Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  I knew these were all connected because I was the background researcher for the National Enquirer’s Daniel Coleman, who was working on UFO stories in each area.

  When I returned to Carman in 2004 almost 30 years after the UFO events of the 1970s, I expected everyone would be ready and willing to give me insights into what the UFO flap had meant and how it had changed their lives but that didn’t happen.

  Only Anthony Britain seemed eager to reflect on what had occurred. When I asked him why the UFOs had been in Carman, he said, “You know why they were here.”

  “No, I don’t,” I replied.

  “I told you all about it.”

  “Anthony, in 30 years I’ve never known why they were here.”

  “The missiles … I told you we’d sit in the hills and watch the objects coming in from the United States.”

  As soon as I heard the word missiles, I knew he was right. By 2004, researchers had become aware of the nuclear connection. It all made sense.

  Growing up in Winnipeg, we all knew about the Grand Forks and Minot U.S. Air Force bases in North Dakota and their Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) silos. We knew that if there was ever a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States we would be the first to go. Every 10th Soviet missile would fall short right on top of us. We also knew there were 300 ICBMs, each with three warheads, in North Dakota. That meant that if North Dakota had been a country in 1975 it would have been considered a nuclear superpower.

  Anthony reminded me of the conversation he had with a U.S. Air Force pilot at Jack’s Place Bar in Windygates, Manitoba, on the border with North Dakota. The pilot was from Minot Air Force Base. He told Anthony that he had been on a mission with an order to ram. This was all confidential. He said four pilots ran into something sitting over a silo. It came right up through the formation, and he said it had no intention to veer off. The object came right through, and the pilot was in the way, so he avoided it and let it come through. The pilot said he wasn’t going to die for that.

  I knew about the highly publicized Sandy Larson abduction case in August 1975. It had happened very close to two Grand Forks Air Force Base missile silos outside Buffalo, North Dakota.

  Then there was the story of UFO abductee Katarina Sharma, who told me of an encounter with a UFO at the A-10 Blitzkrieg missile silo three-quarters of a mile north of Karlsruhe, North Dakota. Katarina was about nine at the time. She and two friends were outside the gate of the silo when a UFO rose through the metal lid that covered the missile. The perfect spherical ball the size of a garbage can lid ascended 25 feet and spun. Its colour was a shiny metallic bronze with burn marks. The ball’s glow could have been a reflection from the sun. Hesitating for a moment, it then quickly flew away.

  Finally, there were the same ground-light-type objects we spotted in Manitoba that appeared just southwest of Karlsruhe around Wilton. As I mentioned earlier, I travelled to there in 1977 after the local newspaper did a story on the small balls of light that were seen on the nearby roads following cars around. When I did my lecture in Wilton, the room was full. Many who had seen the Wilton ground objects agreed that what they had witnessed appeared similar to what I was showing on slides of the objects observed in Canada.

  UFOs have always seemed interested in nuclear weapons and power plants, a connection that dates back to 1945 when the modern UFO era began. What follows is a chronology of such events:

  1945: A couple of weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945 a young U.S. Marine named Ed Rogers arrived by ship in the devastated city. While there he took a series of photographs. In the 1990s, it was discovered there were UFOs in many of the pictures. The Marine made arrangements for the photographs not to be released until after his death, which occurred in 2014.

  1947: A UFO crashed outside Roswell, New Mexico. At the time the Roswell U.S. Army air base was the only operational atomic bomb unit in the world. The pilots from Roswell made up the crews that dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan. In addition, the first atomic bomb test took place only 120 miles to the west in July 1945.

  Disk-shaped object over the harbour in Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945 only days after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Credit: Marie Udea.

  1947–1952: In the years after the Second World War, UFOs continued to show a great interest in nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. The correlation was first made public by Captain Edward Ruppelt, who directed the U.S. Air Force investigation into UFOs back then. He reported to Life magazine that when viewing a folder of 63 unexplained UFO reports that had been plotted on a map of the United States he discovered that it showed an ominous correspondence with the location of various atomic energy installations. “These sightings,” he told Life, “were pinpointed on a map. Soon afterward, it was seen by a Pentagon representative who noted that a number of concentrations duplicated exactly the area of atomic energy installations. The Pentagon man excitedly reported back to his headquarters. A conference was called immediately in Washington. Intelligence had to tell the Pentagon that they had no evidence that the flying saucers are spying on or threatening our atomic program. But this fear still lies deeply in some responsible minds.”1

  1952: On November 20, 1952, George Adamski appeared, only three days after the New York Times announced to the American people that the first hydrogen bomb had been tested. He went down in history as the first contactee (a person claiming to have talked to occupants of UFOs). Adamski said Orthon, the alien he communicated with, was worried that the atmospheric nuclear bomb tests would kill all life on Earth, spread into space, and contaminate other planets.2 Other contactees in the 1950s and 1960s came forward with similar nuclear messages.

  1979–1980: Paul Bennewitz, a physicist who operated a small electronics company called Thunder Scientific Corporation outside Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, reported UFOs over the Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility. His reports circulated widely inside the UFO research community. The U.S. Air Force intelligence people at Kirtland met with him about his sightings and then set up a program to discredit Bennewitz and what he claimed he had witnessed.

