Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

Jerry: No, they were separate. There was a red light that was sort of revolving around it. It would go to different spots, but it would stay near the triangle.

  In the spring of 1976, other people, including me, began to see triangles. The objects were definite triangle shapes, unexplainable as such things as planes, weather balloons, or other natural phenomena used by skeptics to talk themselves out of tight corners.

  In 1976 it wasn’t the McCanns who were reporting triangles, because the sightings being made had shifted to the Carman-Brunkild area. Before the year was over, there were 15 sightings of triangles by 38 witnesses. No matter how unorthodox they were the sightings indicated there was something real that had invaded Manitoba’s skies.

  Common to all the 1976 sightings was the fact that the triangles flew at very low altitudes. The triangles in 1975 were reported moving quite fast, while the 1976 ones filed featured extremely slow-moving objects.

  Barbara Pelletier, who had a triangle fly right over her and her boyfriend near Brunkild, described her experience this way: “It moved our way and came right over the car, and it was shaped like a triangle. It wasn’t that high. You could see the shape of it. I could see how high it was. There were big lights in the corner of the triangle. There was a red one in the one corner and two blue ones on the other sides. There were a couple of lights forming the sides of the triangle. They were white, about four or five forming the sides of the triangle.”

  In the spring of 1976, I was lucky enough to be present at five sightings in which triangles were seen. This is because various cameramen were out in the flap area trying to photograph UFOs.

  I noticed during my observations that other high-flying UFOs accompanied each low-flying triangle. The triangles were just as others had described them: low at less than 1,000 feet.

  The simultaneous appearance of a triangle and a bouncing light was an unusual combination, but important in the entire UFO mystery because Manitoba wasn’t the only place to experience such a phenomenon. Dr. Harley D. Rutledge, chairman of the Physics Department at Southwest Missouri State University, researched identical incidents.4 Because of Rutledge’s position he was very hesitant to talk about his discoveries. He told me in a letter dated March 24, 1977: “We value our reputations more than life itself.”

  Rutledge and his team of researchers had more than 70 experiences with the bouncing lights. He estimated the speed at over 5,000 miles per hour and reported: “Detecting unusual radio waves which he believed were being emitted by the objects.”

  According to Wendelle Stevens, it was on May 25, 1975, during his research on the bouncing lights, that Rutledge reported “watching a large triangle over the Farmington area at an altitude of 2,000 feet.”

  Although there were descriptions of low-flying triangles in Missouri, Minnesota,5 and Manitoba during 1976, the colouring of the objects varied considerably. The most prevalent triangle report was of an object with a light at each corner. In Manitoba where triangles were sighted all over the southern part of the province, the most common colour combination was red, red, and green. Twenty people in eight incidents saw this object, and in these sightings it was flying with the blunt end of the triangle forward.

  When the object maintained a stable altitude, only two of the lights could be seen. As soon as the green light appeared, the object rose in altitude until it could no longer be distinguished. During all this, the triangle travelled very slowly.

  I was with three other people when we spotted a couple of triangles, including a dramatic one close up.6 It was 9:16 p.m., according to notes I took that night. Danny Penner yelled to me that he saw something flying off near the Brunkild microwave tower. The object with two distinct red lights just cleared the tower and continued its slow flight southwest.

  Just after the object passed the tower, a green light suddenly became visible as it began a slow ascent into the sky. During the next 14 minutes, I watched as the object moved higher and higher until it was a small red light among the stars.

  An hour later the same triangle dramatically reappeared and flew over the front of our car only a couple of hundred feet up as we sat on Highway 205 East, eight miles south of the microwave tower.

  Small ground light shows the same colour pattern as Charlie Red Star.

  “I figured it might have been the same craft I saw go over the tower,” Danny stated.

  It came back in the same direction as the other one had vanished (southwest) and looked identical from what I could see. “It could have been the same craft,” I told Danny.

  When the triangle reappeared and approached our car, I gazed up at it with my binoculars and noticed an interesting characteristic described by many other witnesses. Through the binoculars, the object covered my entire field of vision. The three lights forming the corners of the triangle seemed to be five or 10 feet across. Yet for such large lights they weren’t illuminating anything in the centre of the triangle. This same phenomenon had been reported about the triangle on March 19, so I made an effort to peer at the middle of the triangle at its closest point. There was nothing there, just three well-shaped lights forming a triangle. (See photograph on page 186, which was taken with my camera in Sperling, Manitoba, in 1976. The front two lights of the triangles are visible as the object moves up and down in its flight path.)

  The sightings of the triangles continued right into 1977. On March 6, 1977, for example, David Rosenfield, a pilot who flew out of Friendship Field, phoned Anthony Britain and reported that there was a UFO on the western horizon. Anthony and his wife, Rachael, hurried to glance out the west window on the second floor of their house.

  The scene was described by Anthony: “The thing was real close, no more than two miles away. Through the binoculars, I got a real good look at the thing. I had the object in view for five minutes. Just as it was dropping behind the trees along Highway 245, I could see that the corners of this object had definite red lights. In between the lights there was what looked like red neon lights.

