Killer comets, killer asteroids: Make my day, planet-killers

Nudge it, nuke it, tug it with a gravity tractor, or slow it down with some concentrated sunlight. Make my day, planet-killers.

Those are your choices if a planet-killing comet or asteroid is en route to rather imminently collide with Planet Earth. Asteroid PZ39 shot by the Earth from a distance of more than 3.58 million miles (5.77 million kilometres) earlier this month. It flew towards us at speeds of more than 35,500 mph (57,240 km/h), approaching  just after 11 a.m. GMT two weeks ago on Saturday, Feb 15.

A near-miss? “A little over 9x the distance of the earth to the moon,” Ron Graham helpfully explained. “A near miss is, in fact, an impact,” Kevin Hopton added

Both asteroids and comets are bad to have coming toward you, but comets are worse apparently simply because they can be travelling up to three times faster than Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) relative to Earth at the time of impact. The energy released by a cosmic collision increases as the square of the incoming object’s speed, so a comet could pack nine times more destructive power than an asteroid of the same mass. But both are considered to be a potentially hazardous object (PHO).

“It would be a much bigger explosion, a much bigger crater, much more damage,” (https://www.space.com/26264-asteroids-comets-earth-impact-risks.html) impact expert Mark Boslough, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said in June 2104.

If Boslough says it is so, that’s good enough for me. After all he is the author of this now famous account, dated Dec. 25, 1998, which I wrote approvingly of in a post on Nov. 9, 2014 headlined “‘Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/edward-baker-thompson-manitoba-s-microwaved-telephone-company-night-watchman-1998-urban-legend-owes-its-fame-to-real-life-american-scientist-and-a-denver-newsman/)

Wrote Boslough back in 1998:

“Telephone relay company night watchman Edward Baker, 31, was killed early Christmas morning by excessive microwave radiation exposure. He was apparently attempting to keep warm next to a telecommunications feedhorn.

“Baker had been suspended on a safety violation once last year, according to Northern Manitoba Signal Relay spokesperson Tanya Cooke. She noted that Baker’s earlier infraction was for defeating a safety shutoff switch and entering a restricted maintenance catwalk in order to stand in front of the microwave dish. He had told coworkers that it was the only way he could stay warm during his twelve-hour shift at the station, where winter temperatures often dip to forty below zero.

“Microwaves can heat water molecules within human tissue in the same way that they heat food in microwave ovens. For his Christmas shift, Baker reportedly brought a twelve pack of beer and a plastic lawn chair, which he positioned directly in line with the strongest microwave beam. Baker had not been told about a tenfold boost in microwave power planned that night to handle the anticipated increase in holiday long-distance calling traffic.

“Baker’s body was discovered by the daytime watchman, John Burns, who was greeted by an odor he mistook for a Christmas roast he thought Baker must have prepared as a surprise. Burns also reported to NMSR company officials that Baker’s unfinished beers had exploded.”

The clues, of course, to the fabricated nature of the story are contained in the names of the participants: the victim, “Baker”; his discoverer, “Burns”; and the spokeswoman, “Cooke.”

Boslough attached his microwaved worker offering to a then-current list of Darwin Award stories for 1998, declared his entry to be that year’s winner, sent it out to a few friends and sat back and watched the inevitable unfold, as veteran Denver Post editor and columnist Dick Kreck was taken in by the hoax, publishing it as the authentic 1998 Darwin Award winner. It seems, at some level, we all want to believe.

Certainly, Kreck, who retired from the paper in June 2007, was no rookie. Born in San Francisco in 1941, Kreck grew up in Glendale, California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State College, he worked as a reporter and copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Denver Post in 1968 and held various jobs, writing a city column for 18 years and covering television and radio. His books include Colorado’s Scenic Railroads; Denver in Flames; Murder at the Brown Palace; Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer ; and Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

Boslough wrote to Kreck in 1999:

“Dear Mr. Kreck:

“Thank you so much for reprinting my Darwin Award hoax in the Denver Post.

