Charlie Red Star

by Grant Cameron

  The next night, March 29, Robin took 60 photos of which only six turned out. Of those half dozen only two corresponded to anything we had seen. The other four were good photos, but we had no idea what objects we had shot. The Winnipeg planetarium had three printed, and I sent the originals to researcher Wendelle Stevens, who was one of the foremost UFO photograph experts. They never arrived.

  The first time I tried to photograph Charlie I had a similar experience when I was shooting two miles west of Elm Creek. The object over the field north of me was extremely close, and I used an entire roll of film on one-second exposures.

  The object appeared to be only a few feet off the ground and was flying back and forth like a typewriter carriage. It travelled slowly east pulsing red, then stopped and turned green. After that it shot back across the field in a few seconds or so, reverted to a pulsing red, and once more headed slowly across the field.

  I had heard the stories of photo troubles but felt it wasn’t all that hard and my film would prove it, certain that I had succeeded my first time out. When I got home, though, I discovered just how wrong I was.

  A bit before dusk I had taken a picture in Carman, and driving out to Elm Creek I had left the aperture at F5.6, which wasn’t correct for shooting in pitch-black conditions, so I didn’t get any photos.

  Bad pictures as well as no photos were common. Tannis reported taking 60 photographs in one good session with only seven that were worth printing. Robin shot 80 in one session with only 10 good enough to print. John Losics had a single session with 50 photos of which none were usable. Photographer Jonathan Black took 20 photos and got two worth printing. I fired off 100 and got two somewhat decent ones. It was something we all hated to admit, but it happened and we couldn’t explain it.

  The type of equipment the photographers were using didn’t seem to matter, either. We used film from 25 ASA colour up through 500 ASA. We used lenses from 50 mm to 3000 mm, and exposures from 1/30 a second up to a minute.

  There were disagreements among photographers concerning what should be used. Some suggested a short lens and high-speed film because they believed exposure was the problem. Others, however, insisted the power of the telephoto lens was the problem. Should we go for exposure or close-up detail? Neither really worked, and the mystery was never solved.

  The Tannis Major Photographs

  I have to admit my personal attitude has been to look for some natural phenomena, but Mrs. Major’s photographs have triggered my interest. I’m inclined to ask — “What is it we’ve got here?”

  — B. Franklyn Shinn, Former Director of the Winnipeg Planetarium

  The Tannis Major photographs are without question the best taken during the entire UFO flap. Not only did she get hundreds of UFO pictures, she captured clear shots of Charlie Red Star, which meant a lot to town people because it confirmed the reality of what they all had seen. It was then a surprise to me that when the National Enquirer’s Daniel Coleman came to Manitoba to do a story on the long and prolonged flap of sightings, he had heard nothing about these photos.

  However, Coleman had talked to Tannis during his first trip to Manitoba in June 1975. In his report to the National Enquirer, he wrote:

  Perhaps the record for UFO watching was set by Mrs. Tannis Major, the freelance photographer who was determined to get a good picture of a UFO. Sometimes accompanied by her husband, she went out for 26 days in May and June watching for UFOs before rain forced her to stay in on the 27th day in order to keep her camera dry.3

  Tannis told Coleman in a June 4 interview that she was out to get a picture of “Charlie Boy.” It wasn’t until a month later, on July 9, that her dream was realized.

  Just south of Carman, Tannis’s house faced the Britains’ airstrip across the road to the west. Consequently, when Charlie flew the “beer run,” most of the path was visible through Tannis’s front window. Therefore it was no surprise to anyone visiting the Major house to discover a camera with a long telephoto lens on a tripod in the living room pointed out the window.

  “I figured if he ever showed up,” Tannis told me, “I would be ready for him. You haven’t got time to set up the camera when it happens. This way I’m shooting with everything I’ve got and I’m also shooting through glass. That’s important.”

  It was July 9 at almost 11:20 p.m. when Tannis happened to look out the front window and spotted Charlie west of Carman near Stephenfield. The object appeared to be flying just above the treeline, moving from south to north and therefore from left to right in the window.

  “I knew it was a UFO right off the bat,” she said to me. “If you’ve seen a number of them already, you know right away it’s a UFO. I didn’t waste any time. I had everything set up already. This was the time to shoot and fast.”

  The object, according to Tannis, was moving rather slowly, so she set her shutter speed for one second. The camera, a Canon VLB, had a Vivitar lens with a 3x telephoto extender that brought the lens up to 615 mm. The lens was wide open, giving it a T-stop of about 3.5–3.8.

  The film used was a surplus Hollywood movie film, type 5247, which has a very fine grain. Tannis shot her pictures at 200 ASA and had it pushed to 400 at developing (the film allows for varying ASAs to be used). Multiple Color Systems in Portland, Oregon, developed the pictures. The blow-ups were done by Winnipeg Planetarium artist Elliot Slater.

  All three photos in the series were taken with one-second time exposures. The only movement of the camera was made by Tannis between shots to keep the object in the field of vision of the powerful telephoto lens and to follow the object as it moved to the right in the window.