  “Now that V-shape or triangle is not a guess at the shape of the thing. Rosenfield saw it, too. There was definite spacing between the three lights. The neon structure reminded me of heated metal. We had a real good look at it. It was there for five minutes.”

  Rosenfield, meanwhile, followed the object eight miles west to Stephenfield and stated that it spent its entire time flying back and forth between the Haywood tower and the lights at Stephenfield. He had it in sight for 30 minutes. Rosenfield’s impression of the triangle is that there “were lights on the bottom of the saucer.”7

  Towers

  During 1975 and 1976, the sightings of UFOs in Manitoba were almost a daily occurrence. The province had become one of the areas of the world with the highest number of sightings, if not the highest. What attracted these objects to Manitoba? No one theory seems to provide even part of the answer. Nevertheless, whatever attracted Charlie and his friends, one thing can be said for sure: they were often spotted around the many microwave, radio, and television relay towers in the province.

  Sprinkled across the Manitoba prairie, these towers range from the 190-foot one at Brunkild to the 1,400-foot structure at Pembina, North Dakota, near the U.S.-Canada border. They might have provided some form of visual guidance for the objects, or they might have been important because they were the source of large volumes of communication.

  From the reports I saw, it appeared that if there was a UFO sighting, there was often a microwave or other tower nearby. This, of course, might have been a coincidence because the towers were visible from long distances.

  Many accounts had UFOs travelling from tower to tower. For example, in a case at Sanford, Manitoba, two women were confronted by a UFO that hovered over their car. In their story, the Brunkild tower, 10 miles away, was a key part.

  “Then it lifted and headed for the tower at Brunkild,” Phyllis Johnson, one of the women, stated. “We could see it all the way ov
er to the tower and back. There was just this one light. It went straight over.”

  In the car with Phyllis was her friend, Marnie Herb, who told her, “That’s what they do, you know.”

  In 1975 when the UFO flap was in full swing, there were many articles in magazines and journals about the attraction UFOs seemed to have to power lines, military installations, the space program, and new weapons tests. The microwave tower theory hadn’t gotten any press as far as I could tell. So when I learned that in some towns people went to their local towers to watch UFOs I paid attention.

  In April, May, and June 1975, for example, the CBC tower just north of Carman became a regular meeting place for those trying to see Charlie Red Star. Rachael Britain told me it was such a popular place that “You’d go out to see people you hadn’t seen for months. We’d bring along coffee and sandwiches and have a real get-together.”

  At a lecture in Starbuck, Manitoba, I mentioned that microwave towers might have something to do with where UFOs were going. After the lecture, many of the students came up and said they knew this already. Apparently, in August 1975, a number of the students had seen an object around the 1,066-foot tower just outside Starbuck.

  Sitting by the towers paid off many times for those who went out to spot UFOs. The famous CKY film clip was taken at the Carman CBC tower. The TV camera was stationed at the tower and was pointed west. There was an alleyway between the lights at Stephenfield and the Haywood tower, and the UFO seemed to fly between them and the CBC tower.

  Three photographers who had come out a number of times with me had a dramatic close encounter at the same tower. Two others and I had a vivid sighting that involved a UFO that flew past the Brunkild tower twice.

  Jennette Frost lived 12 miles east of the CBC tower at Sperling. In her description of the numerous times she saw Charlie, she mentioned not only that the UFO had visited the tower but had also affected it. “Whenever I saw it [Charlie] coming from Carman that tower would just glow! Oh, it would look about that broad [indicating a couple of inches] from here. It always seemed to affect the tower. It didn’t always come from the same place, but you often saw it coming from Carman and just north of the tower.”

  Even Brendon Eagle, who constructed the Carman CBC tower, spotted a UFO there. “I saw one at the 4,000- to 5,000-foot level over the radio tower at Carman,” he told me. “It hovered there. I wonder if they’re using that tower. They might be using the beam of frequency for guidance.”

  The Carman tower was the main one where people observed UFOs, but they popped up at other towers, as well. Jennette recorded everything in her diary:

  One night Doug [her son] and I were pumping water into the cistern. You have to stay with it till it’s done. At 11:30, as a severe thunderstorm approached, I saw Charlie sitting and pulsating in the sky straight north of Brunkild, not too high up. It stayed there stationary for some time and then approached the Brunkild tower very slowly. It then dropped down on the east side of the tower below the top red light. It hovered there for a few seconds and then moved in an easterly direction.

  I received reports from UFO researcher Chris Sedaris that there were numerous sightings at the two towers on the edge of Haywood, northwest of Carman. As for my own reports, I could only find a half dozen that happened near the Haywood tower. One came from Marcel Viugnier in Rathwell, Manitoba. “I saw something out this way [east] one night,” he told me. “I said, ‘There’s a UFO over by the Haywood tower.’ Later, people said that they were coming to the power station at Haywood.”

  Many sightings occurred near the Elie telephone tower. In one, Wilson McKennett and a dozen other people watched five UFOs, one big and four small, come to the tower three nights in a row. “It was west of here,” Wilson said. “Close to the microwave tower and the mother ship seemed to be close to the tower.”