“Like you, I am a skeptic and have always very suspicious of these stories. However, I am also a scientist so I decided to do a little experiment. I made up the most outrageous and twisted death-by-stupidity tale I could imagine. I made sure that all the characters in the story had names (Mr. Baker, Mr. Burns, Ms. Cooke) that would give my joke away to any wary reader. I set the story in a location that allowed the company “Northern Manitoba Signal Relay” to have the same acronym as New Mexicans for Science and Reason, our local version of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Skeptics.

“I took a list of Darwin Awards that somebody sent me and attached my own creation, which I also declared to be this year’s winner. I turned it loose by e-mailing it to a few out-of-state friends on New Year’s Day. Seeing it this week in the Post is a bit like getting a response to a note in a bottle eight months after throwing it into the ocean. It is also a good lesson in why we should all be skeptical of what we see on the Internet … not to mention what we read in the newspaper!

“By the way, NMSR president Dave Thomas – a recent guest speaker at Rocky Mountain Skeptics – is the only person who discovered the hoax and correctly attributed it to me. He had searched for “NMSR” under Deja News and recognized my brand of humor when his search turned up my story.

“Best regards,

“Mark Boslough”

There are, of course, lot of people besides Boslough whose job it is to think about such things on both a theoretical and practical basis. I’m not one of them.

Rafi Letzter, a staff writer for New York-based Live Science wrote earlier this month:

“If a giant object looks like it’s going to slam into Earth, humanity has a few options: Hammer it with a spacecraft hard enough to knock it off course, blast it with nuclear weapons, tug on it with a gravity tractor, or even slow it down using concentrated sunlight ” (https://www.livescience.com/how-to-stop-asteroid-from-hitting-earth.html)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have come up with an 18-page guide titled “Optimization and decision-making framework for multi-staged asteroid deflection campaigns under epistemic uncertainties” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576519313700?via%3Dihub), also published earlier this month, in the journal Acta Astronautica, to help, in Letzter’s words, “future asteroid deflectors.”

For those taking the longish catastrophic view, rather than the shortish catastrophic view, here’s something to consider:

“If an approaching asteroid were detected early enough,” the  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) says, “it could be possible to divert its path using the gravity of a spacecraft (https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitigate/gravity-tractor). “Instead of sending an impactor to ram into an approaching object, a gravity tractor device would fly alongside the asteroid for a long period of time (years to decades) and slowly pull it out of Earth’s path.

Gravity tractors would be most likely to work on any shape or composition of approaching asteroid, even if it were just a pile of rubble. However, gravity tractors might not be effective for the largest asteroids of over 500 meters in diameter which might be the greatest threat to Earth. Gravity tractors offer the greatest control and could perhaps even divert an approaching asteroid to other locations in space where people could theoretically use them for research or commercial purposes. However, these techniques have never been tried and would require decades for building, launching, and carrying out a mitigation mission.”

On March 26, 1997, police in Rancho Santa Fe, California discovered the bodies of 39 members of Heaven’s Gate, an American UFO religious millenarian celibate cult based in San Diego, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles. The 39 cult members who died almost 23 years ago took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed it all down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of actress Nichelle Nichols,  best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.

They had participated in the mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp, as it approached Earth. They believed an alien spaceship hiding in the tail of a speeding comet was coming to collect their souls.

Earth-threatening asteroids might well be movie or book genres of their own. On the movie side, there are such classics as American science fiction disaster film classic Armageddon from 1998, depicting Bruce Willis et al. saving the Earth. The movie has Harry Stamper (Willis) and his oil rig crew (who are mostly losers who have done time in jail) being hired by NASA as astronauts. Their goal is to drill into an asteroid the size of Texas and deploy a bomb to break it into pieces, before the asteroid hits the Earth.

One of my favourite cover versions of the many that have been done over the years of the song Leaving on a Jet Plane is by Winnipeg’s Chantal Kreviazuk from Armageddon, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and featuring a heartfelt, if somewhat off-key, opening rendition to the song by Ben Affleck from the movie, leading to the delightful mission control quip: “So, Truman, this is who you found to save the planet.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbt2G71uT1M&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1KgfVHJxTwyayZ-pLStZ2H0RSeinmKhRqhPPGxR3L2HcIFj6j8vXbdj5s).

