NUFORC Sighting 13847

Occurred: 1972-08-10 00:00 Local
Reported: 2000-08-20 00:00 Pacific
Duration: ?
No of observers: 2

Location: none (in countryside) (Canada), SK, Canada

Shape: Other

Metallic "squished-football"-shaped UFO displayed extraordinary maneuverability and speed; later green light cloud followed car.

8/20/00 Account of August 10, 1972 UFO Event(s) Seen By ((names deleted)) My present (married) name is ((name deleted)), though in August of 1972 my (maiden) name was ((name deleted)). It was the summer vacation between my second and third years of law school; at the time I lived in New York City where I was attending Columbia University School of Law. A friend of mine from law school had to get his car back to California before the registration expired; he’d invited me to drive across Canada and down the West Coast. Thus it was that on August 10, 1972 I was seated in the passenger seat of a car travelling west on the Trans Canada Highway in the western portion of Saskatchewan headed towards the Alberta border, a long and quite-deserted stretch of road. It was the beginning phase of sunset: it was still basically full daylight, but the western sky was already glowing a reddish orange. I was gazing northward out the passenger side window when I noticed a metallic object shaped rather like a long slightly squished football but more pointed on the ends (see”P.P.S.” on last page). It was approaching or arriving, coming down out of the sky which would have been to the northwest of me (it was in the upper left portion of my passenger side window); however, although it was arriving, I had not seen it do a full entry from the sky -- no starting with a tiny speck getting larger -- it just seemed to show up out of nowhere albeit at a distance from which it then approached. It came in on a trajectory rather like that of a plane coming in for a landing (except that it wasn’t a plane and had no wings): it curved down and out to the right (east) and leveled off flying eastward parallel to the flat horizon. It was going quite fast, faster certainly than any airplane would have, but the speed wasn’t astonishing or attention-getting at that point. I called my friend’s attention to the bizarre object. Since he was driving, my friend had less opportunity to watch the object; and since we were on a hard-driving schedule to get the car to California, we never considered stopping. But as we continued to drive, my friend would pose possible explanations as I, who was observing nonstop, would report back contradications as I saw them. My friend posited several falling object possiblities, such as meteorites, space debris, etc. beginning when I first called his attention to the object. I remember my reply was “How many meteorites stop dead in their tracks?”, for indeed the object’s approach and fairly fast eastward movement ended abruptly with the vehicle suddenly, and without first slowing down, freezing dead still in the sky! The object stayed stopped in this position, which was at that point either north or northeast of me, appearing to hover. It then fired what appeared to be a tiny jet or other propulsion off to the right (east) and reversed its direction from its arrival and moved parallel to the ground to the west, moving at what seemed to be a fast yet somehow unrushed speed in that it wasn’t as fast as its initial arrival speed. # It then repeated these maneuvers in reverse: an instantaneous stop, hovering, then a tiny firing to the left (west) initiated movement in the opposite (this time easterly) direction. The object, which by then I was calling a UFO because of its humanly impossible movements, stopped and hovered for a third time. Then once AGAIN it fired what appeared to be a propulsion firing, off to the right (east), and reversed its direction a second time, except that this time the propulsion firing was slightly larger and instead of just travelling along the horizon, the UFO swept left (i.e., westward)and away (i.e., a bit northward) and UP, DISAPPEARING ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY up into the sky in the direction from whence it had first come! The speed of this disappearance flight was mind-boggling -- 1,2,3 and it was gone. Comparing it to even our most powerful end-of-the-century rockets’ launches, where the rocket is visible for quite some time, this UFO had propulsion man hasn’t begun to come close to. Ditto on the incredible in-air maneuverability which included fast speeds, fast stops, and hovering apparently at will. To focus on the object itself as opposed to its movements, the object appeared to be metallic and shiny and appeared to be brightly reflecting the reddish-orange of the setting sun. (This would account for the object being called a “fireball” in the next morning’s newspapers, though it definitely was not a fireball -- it was bright fire-colored light reflecting off metal. This would also account for varying reports as to its color being red, blue, or orange -- the daytime sightings and/or sightings at a different angle would not have picked up the red-orange reflection of the sunset’s light.) I have never hazarded a guess as to the object’s size or its distance from me because I have lousy size and distance estimating