  Estimating the object to be six miles away, Tannis took her first photo. The time was 11:20 p.m. The developed shot showed a pulsing object travelling from left to right with a definite trail left by a one-second exposure indicating motion. The picture reveals an apparent change in the angle of the object. Tannis said it seemed to bank east toward her.

  The first Tannis Major photo of Charlie Red Star, with the planet Venus in the background.

  In the second photograph taken a minute later, the object is still moving but now appears tilted on its side.

  The second Tannis Major photo of Charlie as he appears to turn in the sky.

  The third Tannis Major photo of Charlie in which he seems to hover in one position.

  The third and last picture in the series was taken a minute after the second one and best illustrates what Charlie actually looked like to people such as myself who were lucky enough to see it. Just before the object disappears, the one-second exposure indicates no movement from it. This is still the depiction of Charlie most familiar to residents of the area.

  No horizontal motion is apparent in the third picture and therefore the object appears to hover motionless in the sky. The coloration is similar to that in the accounts given by people who saw it — white with a red corona. Two photos taken elsewhere in the world — one from a Concorde jet in France and the other snapped by Ralph Mayher — feature comparable object images.4

  Just after shooting the third picture, Tannis told me it was lights-out time again — the object suddenly disappeared.

  After receiving the developed pictures, Tannis said during our interview that the RCMP came to get copies of them. This shocked me, since I had heard the RCMP story but a different version. I thought Tannis had gone to the local RCMP office and offered them copies of the photos. However, she insisted that the officers had come to her to request them.5

  After Canada’s Department of National Defence dropped its official investigation into UFOs, the National Research Council’s Institute for Astrophysics, Planetary Sciences Section, was charged with receiving and evaluating UFO reports filed by the RCMP, the Department of Transport, the military, and any other federal organization approached with UFO sightings. So copies of the pictures were sent to Ottawa.

  So
me of the Manitoba UFO accounts submitted were briefly analyzed by two of the chief scientists in the Planetary Sciences Section: Dr. A.G. McNamara, head of the section, and Dr. Ian Halliday. McNamara, who did much of the investigation of the Manitoba reports, made his position on UFOs public in an article he wrote entitled “UFOs: What Are They?”

  In the summary of the paper, McNamara laid out his personal belief: “Two thousand years of observation and thirty years of rather intensive collection (15,000 reports in the USAF Project Bluebook and 1,500 in Canada) and examination of reports have not yielded any positive sighting or artifact of extra-terrestrial origin.”6

  McNamara wrote the above despite the fact that he and his colleagues did almost no proper examination of cases sent to their office. “It’s a matter of priority,” McNamara told the National Enquirer. “We’ve got a lot more important areas to investigate and we can’t put a lot of effort into chasing down these things which, in general, lead to naught.”7

  Therefore not many researchers took the opinions of the National Research Council very seriously. The analysis done by McNamara on a sighting report was usually a guess made off the top of his head after a brief glance at the accounts, which prompted some investigators to wonder: If this is the quality of the research at the National Research Council, what about the rest of their research in other areas being paid for by taxpayers?

  In one Manitoba case, for example, a handwritten notation at the bottom of the report suggested the sighting might have been caused by a Frontier Airline flight from Winnipeg to Las Vegas. This was absolute nonsense to anyone who had done UFO research in the area. We had all clearly heard the Frontier flight pass over every night. It was so high that it wasn’t visible beyond a faint view of the plane’s strobe light. What’s more, it went in the opposite direction of Charlie Red Star’s beer run and happened only once every night for a couple of minutes.

  Furthermore, I visited the Planetary Sciences Section twice to inspect sighting reports. They were kept by a secretary in a filing cabinet in her office, and the analysis was done on Friday afternoons when there was spare time.

  While there I interviewed Dr. McNamara and was impressed with his sincerity about the whole UFO thing. He gave me the distinct impression he was a UFO disbeliever and seemed to be someone who wasn’t very knowledgeable about the subject. McNamara wasn’t even familiar with the material in the filing cabinet that he was supposed to study for the public.

  When I brought back the NRC analysis in which McNamara had determined the Charlie Red Star sightings were the nightly Frontier Airlines flight, most of the people who had taken photographs of Charlie laughed. Tannis Major, however, was quite upset. “What makes me so mad,” she said, “[is that] Ottawa has the gall to say it’s an airplane. I wish they would get smart enough to say either they don’t know what it is or that it’s a UFO and they don’t know where it comes from instead of making up a fairy tale. Unless I’m still living in the era of the Wright brothers, to call that a plane, that’s idiotic.”

  In August 1976, I showed my prints of the three best Major photographs to the National Enquirer’s Daniel Coleman. He was interested in using them in a story about the Manitoba UFO flap, so we got together with Tannis to discuss the present state of UFO affairs and Tannis’s photographs with her.

  I brought out my prints, which were 16x enlargements, but discovered that Tannis had obtained some 64x blow-ups. These showed very clear images, and in Tannis’s third picture there was a small bluish field on the lower edge of the object.