On the book side, I’m partial to Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven. I read the novel an early paperback edition shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on and old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back on weekend trip. A great page-tuner for a cold late autumn bus ride.

This is also around the time Pournelle, an American polymath: scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, as well as noted science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers (https://io9.gizmodo.com/rip-jerry-pournelle-a-tireless-ambassador-for-the-futu-1803143871) became perhaps the first writer from any genre to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher.  Jerry Pournelle, early adopter, died in September 2017 at the age of 84.

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Crashing Heaven’s Gate

Twenty-two years ago today I was living in Kingston, Ontario and driving along Peterborough County Road 2, just outside of Hastings, when I learned of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide on the car radio. It was a Wednesday. The suicides took three days, in shifts.

Members of Heaven’s Gate took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed it all down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of actress Nichelle Nichols,  best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.

Heaven’s Gate was an American UFO religious millenarian celibate cult based in San Diego, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles. Applewhite also wrote under his cult moniker “Do.” Nettles was known as  “Peep.” Later they became known as “Do” (pronounced Doe) and “Ti” respectively, from the end of the musical scale.

On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group, who had participated in the mass suicide in nearby Rancho Santa Fe, California, in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp, as it approached Earth. They believed an alien spaceship hiding in the tail of a speeding comet was coming to collect their souls.

A tragically surreal moment in the now almost forgotten and often surreal years of the late 1990s, leading to the end of a millennium and the Year 2000.

Applewhite’s theology was based in part on the notion he and Nettles were the “two witnesses” spoken of by John of Patmos, also known as the John the Revelator, in his apocalyptic Book of Revelation (11:3-12); two witnesses who are killed, but stay dead for only 3½ days and then are taken up to heaven in a cloud. While Biblical scholars are not certain of their identity, many believe the two unknown witnesses are either Moses and Elijah or Enoch and Elijah. One of my favourite scenes from the 2002 movie, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, shows the fire-breathing two witnesses at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, as rabbinical scholar Tsion Ben-Judah and journalist Buck Williams cross the militarized no-man’s land during the Tribulation to meet them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SJipNpSFnQ&feature=share)

At their final celebratory meal at Marie Callender’s Restaurant in Carlsbad, about 15 miles from Rancho Santa Fe. the weekend before they committed suicide, eating 39 identical turkey pot pies, ice tea and cheesecake with blueberries, waiter David Riley asked where they were from,” Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher wrote in the Washington Post a few days later in a story headlined, “The cult that left as it lived,” published on March 30, 1997.

The answer they gave the waiter as to where they came from? “From the car,” one replied.

Applewhite’s journey to the edge of the zeitgeist and beyond began in the early 1970s, first when he was a music professor in Houston, teaching at the University of St. Thomas, a conservative Catholic college.  In 1970, he was fired from his post after administrators there learned that Applewhite was in a relationship with a male student, according to local news accounts. The University of St. Thomas called the reason for the firing “health problems of an emotional nature.” Applewhite would wind up having himself castrated.

Nettles, who died in 1985, was an astrologer and, according to several academic studies of the group, had dabbled in numerous metaphysical theologies, combining Christian ritual with elements of paganism, science fiction and millennialism.  Applewhite, who died in the Rancho Santa Fe mass suicide in 1997, was 66.

Born in Spur, Texas., Applewhite attended Austin College, a Presbyterian-affiliated school in Sherman, Texas., then studied music at the University of Colorado, where he played the lead in both South Pacific and Oklahoma. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he directed choruses at First Presbyterian Church in Gastonia, North Carolina, and later St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and at First Unitarian Church of Houston, before joining the faculty of the University of St. Thomas in 1966.

There are believed to be four surviving members of Heaven’s Gate. Two of the surviving members still maintain the group’s website, making sure the hosting bills are paid annually and the domain name continues to be actively registered, although the Heaven’s Gate website has not been altered since the 1997 mass suicide. The two do not identify themselves in interviews, but they are believed to be Mark and Sarah King, a couple in their sixties, from Phoenix, Arizona, who left other cult members in the late 1980s and set up a company called the TELAH Foundation, which stands for The Evolutionary Level Above Human.

