road and saw nothing, yet there was a strong feeling experienced by all of us that something strange was present.

  Stepping out from under the hydro line toward the road, I spotted something — a small brilliant white ball of light sitting seven poles (a couple of hundred feet) south of my position. It was only visible for a couple of seconds and then was gone, along with the almost deafening buzz.

  The light exhibited a strange characteristic that I was already aware of: it could only be seen from certain angles. From where we were under the hydro line, nothing blocked the view of the object, yet it wasn’t visible. Moving three feet in another direction made it evident.

  We had seen this characteristic while watching Little Charlie. From the middle of the road, the object was apparent, but when we moved to the shoulder it sometimes disappeared — one more mystery we were never able to explain.

  Charlie Fights Back

  Without a doubt the scariest moment of the entire flap for me happened one night in April 1976 while chasing a ground light south of Brunkild, a town on Highway 3 between Carman and Winnipeg.

  On the evening in question, we were tracking triangles that had been flying around for a couple of weeks. One of my friends was in the front seat busily writing down descriptions of object after object, while Danny and Toby Penner and Rich Willow were in the back seat.

  One of the objects hovering near the Brunkild microwave tower was a triangle with two red lights in front and a green one in back. It veered off southwest, and we were headed that way, too, when I noticed a pair of ground lights right in front of the car. (Ground lights usually came in pairs — one bright and one dim.)

  I drove down with lights on and lights off until I came to a point eight miles south of the highway where the gravel road ended and dirt started. There were deep ruts in the road, and I assumed it was safer to stop here than risk getting stuck in mud far from any town.

  Leaving the car with Toby Penner, I walked toward the object, flashlight at the ready. I told the others to remain in the car and that we would be right back. As we approached the object, I discovered strange white impact marks in the mud (four inches long, almost one and a half inches wide, and one and a half inches deep). White outlined the holes and there were white spots in the bottom of it, providing another mystery we never solved. Turning back to the lights at the end of the road, we experienced an incredible encounter, one I will let my notes from that night describe:

  I saw that they [the lights] were still there but that the less intense one was on the left. I gave three bursts from my flashlight toward the one that appeared to be on the ground. After about three seconds, to my great surprise, the object pulsed back three times. What is meant by this is that during a period of about 1.5 seconds the object would rise and fall in the intensity of its light. This the object did three times without moving.

  Next I took the flashlight and made a long vertical line up and down in the air. In response, after a few seconds, the object rose to double its height and then dropped back down.

  I took the flashlight and made a long vertical line back and forth along the horizon. In response, the object moved back and forth across the road in a motion resembling a falling leaf.

  I repeated all the motions, three flashes, this time two up and two across. The object repeated all the motions.

  Suddenly, the thing started to make noise. Although there was a small breeze, the sound was very clear. It sounded at first like Morse code. The start was a short-short-pause-long. At this point Toby said, “Look, he’s doing everything you’re doing.”

  I told him to listen to the noise.

  The noise was still there. It was short beeps like a type of code, but now I realized that instead of using beeps it was using a whistle noise. Later, Toby and I discussed the sound and concluded that it was a beep and a whistle at the same time.

  Toby started back to the car, and I asked him to send one of the other people to watch the objects. The noise had now continued for about 20 seconds, but I wasn’t paying much attention. This is because I had begun to think that I was losing control of the situation. The object had been responding to the light, but now with the noise it was doing things I hadn’t ordered.

  It appeared that this was some kind of small observation craft or a monitor and that I had annoyed it. The noise stopped, and I heard Toby yelling at the car. I quickly turned and ran back to find Toby telling everyone about the amazing stuff that was going on down the road.

  I took Danny, Toby’s older brother, to see the object. I was hesitant to get as close as the first time and stopped at the white holes in the road. I repeated all the flashlight motions — up/down and sideways. The main bright light repeated all the actions.

  Suddenly, I got the distinct impression that we should return to the car, and we did. When I got back, I related to the others what had occurred. As I talked, I suddenly noticed a familiar object visible in the back window — a bright arc welding light hovering low on the horizon. It was flying east along the southern horizon very close to us and appeared headed right toward the two objects on the road.

  From the time I first saw that object until it arrived at the other two objects, I didn’t watch. I was too busy panicking. All I could recall, as I stared out the front window, was Danny, Toby, and Rich fighting for one of the two sets of binoculars in the back seat. It sounded as if they were having a great time. Later the kids who were watching said that the object began to pulse red as it came toward the two ground lights.

  Just after the object crossed south of us, I saw it seemingly pause for a moment and then continue east. “Are you ready?” I asked my companions.

  Someone asked, “Ready for what?”

  The object began to brighten. “Here he comes,” I warned.

  The battle for the binoculars continued; one set was now missing. It turned out that someone was partially sitting on it.