  1980: On three nights, December 26, 27, and 28, the twin air force bases of Woodbridge and Bentwaters, England, were visited by a series of UFOs that shot beams of light into the nuclear weapons storage area and reportedly affected the ­tactical nuclear weapons stored there. A connecting aspect seemed to be the fact that the American military was on high alert, since at that time the Soviets had moved troops to the Polish border in a possible move to invade Poland for a second time. The nuclear weapons stored at Bentwaters were the type of tactical nuclear weapons that might have been used if there was a new war over Poland.

  1986: During the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown on April 26, 1986, there were reports that a bronze-coloured fiery sphere came to within 1,000 feet of the damaged Number 4 reactor at the height of the fire. It reportedly shot out two bright red rays at the reactor. The radiation levels reported fell from 3,000 to 800 milliroentgens per hour. After three minutes, the UFO flew northeast.

  Final Thoughts

  For the purposes of this book, the most important nuclear connection came in 1975 following the U.S. military loss to the Communists in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was a very unstable moment in American foreign policy. The “domino theory” was the predominant political and military strategy. It embodied the fear that one country after another would fall to the Communists until they controlled the world if the United States didn’t prevent that from happening.

  After the Vietnam defeat, U.S. military planners were likely trying to figure out which country would topple to the Communists next. Would they move to seize South Korea, the Philippines, or Indonesia? Because there were insufficient American troops on the ground in these nations would nuclear weapons have to be deployed to draw a line in the sand and stop the spread of communis
m? It is very possible that when the Vietnam War ended in disaster in April 1975 the status of the ICBMs was secretly raised.

  Whatever the U.S. strategy was the records reveal a great interest by UFOs in nuclear weapons in 1975. NORAD Command Director’s Logs show numerous encounters with UFOs in or around the nuclear weapons storage areas at various Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases along the Canadian border. These bases had stockpiles of nuclear weapons and also headquartered the huge B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons for their daily Cold War–era deterrence missions.

  Consider, for example, the written record of UFO encounters at Loring Air Force Base in Maine in October 1975. SAC documents refer to the objects as helicopters, as if someone were able to get a helicopter inside the weapons storage area and escape unscathed.

  The initial incidents at Loring created concern at the highest levels of the American government: “The incidents drew the attention of the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of Defense. Though the Air Force informed the public and the press that individual sightings were isolated incidents, an Air Force document stated that Security Option III was implemented and that security measures were coordinated with fifteen (15) Air Force bases from Guam to Newfoundland.”3

  The UFOs spotted at Loring penetrated the nuclear weapons storage area at an estimated 300-foot altitude. The event went on for two nights and one incident lasted at least 40 minutes. On both nights the events ended with the object flying toward the Canadian border, 12 miles to the east.

  Another case highlighted by the NORAD documents was an encounter at Wurtsmith Air Force Base on the Michigan-Ontario border. The base wing commander, Colonel Boardman, ordered a KC-135 in the area to intercept the object, but the mission failed.

  Then there was Great Falls, Montana, where Sabotage Alert Teams guarding the nuclear weapons at Malmstrom Air Force Base dealt with UFOs a few weeks later. As with the incident at Loring, the UFOs did what they pleased. F-106 interceptors were scrambled in response to multiple reports of UFO visits to nearby missile sites at Moore, Harlowton, Lewistown, and several sites around Malmstrom. Most strikingly, it was also reported that computer codes in the missile warheads were altered.

  Then, on November 10, 1975, there was a UFO encounter at Minot Air Force Base directly south of Carman. The base’s experience was with a mysterious automobile-sized object.

  At the same time there was also activity on the Canadian side of the border. Police and military officers and NORAD radar saw and tracked UFOs that alternately hovered and darted at high speed at the NORAD Falconbridge radar station near Sudbury, Ontario. As in the SAC occurrences, NORAD scrambled two F-106 jets but to no avail. The Department of National Defence headquarters in Ottawa also became involved.

  In the midst of all the UFO visits to nuclear bases, logger Travis Walton claimed he was abducted in Snowflake, Arizona. The case became one of the most famous abduction stories ever, made headlines around the world, and is still the subject of numerous documentaries because it lasted five days instead of the normal one or two hours. The abduction almost seemed, as with the hovering of UFOs over nuclear missiles, to be a sort of dramatic alien warning to governments about the dangers of such weapons.

  So how do all the SAC base nuclear incursions along the border tie into the long series of sightings in the Carman area? As mentioned earlier, Anthony Britain had maintained that the Carman sightings were tied to the Minuteman III missiles at the Grand Forks and Minot installations and that he had talked to a U.S. Air Force pilot who had been involved in a jet scramble involving a UFO over a missile silo.

  On July 3, 1974, the Soviets and the Americans signed an additional protocol to the SALT I Treaty that stated each country could build an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) site to shoot down each other’s ICBMs. This was the ground-based version of what would later become the Star Wars anti-ballistic missile shield. Each country would be allowed 100 new nuclear missiles.

