Of those polled, it was found that 85 percent of the students had either seen a UFO themselves or personally knew someone who had.
The results were so strong in Carman that they dwarf those in other Manitoba areas. A comparison to the national poll shows that personal experiences of UFOs in Carman are six times the country’s average. Nationally, only 11 percent claim to have seen a UFO, and only 54 percent believe in the possible existence of them.
The numbers seem to back up the statement that in 1975 and 1976, at least, Carman was the UFO capital of the world.
Appendix 2
Charlie Red Star Poetry
“Charlie Red Star” by Roger Currie and Kent Anderson
Twinkle, twinkle, UFO
How we wonder where you go.
Up above the world so high
Like a bright light in the sky.
As you shine your big red light,
Carman’s people stay up at night.
“Chief Charlie Red Star” by Frances Stagg
Who rides the night on his fiery steed,
Crossing all barriers at unfathomed speed?
Riding the wings of the clouds tossed on high,
Drifting by moonlight o’er soft silent sky.
’Tis Chief Charlie Red Star
The great warrior bold
From a Cree Indian legend by the campfire I’m told.
His headdress aflame with bright feathers of red
As in days long ago on his pony he sped.
He rides through the buffalo past the stars
Hunting the Great Plains from Pluto to Mars.
With soft silent footsteps that no man can hear.
For he brings only joy and never a fear.
As embers die out on our campfire bright
And the daybreak arrives to give light to the night.
The Indians know he is happy at last
Reliving old memories and dreams of the past.
When he hunts through the night, we won’t question why.
Good night, Charlie Red Star — Old Chief of the Sky.
Notes
Introduction
1. A flap is a prolonged series of UFO sightings.
Chapter 1: The Arrival of Charlie Red Star
1. Chris Rutkowski, Aliens & Abductions: What’s Really Going On? (Toronto: Dundurn, 1999), 27.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 28.
5. Jess Stearn, Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 257.
6. Daniel Coleman investigated the series of sightings in all three places. The actual reporter’s stories sent back for all three areas can be found at the end of this book. The Wisconsin sightings led to another major event in UFO history. In March 1976, Jimmy Carter was campaigning for president in Wisconsin at the time of the flap. During a question-and-answer session, he was asked what he would do about the UFO situation. Carter replied that if elected he would release all government information on UFOs. The comment became famous, and Carter is still asked about the matter from time to time.
7. On January 7, 1948, Air National Guard Captain Thomas Mantell, a very experienced pilot and a Second World War veteran, was ordered to check out reports of an unidentified flying object in Kentucky airspace. Mantell and his three fellow P-51D Mustang pilots, all of whom were already in the air, proceeded to do so. After pursuing something unknown for a while, three of the pilots returned to base, but Mantell continued on, eventually crashing near Franklin, Kentucky, on the border with Tennessee. What he was chasing remains a mystery, but there are plenty of theories — see www.ufocasebook.com/Mantell.html. As for the Arizona logger Travis Walton, he claimed he was abducted by a UFO on November 5, 1975, and held for five days. See the logger’s own book The Walton Experience (New York: Berkley, 1979); also entitled in a later edition as Fire in the Sky: The Walton Experience (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 1997), which includes material about the movie Fire in the Sky, based on Walton’s ordeal.
8. Debbie Lyon, “Have You Seen Any UFOs Lately? The Manitoba Center Wants to Know,” Winnipeg Free Press, June 4, 1977.
Chapter 2: Witnesses and Testimonies to Charlie Red Star
1. “UFO Report Interview with Jim and Coral Lorenzen,” UFO Report, August 1977.
2. Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micros-Study of the Kennedy Assassination (New York: Bernard Geis/Random House, 1967), 25–29.
3. For a full description, see “The CKY-TV Movie” section of see Chapter 5, “Cameras, Photographers, and Charlie Red Star.”
4. Joseph McCann also claimed that the UFO activity had affected the 115 horses in the north pasture. He told the National Enquirer: “You know my 115 horses up in the north pasture, they’re going crazy up there. They’re getting wild up there. Last year they were tame but now they are getting wild. Whatever they’re [UFOs] doing to them, they’re getting crazy up there.”
5. These photographs by Tannis Major were the best ones ever taken of Charlie. A full account of the events involved in taking the pictures is given in the section called “The Tannis Major Photographs” in Chapter 5, “Cameras, Photographers, and Charlie Red Star.”
6. This is exactly the same type of description given to me by Jennette Frost at Sperling, who described the two lights she had seen on one object as similar to the type of lights used on old Model T cars.