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Invisible ships: Romulan Star Empire Birds-of-Prey and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s USS Eldridge

Star Trek fans will recall the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701),  a Federation Constitution-class starship operated by Starfleet, under the command of Capt. James T. Kirk, first encountered a cloaked Romulan Bird-of-Prey in 2266, when one crossed the Romulan Neutral Zone, an area of neutral space between the United Federation of Planets and the Romulan Star Empire, established after the end of the Earth-Romulan War in 2160, attacking and destroying Earth outpost stations 2, 3, 4, and 8, which were constructed along with four other outposts on asteroids located in Sector Z-6 and in neighboring sectors, along the Federation side of the Romulan Neutral Zone.

But what on Earth, if anything, happened with the USS Eldridge  (DE-173), a Cannon-class destroyer escort, in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on or about Oct. 28, 1943? Did a Second World War top-secret United States Navy military experiment cloak the USS Eldridge rendering it invisible to both the human eye and electronic detection with a “greenish fog” appearing in its place, according to some alleged witness reports? Was the ship on its first shakedown cruise in the Bahamas, situated in the Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, as its official logs claim, or did the warship USS Eldridge vanish from its berth in the Pennsylvania naval yard in a flash of blue light and teleport to Norfolk, Virginia, more than 200 miles south, sitting in full view of some of the sailors aboard another Navy vessel, the USS Andrew Furuseth, a merchant marine type EC2-S-C1 standard Liberty-class ship, before reappearing in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in the berth it had originally occupied, although also travelling about 10 minutes back in time?

No, says the U.S Navy. The whole story is a hoax.  Refracting light to create even a mirage of invisibility by generating an intense electromagnetic force field as part of a unified field theory experiment uniting electromagnetic radiation and gravity into a single field defies the known laws of applied, if not theoretical, physics. What else would they say? We did it?

Apparently the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) at one time had its debunking attempt for the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment” posted online, according to an August 1999 story by Frank Lewis in the Philadelphia City Paper, headlined “The Where Ship? Project,” tracing the origins of the story to either a man known as Carlos Miguel Allende, whose real name was Carl Allen from New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and who told a writer and, separately, two naval officers, that he’d witnessed the experiments, or alternatively, the naval research office apparently said online, the story’s origins could lie in misinterpretation of real attempts in the early 1940s to demagnetize the hulls of ships, thereby making them “invisible” to the Germans’ magnetic mines. I say apparently because when I tried to access the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) HTML page link at http://www.onr.navy.mil/foia/PhillyExp.html earlier today, all that came up was a blank page. No HTTP 404 Not Found, HTTP 403 Forbidden, or HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons standard response status code message, all of which would indicate that the client was able to communicate with the given U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research server, but the server could not retrieve what was requested. Instead, just a wall of white. Same result using the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine, although it did tell me 132 other users had tried using the http://www.onr.navy.mil/foia/PhillyExp.htm link there between Jan. 30, 2000 and Oct. 15 of this year. No word on if their luck was any better than mine.

A similar response to the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research in the so-called Philadelphia Experiment was proffered in the Roswell, New Mexico “incident” near Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) on July 8, 1947. Or at least it would be after the fact. Contemporaneous with the actual events on July 8, 1st Lieut. Walter Haut, the public information officer (PIO) airman on duty at the United State Air Force’s Strategic Air Command 509th Bombardment Group, Very Heavy, based in Roswell, was ordered by base commander, Col. William Blanchard, who later rose to the rank of four-star general and served as vice chief of staff of the United States Air Force, to draft a press release revealing that the United States Army Air Force had recovered a crashed “flying disc” from a nearby ranch. The U.S. Army Air Force retracted the claim later the same day, saying instead that a weather balloon, still later described as a top-secret Project Mogul microphone-equipped high-altitude balloon, had been recovered at Roswell. In interviews decades later, Haut said he believed there was “no chance” senior officers who handled the recovered material, including Blanchard, mistook a balloon for a flying saucer.