skills and because even if I had better skills, there was no size or distance frame of reference out there in that vast, flat, and empty plain. I can only say that it clearly was neither super close (not on top of us and not close enough for me to have observed any specific features on the vehicle if there were any) nor super far away (not a speck on the horizon -- MUCH more visible and observable). I can’t say whether the UFO made any noise. I heard none, but I was far enough away that there could have been noise I didn’t hear (plus the car windows were up), although I probably WOULD have heard it if it had been as loud as, say, one of the U.S.’s rocket launches. What also strikes me after the fact is that despite the incomprehensible speed of the departure, there was no sonic boom. Humans’ jets moving at a small fraction of the speed make dramatic and highly noticeable sonic booms. I have always been clear that the above-described object clearly was a UFO and was of extra-terrestrial/not-man-on-earth origins. The various “explanations” offered in the newspapers the next morning (copies of two attached hereto), from meteors to other falling objects to fireballs to sunspots, are laughable and don’t come CLOSE to fitting the facts -- such objects do not stop in midflight, hover, and then zoom back up into the sky from whence they came. And it’s inconceivable that it was a secret government vehicle like the UFO’s that turned out to be tests of the Stealth # plane: since then we’ve been so thrilled at creating a space shuttle that could return to space -- although it had to be towed back to its launch site and put back on a rocket, and we had our problems getting that technology to work; that doesn’t sound like a government with a vehicle that can return to space instantaneously at will from a standstill in the sky! Plus I’ve already mentioned the dramatic difference in our rockets’ launch speeds and this UFO’s blinding “launch”/disappearance speed. Plus the lack of a sonic boom. However, some time after the UFO disappeared, my friend and I did observe two other strange events which I’ve always said could have been unrelated to the UFO and could have had unrelated earthly explanations -- but I’ve always wanted to learn more because it was so strange that these next two bizarre events followed so closely on the heels of what was definitely a UFO appearance. After the UFO zipped back up into space and after the sun had set, my friend and I were still driving westward on the Trans Canada Highway, probably pretty much at the Saskatchewan/Alberta border by that time. It was a VERY dark night and the road was pretty much deserted. As I had all day, I was gazing out the passenger side window (northward). Eventually a group of phenomenally bright lights, on the ground, came into view: at that point the plains had some roll to the land, and coming out from behind one of these rolls, so that I couldn’t see the source, was the most dazzling display of bright white lights that lit up all the land and sky around it. It wasn’t too far above (i.e., north of) the Trans Canada Highway. It was rather like a huge display of klieg light opening up a gigantic glitzy new shopping mall in Texas, except that the klieg lights I’d previously seen made specific spotlights in the sky and often were moving back and forth or around in circles -- these lights didn’t have that spotlight effect -- it was more of a huge, constant, and unmoving, light display. At the time my two guesses were a government installation or a landed UFO; why else would this city-appropriate light display be out there in the middle of nowhere? When we finally got to a bigger town, Medicine Hat, where we stayed for the night, we asked numerous citizens about the huge lights out on the plains just east of town and just above the Trans Canada Highway, but nobody had a clue what it was, and everybody was clear it wasn’t any permanent building or installation. I still totally reserve judgement and work on the assumption that the lights were there by the hand of man. In August 2000 I did learn that the Canadian government was rumored to have at one point had a UFO-attraction experiment out of an air base located just north/northeast of Medicine Hat, which project included trying to attract UFO’s with bright lights (Project Lure, described at www.aufosg.org/kijek/page 90 and page 87). Although the government claimed to have ceased the project prior to 1972, my current best guess as to the massive klieg light-like display I saw is that perhaps either the government or some other private project was trying to attract back the UFO that had appeared near there earlier that evening. But it’s an open question, of course. Nothing so clear as my first event. # Now to the third event, which was TRULY strange. It happened almost immediately after we’d passed the huge bright lights and once again had our dark sky and deserted road. I looked out the car’s rear window and saw a small cluster or cloud comprised of tiny dots bigger than the water drops in regular clouds or hazes: the tiny dots were tiny, glowing, neon or fluorescent green lights. The cloud was small (though big enough that I couldn’t have gotten my arms around it) and amorphous and slightly