7. This exact reported effect of close encounters with UFOs appeared as part of the plot in Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As the Manitoba cases were never made public, Spielberg must have obtained his example from some other UFO sighting in which the same event occurred.
8. See the “More Little Men” section in Chapter 6, “Landings.”
9. The lack of objectivity from Constable Wotherspoon might have come from the fact that the first two officers who had talked to the media were transferred out to less friendly environments. In Canada the RCMP has many outposts in the North or in the bush, which isn’t exactly where many officers are dying to go.
10. The Staggs had witnessed the same thing on May 6, 1976. This incident was different in that the Staggs described a fourth object that flew by the car very low to the ground.
11.This is particularly true in light of the fact there were three other cases in which animals disappeared in heavy UFO sighting areas.
Chapter 3: Classics
1. The jerking motion was identical to the one described by the McCann children in 1975. I also saw it on the second night I spotted a UFO in Carman in June 1975. It was called the bouncing Ping-Pong ball by the McCann children, and that was exactly the way it looked — a white ball bouncing randomly in the sky.
Chapter 4: It’s Funny They Should Be the Same
1. Years after the Manitoba UFO flap there were many reports of triangles. The 1990s brought the famous cases of triangles that were seen and tracked by the military in Belgium, and by a dramatic series of triangle sightings witnessed by most of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1997. This led to many new reports of triangles around the world. It should be remembered that triangles were a collective reality many years before.
2. In the 1990s and 2000s, reports of objects being dropped off by a larger entity in the sky became commonplace in sightings around the world. In these reports, the number of objects ranged from a couple to hundreds. Many of them, especially in Mexico, were videotaped and can be found on YouTube.
3. This identical docking manoeuvre was sighted just north of Elm Creek by Frances Stagg and her husband, Art, on November 17, 1975, and May 6, 1976.
4. Wendelle Stevens, “UFO Tracks in the Sky,” UFO Report 2, no. 5 (Fall 1975).
5.Daniel Coleman’s report to the National Enquirer concerning a sighting in Two Harbors, Minnesota.
6.The Brunkild microwave tower sighting is described in mo
re detail in the “Charlie Fights Back” section of Chapter 7, “Ground Lights.” A second identical event occurred at Homewood, Manitoba, on March 19, 1976.
7. Exactly the same three-light triangle description was given to me by a family of six living north of Carman. Just as the Manitoba UFO flap was ending, triangle articles started to appear in UFO magazines around the world. Examples are Richard Hall, “The Weirdest UFOs I Have Known,” Official UFO (May 1977): 20. Also see James A. Hudson, “Trail of the Triangle UFO,” True Flying Saucer UFO Quarterly 7.
8.This sighting by Anthony Britain compares to those of Charlie, who usually flew 1,000 feet or lower.
9. John Womack, I Was Picked Up by a U.F.O. (Cullman, AL: Helms Publications, 1975). This “flow” property of light was similar to light coming off an object sitting on a car in April 1976. It looked much like smoke that floated around and moved more like a fluid than a beam.
10.J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, The Edge of Reality: A Progress Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1975), 273.
11. Probably the most famous case of UFOs, hydroelectricity, and blackouts concerns the many reports during the 1965 Northeast Blackout. Numerous UFOs were observed just before the blackout, and many people think they might have played a role in what happened. Even the U.S. Office of Emergency Planning named “unknown phenomena” as one of the things being looked into in its investigation of what caused the blackout. It never did reach a conclusion.
12. In a North Dakota tape supplied to me by Richard Faflak of a woman who recorded from one device to another when a UFO flew close to her house, the same double-sine wave appears when put on an oscilloscope.
13.See the “The Second Movie” section of Chapter 5 and the “Possibilities” section in Chapter 7 for more discussion of the dead light phenomenon.
14.Similarly, experiences with ground lights showed that the small ones were very sensitive to light. The correlation here was much more repeatable.
Chapter 5: Cameras, Photographers, and Charlie Red Star
1.See the section called “The Second Night — Charlie Takes Off” in Chapter 2.
2.Not getting it on the spool might happen in the field because loading a camera was often done just by touch because of the pitch-black conditions and the fear of losing night vision by turning on a light to change film while something flew around.
3.Daniel Coleman, National Enquirer, June 17, 1975.
4.Ralph Mayher took the picture on July 29, 1957, in Miami Beach. See Todd Zechel, “The CIA and UFOs,” Official UFO, September 1977.
5.The local RCMP officers had sightings of Charlie Red Star and talked to reporters. However, both officers involved in the incident were transferred shortly after and never claimed they saw UFOs again.