Here in Canada, four federal government departments – the Department of Transport, Department of National Defence, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)and the National Research Council – all dealt with reports, sightings and investigations of UFOs across Canada between 1947 and 1970 and were involved with collecting data and conducting investigations on unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

The Defence Research Board, chaired by Winnipeg-born Dr. Omond McKillop Solandt, through an inter-departmental committee, beginning in April 1952 co-ordinated “Project Second Story,” which had as its main purpose collecting,  cataloging and correlating data from UFO sighting reports. The committee created a questionnaire and interrogator’s instruction guide. The reporting method used a system intended to minimize the “personal equation.”  In other words, a weighting factor was created to measure the probability of truth in each report. The committee’s minutes were declassified on July 3, 1968.

The most famous UFO sighting in Manitoba history took place a year earlier in 1967. Known as the Falcon Lake Incident, it occurred on May 20, 1967, when Stephen Michalak claimed that he encountered a unidentified flying object (UFO) near Falcon Lake, while taking a short vacation in Whiteshell Provincial Park, not far west of the Ontario provincial boundary.

Michalak claimed to have been burned by the craft’s exhaust vent, which was covered by an ovular grid, he said.

Michalak, an industrial mechanic born in Poland was a resident of Winnipeg, but had taken a short vacation in the Falcon Lake area, where he had prospected as an amateur geologist before, to search for veins of quartz he had been told could be near the lake.

Shortly after noon, Michalak said he was disturbed by a noise similar to geese grunts. When he looked up, he spotted two cigar-shaped objects, which were red and brilliant as fire. They were descending at 45 degrees, he said, adding the more they approached the more oval they became.

One of the objects stopped in the air, he said, while the other landed on a big rock 160 feet away from him.

After some moments, the object floating above Michalak changed its color to grey, and then flew directly west, disappearing through the clouds. The landed object also changed to grey, and then to a color similar to incandescent stainless steel.

From the interior opening of the object, some violet light rays were emitted, he said, but as Michalak was already using special glasses to examine the quartz, the rays didn’t affect him, he claimed. The object was said to have a sulfurous smell and made a humming noise.

Half an hour passed, and Michalak still was observing the spaceship. Suddenly, a door opened, he said, and he could see that the interior of the UFO was very illuminated. He approached closer and heard some voices coming from inside the ship.

Believing that the object was an experimental American flying object, he tried to make a contact in English. As no answers were given, he tried other languages in vain. Nervous, he walked to the open door, and saw a panel and some lights inside the ship.

He did not see anybody, he said, so he waited. Suddenly, the door closed. Despite the surprise, he discovered a colourful glass around the UFO. It was very well conserved, with no cracks. He attempted to touch it, but his glove simply melted, the heat hurting his hand through the glove’s protection.

A metallic box full of holes came off the UFO in what seemed to be a grid-like exhaust vent. A steamy explosion occurred, he said, and some kind of gas was expelled in his direction. Immediately, his clothes started to burn, Michalak said. As the object flew after the other one, Michalak was left behind desperately trying to extinguish the fire.

Once the fire was extinguished, Michalak said he felt pain and sickness and noticed a metallic odour from the inside of his body, like the smell of something electric that is burning. He initially claimed the burns were caused by airplane exhaust. The RCMP later confirmed that Michalak had been drinking beer the night before the sighting he reported.

The Department of National Defence still identifies the Falcon Lake case as unsolved. Michalak died in 1999 at the age of 83.

Since 1970, the task of investigating UFO reports has fallen largely to the Mounties.

Today’s defence intelligence operations are less likely to be focused on UFOs or cloaking naval warships as to be invisible, as to more prosaic efforts, such as that by Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) to use its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo through its CSE Web Operations Centre (CWOC) to track 10 to 15 million user uploads and downloads daily and analyze the records in its needle-in-a-haystack effort to stumble upon extremist plots and suspects. It has been monitoring and collecting HTTP metadata for 102 known “Free File Upload” (FFU) file-sharing sites, commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files. Not so surprising given that Canada is a  partner in the so-called “Five Eyes” electronics communications intelligence partnership, which also includes the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is Canada’s national cryptologic agency with a National Defence Act mandate that includes foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) interception and analysis, including cryptanalysis or codebreaking, of communications and other electronic signals. CSE  is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada under the signals intelligence part of their mandate, but can, if requested, with proper warrants or other lawful authority held by the requesting agency, provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties under what is known as CSE’s “assistance mandate.”