  I did up my seat belt — why I still don’t know. The whole affair had frightened me terribly because it seemed like a nightmare that had come true. I could do nothing, and this object was now calling the shots.

  Rich and I were in the front seat and seemed to be the only ones disturbed by what was happening. Even when Toby and I had walked down the road in pursuit of the two objects, Rich had been very unhappy. At the time he had said, “I wish we’d leave it and go the other way.”

  The object, as feared, stopped travelling east. It made a turn north, then west, and was now hurtling toward us. Someone in the back seat said, “This is neat, eh?”

  Asking for my binoculars, I held them against the windshield of the car. This was necessary because my hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t keep them still.

  The triangle object was quite familiar to me. There were two red lights in front and a green one in back. I had seen the object twice before: earlier that evening moving over the Brunkild microwave tower headed southwest, and a few weeks earlier when Reg Peters and I had spotted it east of Carman. The lights appeared in formation, but I was sure they were attached to the same craft.

  The object appeared to be tilted, with the far side down and the front tilted up. I didn’t know how; it just seemed that way. It was coming at us and wasn’t very high — maybe 500 feet.1 The kids in the back seat were having a wild party.

  The lights kept coming toward us until I was staring almost straight up at them. I was never so scared in my life. The object paused for a second, shifted a bit to my left, then started moving north. As it made the slight shift, like a small jerk in a film, my fear instantly vanished. I went from being more afraid than I ever recalled being to having no fear at all.

  When I put down the binoculars and stopped watching, Danny said, “That’s the same one we saw earlier. Do you think it’s the same one? Or another one with the same lighting?”

/>   “Same one,” I replied.

  “It came from the same direction we saw it go,” Danny added.

  “Probably the same one.”

  “That’s the same one I saw,” Danny insisted. “It’s the one I saw before you.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “Let’s stay all night,” someone in the back suggested.

  The object easily took up the majority of the field of vision in the binoculars, and as with the two prior sightings of it, there were gaps between its three huge lights.

  The whole event seemed to take about 20 minutes from the time the object left the two small ground lights until it went north away from our car, but it was probably only a couple of minutes.

  Suddenly, there was a bright white light behind us, and the interior of our car was lit up. I got out and saw that an RCMP vehicle had pulled up behind us.

  An officer stepped out of the police car and walked over to my window. “Trouble?” he asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  He beamed his flashlight through the window. “Okay, what’s going on here?”

  “We’re just watching those lights at the end of the road,” I said.

  “What lights?”

  “Turn off your car lights and I’ll show you. You can’t see anything with them on.”

  The officer strode back to his car and turned off the lights. The four kids in my car got out. It had only been a minute or so since the triangle of lights had flown over, so I pointed to the object as it travelled toward Brunkild along with another light that had just materialized.

  “Do you see those two objects there?” I asked the officer.

  “Yeah …”

  “Okay,” I said, “take a look at this.”

  The kids were very excited; they knew what was about to happen.

  We moved down the road to where only one of the objects was visible, and then only barely. I made a long vertical line in the air with my flashlight. The object moved up into view, then dropped to the left side of the road.

  “Are you sure it isn’t a farm light?” the officer asked.

  “We’ve been chasing it for six miles,” I said, though it turned out to be eight miles when measured later.

  “Oh, well,” the officer said, “it’s probably just a couple of guys down the road having a couple of beers.”

  “It’s not a couple of guys down the road having a couple of beers,” I insisted. “We’ve been following it for miles.”

  The officer started moving back to his car. “Oh, well, I’ll see you guys around.” He hopped in his car and pulled away.

  “Don’t let him get away!” I cried. “Get his licence plate number.”

  A couple of the kids ran after the RCMP officer’s car, pointing their flashlights at it.

  “Got it!” Rich shouted in triumph. “BLT-147.”

  I made plans to interview the RCMP officer after finding out what detachment he was stationed at but changed my mind, thinking it would be hard on the man to explain the lights in the sky and on the road.

  The Monitor Connection

  While researching the UFO flap, I was also working on the story of Wilbert Smith, who had headed up the official Canadian government flying saucer investigation from 1950 to 1954. I had received Smith’s story and his activities from a radar technician named Ernie Epp, who was working at the Department of Transport in Winnipeg. Ernie had been a technician for Smith in a flying saucer detection building that the latter had constructed on Department of National Defence property outside Ottawa. Smith had experienced a UFO sighting after travelling to Carman during the flap.

  The Smith story encouraged me to travel in 1977 to Ottawa to meet with the man’s widow, Murl. She in turn put me on to a defence research scientist who had worked privately with her husband from 1956 until Smith’s death in December 1962. The man, Art Bridge, was now living in Morden, only 20 miles south of Carman.

  I had a number of secret meetings with Art. He was still interested in the subject of UFOs but had no intention to go public with what he had done for Smith or the Canadian military. In the 1970s, when I talked to him, he wasn’t doing anything related to science.