6.A.G. McNamara, “UFOs: What Are They?” Journal of the Canadian Air Traffic Control Association 8, no. 1 (1977): 9–12.
7.Interview with Bob Pratt, National Enquirer, August 3, 1976.
8.When I received the developed film back, I looked for the frame where the object had crossed behind the telephone pole. The object was clearly visible: a long red line across the horizon with a break in the line. Few photos taken of UFOs have all the items seen by the photographer. This picture of mine was one of the few where the shot corresponded to what had actually been seen.
9.In many important UFO sightings, mysterious “men in black” or MIBs sometimes haunt the case. They harass witnesses and seem more interested in destroying important evidence. Wendelle wrote to me about all this in a letter dated February 23, 1977.
10.Personal interview with Dustin Hope, March 16, 1976.
11.See Chapter 4. Various other people, including Jennette Frost, saw Charlie on May 12, 1975, too.
12.Dufferin Leader, January 7, 1976.
13.See Chapter 4 for more discussion about this wave theory.
14.The image is faint and cloudy in comparison to the actual object.
15.As described more fully at the beginning of Chapter 4, the inter-dimensional theory toys with the idea that UFOs might be linked to parallel dimensions.
16.Because these Manitoba roads were perfectly straight with few if any turns, we often travelled them at high speed without lights. If the moon was out, there was usually enough illumination to see the road faintly. Another reason for driving without lights was that we had discovered that ground lights were very sensitive to anything else that glowed.
17.There were dikes on either side of the drainage ditch to prevent water from flowing back onto the fields. The land here was so flat that the water had to be channelled away.
Chapter 6: Landings
1.Interview with National Enquirer reporter Bob Pratt, August 28, 1976.
2.I first read the National Enquirer interview with Bill Wheatley in 2004. I interviewed Bill probably the year after Coleman from the National Enquirer. Although I have misplaced my notes, what Bill Wheatley states in this interview is identical to the story I recall him telling me.
3.F. David Penner, “Strange Markings Studied,” Red River Valley Echo, July 16, 1975.
4.Bob Pratt, National Enquirer, June 17, 1975.
Chapter 7: Ground Lights
1.At night it is hard to determine size and distance because there are no reference points. This object was either very low or very big based on the field of vision in the binoculars.
Chapter 8: The Nuclear Connection
1.Robert Moskin, “Hunt for the Flying Saucer,” Life, July 1, 1952.
2.It wasn’t until the hydrogen bomb was developed that it was possible to destroy the world. Physicist Herbert York summed up the implications of the first test of a hydrogen bomb: “[T]he world suddenly shifted, from the path it had been on to a more dangerous one. Fission bombs, destructive as they might be, were thought of as limited in power. Now, it seemed, we had learned how to brush even these limits aside and to build bombs whose power was boundless.” See Herbert F. York, Arms and the Physicist: An Eye-Witness Report on a Half Century of Nuclear-Age Drama (Woodbury, NY: American Institute of Physics, 1995), 11.
3.Air Force Security Police message to 15 U.S. Air Force bases, November 10, 1975.
4.Robert Johnston, “Multimegaton Weapons: The Largest Nuclear Weapons,” April 6, 2009. Accessed at www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/multimeg.html.
OF RELATED INTEREST
Haunted Hospitals: Eerie Tales About Hospitals, Sanatoriums, and Other Institutions
By Mark Leslie and Rhonda Parrish
A look inside the hospitals, asylums, and sanatoriums in which formal spectral residents refuse to move on.
Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing, places of birth, and places of hope. But with all of the varying highs and lows that are experienced in these buildings, is it any wonder when echoes linger indefinitely? How about asylums, which house some of society’s worst offenders and troubled inmates, or sanatoriums, places where the mentally and physically ill find themselves trapped, even after death?
Journey inside the history of these macabre settings and learn about the horrors from the past that live on in these frighteningly eerie tales from Canada, the United States, and around the world.
Copyright © Grant Cameron, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Cover image: istock.com/standret
Unless specified otherwise, all images are the property of the author.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cameron, Grant, 1954-, author
Charlie Red Star : true reports of one of North America’s biggest UFO
sightings / Grant Cameron.
Includes bibliographical references.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-3780-8 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3781-5 (PDF).--
ISBN 978-1-4597-3782-2 (EPUB)
1. Unidentified flying objects--Sightings and encounters--Manitoba.
2. Unidentified flying objects. 3. Ufologists--Canada. 4. Cameron, Grant,
1954-. I. Title.
TL789.6.C3C34 2017 001.942097124 C2017-901623-7
C2017-901624-5
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.
Charlie Red Star Page 24