  Coleman got prints from Tannis and took them back to Florida with him, but in September he phoned me and outlined a problem that had come up with the pictures. He had taken them to various photographic people in Florida and everyone had confirmed that the object was indeed unidentified. However, none of the experts would put their names behind their analyses, so Coleman and I discussed what we were going to do.

  It was apparent the object wasn’t an airplane as had been stated by the RCMP and the NRC. The difficulty was to get someone with a qualified background to go on record and declare that Charlie wasn’t a plane.

  I talked with about 30 people, ranging in background from someone with a PhD in astronomy to a nature photographer. Once they heard they were dealing with UFO photographs, they usually insisted they weren’t qualified to make an assessment, even before they saw the pictures. Finally, after two days of phoning, I found two people willing to cover the various aspects requested by the National Enquirer editors. The editors wanted me to get someone to verify that the three Tannis photos weren’t pictures of a meteorite, fireball, or plane.

  To deal with the plane aspect, I asked for the opinion of Murray Sutherland, chief of the tower and head of air traffic control in Winnipeg. I showed him Tannis’s shots and provided him with a two-page summary of how the photographs had been taken, the weather conditions, and the photographic equipment that had been used to snap the pictures. Sutherland read the report carefully, studied the photos, and then asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “In your opinion, could this be a plane, if what Mrs. Major says is true?”

  Sutherland remained silent for a moment, then said, “In my opinion, it looks like no plane I’m familiar with. Just to be sure, I’ll call in one of my supervisors, Dick Cowan, and get a second opinion.”

  When Cowan arrived in the tower, he, too, read over the report and examined the photos.

  “In your opinion,” I repeated, “if what Mrs. Major says is true, could this be an airplane?”

  It took Cowan a long time to answer the question, and when he did, he held up Tannis’s third picture and said, “The only thing this might be is the back end of an F-104. This, of course, would mean that, one, an F-104 was flying around Carman without anyone reporting the sound of a jet; two, it would mean that the jet was moving away from Mrs. Major when she clearly remembered it coming toward her; three, the central colour of an F-104 would be bluish; and, four, a jet wouldn’t account for the first two photos in the series.”

  The analyses from these two men, who I was told “knew airplanes better than anyone in the city,” was an emphatic no to the object being a plane.

  Next I took the pictures to Robert Millar, who had a master of science and was head of the planetarium at the University of Manitoba. He read over the report and looked at the photographs.

  When he was done, I asked, “In your opinion, could this be a meteorite or fireball, or any other astronomical phenomena you’re familiar with?”

  He glanced up as if I had just tried to tell him that one and one was six. “Not if what she says is true. No way.” The only thing close he told me was a fireball. Walking over to a photo filer, Millar pulled out a number of pictures and said, “Look at this. This is a fireball.”

  I gazed at the three photos he presented.

  “See how it breaks up,” he told me. “It’s much different than those photos.” He added that fireballs took a long time to cross the sky and were usually well tracked. Tannis’s photos, on the other hand, were all shot within two minutes.

  Now that the authenticity of the photos had been backed up, I called Daniel Coleman and told him what the three men had said. It appeared that Tannis Major’s photos had gained credibility.

  Caught, Then Lost Again

  During the two years I spent investigating the Manitoba UFO flap, I was always told how much photographs would mean toward solving the mystery. After examining Tannis Major’s photos as well as other cases in which people tried to get UFOs on film, I had to reconsider how important any one picture of a UFO was. In Manitoba, for every shot that turned out well, there were 100 that didn’t and numerous ones that were just too poor.

  Many other photographers and I started to believe that a good photo was “usually an accident.” Not only that, but in a couple of cases the pictures came up out of order or didn’t correspond to anything we had seen all
night.

  For me the sighting that brought the issue to a head occurred on July 27, 1976, and concerned a roll of film I shot that night. This incident turned out to be the best and most bizarre, and the pictures I took were also the last of the ones I snapped in 1976.

  On that July 27, I left Anthony Britain’s house at about 10:15 p.m. and headed eight miles north of Carman, which brought me to a road across from the McCann farm where there was a ground light I wanted to photograph. After shooting a few pictures, I moved southeast onto Highway 305 East where there were two other ground light positions.

  When I was positioned on Highway 305, I noticed a light in the sky directly east and at about a 40-degree angle. Its appearance was similar to a landing light on an aircraft about to land but instead of three lights there seemed to be only one. There were no other lights on the object such as a strobe, and it appeared to be flying southwest away from Winnipeg’s international airport.

  My camera was set up with 500 ASA colour film, a 50 mm lens, and a cable release. I prepared to take a shot even though the sky was overcast, the clouds were low, and there were sounds of thunder both north and south of where I was. But the object was travelling with incredible slowness toward Carman to the south, and I had plenty of time to shoot. The first time exposure was a minute, the second 10 seconds, and the third three minutes. I was hoping the last photo would provide the most information, thanks to the low cloud ceiling and high humidity.

  As the object travelled closer to Carman, it suddenly started to pulse. I now had to consider that it might be a plane landing at Carman, but that idea was ruled out for a number of reasons.

  If the object was a plane landing at Carman, it would have been a small one and wouldn’t have had such a strong landing light on it.

  There was no strobe at any time visible on the object.