  During one visit with the former scientist, I brought up the ground lights we were seeing and told Art about our attempts to capture, film, and explain them.

  “You mean monitors?” he asked after hearing my tale.

  I had absolutely no idea whatsoever what he was talking about but pretended I did. “Yes, monitors.”

  “We had those things all over in the time I was in Ottawa. They were tracking what Wilbert and the rest of us were doing.” He then told me about the time they spotted a monitor hiding in the ditch in front of the house. Later, I realized it was the same story Wilbert Smith had told on an audiotape years earlier:

  We saw one of the monitors do exactly that trick. We did believe that a certain conversation we were having was being monitored by one of the little fellows. So when we came out of the house we made a definite effort to locate it. We did. It was lying down in the ditch right in front of the house, and as soon as we spotted it, apparently the people who were controlling it became aware of the fact. As soon as we spotted it, we saw what appeared to be a heat wave about a foot in diameter and what popped right out of it was a little disk and it just took off and disappeared into the great blue yonder. I think the whole operation took place in less than about two seconds. We were looking right at it. There were three of us, and we all saw the same thing.

  It suddenly occurred to me that Murl Smith had talked about these monitors, as well, but I didn’t recall her using the same name. She had basically told me that the objects made a nuisance of themselves around her yard. One of the things she said was that they burned out a whole row of beans in the garden. She also mentioned they had done damage to a neighbour’s tree, which led the neighbour to say to Smith, “Wilbert, I don’t know where your little friends are from but could you please tell them to stay out of my yard?”

  Murl had told me the objects were around all the time. It was ­probably these monitors that had led to the stories inside the Department of Transport that Wilbert was losing touch with reality.

  Ernie Epp, the radio technician who had put me on to Smith, stated he had asked Smith about the aliens, and Wilbert had told him they were landing in his yard all the time. The fact was monitors were in the yard, and Epp, unfamiliar with them, assumed big flying saucers were landing and visiting Smith.

  James Smith, Wilbert’s eldest son, also spoke of the monitors. He was 17 when his father died in 1962, so he remembered many of the strange events that occurred in and around the house as he was growing up. In an interview with Errol Bruce-Knapp, host of the radio show Strange Days … Indeed, James recalled the monitors:

  At our home when this flying saucer club met in the basement there were windows, and on many occasion there would be small monitor saucers looking in the windows listening to what was going on. In terms of size, they would have been about 30 to 36 inches across and a foot thick, looking, very much like a jelly doughnut.

  I came out of the porch steps one evening just after dark. There was one sitting about three feet out on the front lawn where it could look in the front window and monitor what was going on. We just stood there and looked at each other for about 20 or 30 seconds and then it just took off straight up. The grass underneath it was virtually sterile for the next 10 years. Nothing would grow. There was this great patch of nothing. Similarly, the trees at the side of the house with access to a window — our neighbours used to complain, “Smith, keep your saucers in your own trees.” These things would sit up there and virtually burn all the leaves and branches around them. There would be this dead clump, this dead hole in two or three trees that had access to the windows.

  Whether or not the objects on the ground in southern Manitoba were the same as the on
es Smith had seen in Ottawa in the late 1950s was hard to determine. The same could be said for the small balls of light reported in British crop circles throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

  The British crop circle lights looked very much like our Manitoba balls of light. The British researchers, too, weren’t able to determine much beyond the fact that the lights were a real phenomenon associated with crop circles. Further investigation into these lights will hopefully produce an answer someday.

  The other key place the ground lights/monitors were reported was in Wilton, North Dakota, near the Minot Missile Base. The local newspapers had done articles on these strange balls of lights but couldn’t come to any conclusion about what they were.

  I travelled to Wilton in 1977 to present my slides of the balls of lights we had chased around the roads of southern Manitoba, and it appeared from the reaction of the full room of townspeople who showed up for the lecture that we had all seen the same thing.

  8

  The Nuclear Connection

  Since 28 Oct 1975, numerous reports of suspicious objects have been received at the NORAD CU; reliable military personnel at Loring AFB, Maine, Wurtsmith AFB, Michigan, Malmstrom AFB, Mt, Minot AFB, ND, and Canadian Forces Station, Falconbridge, Ontario, Canada, have visually sighted suspicious objects.

  — Commander-in-Chief, North American Air Defense Command, November 11, 1975

  Most ufology researchers know and accept the close connection of UFOs to nuclear missiles. Researcher Robert Hastings, in fact, wrote a book on the connection called UFOs and Nukes. In 1975, however, the connection wasn’t as well known.

  While the sightings were occurring in Manitoba, I knew we weren’t the only place experiencing such incidents. People in four states bordering Canada — North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, and Wisconsin — also witnessed numerous UFOs in 1975, as did Ontario residents, who spotted more than a normal share of them.