  There were trips being made to the Starbuck tower as early as May and June 1975. Tannis Major in Carman was already aware from circulating stories that UFOs had been seen around the tower. Working from her own reports, she visited Starbuck on many occasions, hoping she might snap a photo of one of them. “We went to the CBWT tower at Starbuck,” she told me. “I took a whole slew of pictures there because there were quite a few of them there.”

  Even on the last day of the long two-year flap a Mrs. Krutcher ­ex­perienced a sighting on September 29, 1976, of an object that flew past the Manitoba Telephone System tower in Morden.

  Ferris Wheel

  The community of Carman provided good evidence for the objective existence of UFOs because most people there reported the same red pulsating object, with Charlie Red Star being the most documented one. However, the accounts were so numerous that skeptics started insisting that all the witnesses were telling identical stories regardless of what they saw.

  In the Carman area, there was also a second major UFO type — a “Ferris wheel” shape. The descriptions of this object were very similar but were never publicized. In 1975 alone, a dozen witnesses told me they saw a “giant red Ferris wheel” fly through the sky.

  The first person to catch a glimpse of this unusual sight was the late Carl Major from Carman. The incident occurred on May 12 and was related to me by his wife, Tannis. “He was going south,” she said, “the day before CKY took that film. He was going south to see what’s what. He joined us later on and he said, ‘I’m pretty darn sure I saw one because it was the shape of a Ferris wheel, lights all around.’”

  The next witnesses to report the Ferris wheel shape were the McCanns, who had observed the giant object moving toward Carman. “It was just like a Ferris wheel at the fair,” Joseph McCann told me, “except it was ten times the size.”

  Anna McCann told me the same thing as her husband in another interview.

  “Was it on the ground?” I asked her.

  “No, no!” she insisted. “It was in the sky and it was rotating as it moved toward Carman. There were spokes just like a Ferris wheel.”

  “Was it at an angle?”

  “No,” Anna McCann replied. “It was on its side, slowly rotating.”

  Most witnesses living near the McCanns’ farm failed to report their sightings for fear of being associated with the McCanns and the ­family’s little green men friends. However, a majority of the neighbours were quietly seeing the Ferris wheel. These neighbours’ stories became known to me when one witness pointed out others who hadn’t come forward. Once it became established that other people were seeing something, witnesses began ending their accounts by saying, “I wasn’t the only one who saw it, you know.” Two of the neighbours I approached stated they had, indeed, seen the red Ferris wheel but pleaded with me to keep their identities secret. They didn’t want to experience the ridicule the McCanns knew so well.

  The last witnesses to see the Ferris wheel were a group of five who had gathered at the CBC tower north of Carman to watch for Charlie. Anthony Britain, one of those present, described the sighting. “I had the 7x50 binoculars and it got in close enough so that I could see it. It was about one to one and a half inches across in the glasses. It looked like a huge flaming Ferris wheel, with the whole outside flaming hot, with the reflection on the inside of glinting metal. It had a very pronounced halo on the bottom corner with actual little fingers licking out.

  “Then it came up to us. It was flying a bit higher that night. It was 2,000 to 2,500 feet up.8 I searched behind me for the movie camera when someone said, ‘Hey! It’s going the other way!’ It backed out of there, exact reverse course — 180 degrees and at about 300 to 400 miles per hour. It’s hard, however, to estimate speeds at night.”

  Getting Rid of a UFO

  Any ufologist who files reports continuously runs up against stories in which people are chased down highways by low-flying UFOs. Manitoba was no exception. In filing such cases, however, I discovered a second bizarre yet common occurrence that people described: on numerous occasions they reported being
chased down roads by UFOs that “flew off” when they made 90-degree turns onto other highways or into their yards.

  In one case, two girls were heading southwest from Winnipeg to Manitou. It was near sunset when a huge flaming object appeared on the driver’s side and followed the car for many miles. They reported that there were now two red objects in the sky, one in the east and the sun in the west. According to the two girls, there was a considerable difference between the two. Coming up to Highway 3, the girls turned west. At this point the object vanished. Mystified by this event, the girls drove around, searching for the object, but saw nothing.

  In another case, an unidentified woman from Kenton, Manitoba, told me that a blood-coloured object paced her car as she drove six children to school in Kenton. “Well, when we got to the corner where we turn off to go west toward Kenton,” she said, “the kids could hardly wait to get to school. We turned west and the darn thing just vanished. We don’t know where it vanished or anything.”

  This case, as bizarre as it might seem, occurred in broad daylight. Daylight close encounters are few and far between.

  Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon was the one involving two school principals who were chased down the road by a UFO. The two, Marnie Herb and Phyllis Johnson, had a saucer hover only a few feet above their car as they returned home to Sanford, 15 miles west of Winnipeg.

  The two were so petrified by what was happening that Marnie, who was driving, decided to turn into a farmhouse yard along the road. At the precise moment the car made the turn, the object shot away.

  “It just lifted,” Marnie said. “That made me wonder. The house is right close to the road. It just disappeared immediately at that lane.”

  The craft headed west to the Brunkild microwave tower, and the two women could see it clearly sitting near the structure. It appeared to be finished with them, so Marnie pulled the car back onto the road and continued north toward Sanford.