  The United States selected its ABM site near Nekoma, North Dakota, about 80 miles as the crow flies south of Carman. Soon there would be 400 nuclear missiles within a couple of hundred miles of Carman. In the centre of the missile complex was a huge pyramid with the top cut off. The structure was built to house the most advanced radar unit in the world and was constructed to withstand the direct effects of nuclear weapons. The enormous complex contained the Missile Site Phased Array Radar and computers necessary to track and destroy incoming Soviet ICBMs. Locals referred to the building as Nixon’s Pyramid.

  “Nixon’s Pyramid” at the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in Nekoma, North Dakota — a huge radar installation set up to detect Soviet ICBMs. It was capable of triggering 100 nuclear missiles to destroy incoming missiles from the enemy.

  Separate long-range detection radar was located almost on the Canadian border near the town of Cavalier, North Dakota. This radar facility was only a few miles from the Halbstadt, Manitoba, UFO landing site.

  The $6 billion ABM base was called the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex and became the only ABM unit ever to go into official operation in the United States. The installation of the missiles began in early 1975 at the same time as the UFO sightings started in Manitoba. The plan was that Spartan five-megaton missiles would try to intercept Soviet ICBMs while they were still outside the atmosphere. If that failed, the much faster one-megaton Sprint missiles would be launched to intercept the Soviet ICBMs as they approached the North Dakota missile fields.

  By April 1975, eight Spartan and 28 Sprint missiles were operational. Then, as the UFO intrusions at the SAC bases began late in 1975, “the full complement of 30 Spartans and 70 Sprints became operational.”4 On November 18, 1975, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate voted to take the Mickelsen site off alert. It was determined that with high costs and the Soviet use of multiple warheads the plan was doomed to fail. The idea of mutual assured destruction (MAD) seemed to be a better plan to deter a Soviet first strike.

  The decommissioning of the site commenced on February 10, 1976, and as the 100 nuclear missiles were removed, the UFOs stopped being reported in the Carman area. The records show that they left and never returned. It was as if some intelligence agency had placed UFO drugs in the Carman water in March 1975 and took them out in early 1976.

  Aerial photograph of the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in Nekoma, North Dakota. It went into operation in 1975 when the Charlie Red Star flap occurred. When the installation was decommissioned and the missiles were removed the following year, the UFOs departed, too. Credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS ILL, 16-CHIG, 33-2.

  I asked Anthony Britain in 2010 how many UFOs he had seen in 1975–76, since he was out every night with visitors, researchers, newspaper reporters, and movie crews. He estimated he had experienced about 150 sightings. Asked how many UFOs he had witnessed in Carman in the 35 years after the flap he replied, “None.”

  The UFO flap in Carman was over. Charlie Red Star appeared to have left for good, and the citizens of Carman returned to their normal lives. I, on the other hand, fell down the UFO rabbit hole and have been chasing the mystery ever since.

  Appendix 1

  Carman Poll Evaluation, November 30, 1976

  This poll was taken at Carman High School.

  Poll Questions

  1.How many of you believe (without having to decide what the origin might be) that there is such a thing as a flying UFO?

  No: 9.6% Yes: 72.1% Undecided: 17.3%

  2.How many of you believe that you have seen something in your lifetime that could be classed as a UFO?

  No: 36.5% Yes: 62.5%

  3.How many of you believe that you have in the past two years seen something that could be classed as a UFO?

  No: 46.2% Yes: 52.9%

  4.Of those of you who answered Yes to Questions 2 or 3 or both, were you close enough to actually see an
object as opposed to a light in the sky?

  No: 76% Yes: 23%

  5. Of those of you who answered Yes to Questions 2 or 3, were you within 100 yards of the object?

  No: 90.4% Yes: 9.6%

  6.Of those of you who answered Yes to Questions 2 or 3, did you see any people in or around the craft?

  No: 98% Yes: 0.96%

  7.Of those of you who answered Yes to Questions 2 or 3, after seeing the UFO, did you experience a time lapse, a period of time where you couldn’t account for what happened?

  No: 91.3% Yes: 7.7%

  8.Do you know of anyone else (other than the people in this school) who have seen a UFO?

  No: 63.5% Yes: 35.6%

  9.How many of you have, without the aid of mass media, TV, or newspapers, ever seen a Boeing 747 jumbo jet? That is, how many of you have actually seen one in person or on the ground?

  No: 44.2% Yes: 54.8%

  10.Have you ever read a book on UFOs — this includes Erich von Däniken?

  No: 42.3% Yes: 47.1%

  The results of the Carman poll were very much what I expected. The sightings were more numerous than in Sanford (a town 20 miles east that experienced many sightings, as well) and were of a much higher quality.

  This is shown in the large number of responses to Questions 4 and 5. In fact, almost 50 percent of the respondents reported being close enough to actually see an object rather than just a light in the sky, which is usually the case for most UFO sightings.

  The most stunning result, however, was in the comparison of the responses to Questions 3 and 9. According to those polled, more students claimed to have seen UFOs than saw Boeing 747 jumbo jets.