changed its contours or overall shape from time to time. Most of the time the green light cloud was just immediately outside the car -- any closer and it would have been touching the car -- AND IT WAS FOLLOWING THE CAR! It kept its distance behind the rear car window (and slightly up) constant. We theorized that perhaps the car was throwing up a dust cloud and for some reason the dust around there was glowing and green and fluorescent. But then the cloud moved around to the side of the car and travelled along with us just outside of my right passenger side window! (By the way I’m from Minnesota and have canoed in Canada -- I definitely know Northern Lights, and this had nothing to do with Northern Lights.) On my next “observation” I do own that I could have been imagining things, but I definitely had the sense of an intelligence in this green light cloud, and it seemed to be an intelligence evaluating me, perhaps to go with it. Until very recently I’ve almost never mentioned this impression to anybody, including the friend with me in the car, because it just seemed so far-fetched (now it seems less so -- see below). In any event I tried to “send” no-don’t-take-me messages to the cloud just in case. Then the cloud moved back to its original position just up and behind the car’s rear window and stayed with us until the lights of Medicine Hat started to become visible, at which point the cloud started to hang back more but was still travelling with us. Then we made the turn off the main road into Me! dicine H at and the cloud pulled way back and up and finally left us -- it seemed not to want to go into the town with us. As with the klieg lights that immediately preceded the green neon light cloud, I’ve always said that there could well be earthly explanations -- I’m certainly not ready to swear to unearthliness on a stack of Bibles the way I would vis-a-vis the first event, the flying object. I am, however, intrigued and amazed by my recent (August 2000) reading of documents concerning a pilot and plane that disappeared in 1978 off the coast of Australia after being harrassed by a UFO very similar to the one I saw in Canada in 1972 and just after the pilot reported seeing a green light while the UFO was hovering above his plane (pilot named Frederick Valentich; documents found at www.bermuda-triangle.org/Investigations/UFO_Incidents/Summary_Report). Also, an October 27, 1966 article in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix reported two different people who said they had been followed in their cars for miles by an object which repeatedly shone a spotlight on their vehicle as it was driving (copy will be attached as soon as I get it). AND recently in Nevada a UFO was seen to generate a greenish blue “fog” 60 feet away from the vehicle (www.filersfiles.com/files/2000/FilersFiles29). (On August 10, 1972 it was a very dark night, the windows were closed, and I was looking only to the north. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if anything had approached from # behind -- e.g., I didn’t notice the glowing green light cloud until it was immediately outside the car’s rear window.) The morning after our sighting, August 11, 1972, the newspaper stands were full of many different newspapers, all with headlines or front page stories about the August 10, 1972 UFO. We couldn’t stay in Medicine Hat to learn more because we had such a pressing deadline to get to California. I do regret not keeping the various newpaper articles we found that day. I have recently obtained the August 11, 1972 articles from the Medicine Hat News and the Calgary Herald (copies attached hereto). These report that the object (which they keep calling a “fireball”) was seen that day in scattered points, first throughout the Western U.S. and then in southeastern British Columbia and Alberta; these sightings were said to include one by “a jet fighter pilot flying over southeastern Washington.” I haven’t re-found the account yet, but I do also remember reading in one of the newspapers that morning that the same object had also been seen throughout the week or weeks preceding August 10, 1972 throughout the Great Plains of the U.S. I also remember reading that morning that a U.S. Air Force jet pilot had tried to chase it but couldn’t catch it and that he had clocked the object as going a speed beyond man’s capabilities. ((name and contact information deleted)) P.S. I’ve left my friend’s name out as he was upset about at having to admit he’d really seen a UFO and he didn’t want anyone to know he’d seen it, and I have no idea whether he still feels this way about it. RS Atts.: (1) two Aug.11, 1972 articles from Medicine Hat News (2) three articles from the Calgary Herald (one=Aug.11, 1972) (3) 1966 reports of spotlights following cars in Saskatchewan P.P.S. I have always described the shape of “my” UFO as being a squished football but with more pointed ends. After seeing photos and sketches of various UFO’s, I realize that what I saw could just as easily have been a disc or classic saucer if tipped slightly away or towards me. # Your form doesn't allow me to paste in the full description that I had already written! So I will mail it to you at the address you've given below.

Posted 2000-12-02