The Communications Security Establishment’s predecessor was the Communications Branch of the National Research Council of Canada (CBNRC), which began work in September 1946. The CBNRC was formed at the end of the Second World War by combining the two wartime cryptologic offices; the civilian Examination Unit (XU) and the military Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), made up by 1945 of what had been the disparate SIGINT collection units of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The Examination Unit was Canada’s first civilian office that was solely dedicated to the encryption and decryption of communications signals traffic content. Until then, signals intelligence (SIGINT) was entirely within the purview of the military.

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Winnipeg’s Dr. Omond McKillop Solandt, chairman of the Defence Research Board, and Project Second Story

The very first documented sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) in this area came from the journals of 18th century explorers David Thompson and Andrew Davies.

Thompson’s journal states that in the autumn of 1792 they were camped at Landing Lake, near Thicket Portage, when they saw a brilliant “meteor of globular form larger than the moon.” The object seemed to come directly towards them, lowering as it travelled, and “when within 300 yards of us, it struck the river ice, with a sound like a mass of jelly, was dashed in innumerable luminous pieces and instantly expired.”

The next morning when they went to see the hole it should have made in the ice, they were surprised to find no markings whatsoever.

David Thompson goes on in his journals to describe a second such meteor, and this one again “passed close by me striking the trees with the sound of a mass of jelly.” He thought the height was no more than eight feet above the ground, although dimensions can be quite deceiving at night, and this estimate could be incorrect. Nevertheless, we are left with an interesting historical account of a strange event in the woods just 30 to 50 kilometres from what is now Thompson.

A more disturbing UFO account comes from 1967. A woman (the family name has been deleted from the case files) was walking through her house around 6 p.m. in Thompson, when she heard an odd beeping sound. It was repeated at regular intervals of about one second, and she wondered what was causing it. She looked out her kitchen window, and saw dirt and loose pieces of paper flying in a large circle around her house. Outside, she found her husband, who had just come home, and five children staring up into the sky. A young boy was holding her eight-year old daughter down on the ground. Up in the sky a rectangular object hung in the air, slowly rotating counter-clockwise and showing alternating silver and black sides. It was black on its lower surface, and made no noise.

The object began moving off on an angle, stopped and hovered, then continued towards the southwest. Until this time the circle of dirt and dust and papers had persisted, but it now died down. The whirlwind was confined to the area immediately around their house and did not affect any other house on the street. When the object moved away, the dirt feel to the ground. Going to the children, the woman found they were calming down except her daughter, who seemed dazed. The boy explained that the five of them had been playing in the yard when the object first appeared overhead.

As they watched, her daughter had been levitated into the air, apparently caused by the UFO in the sky. By the time the other children came to her aid she was about one metre off the ground and her clothes had edged up her body. Her daughter said she did not remember anything from the time she felt the wind until the time she recovered after being dragged back to the ground.

The most famous UFO sighting in Manitoba history also took place in 1967. Known as the Falcon Lake Incident, it occurred on May 20, 1967, when Stefan Michalak claimed that he encountered a unidentified flying object (UFO) near Falcon Lake, while taking a short vacation in Whiteshell Provincial Park, not far west of the Ontario provincial boundary.

Michalak claimed to have been burned by the craft’s exhaust vent, which was covered by an ovular grid, he said.

Michalak, an industrial mechanic born in Poland was a resident of Winnipeg, but had taken a short vacation in the Falcon Lake area, where he had prospected as an amateur geologist before, to search for veins of quartz he had been told could be near the lake.

Shortly after noon, Michalak said he was disturbed by a noise similar to geese grunts. When he looked up, he spotted two cigar-shaped objects, which were red and brilliant as fire. They were descending at 45 degrees, he said, adding the more they approached the more oval they became.

One of the objects stopped in the air, he said, while the other landed on a big rock 160 feet away from him.

After some moments, the object floating above Michalak changed its color to grey, and then flew directly west, disappearing through the clouds. The landed object also changed to grey, and then to a color similar to incandescent stainless steel.

From the interior opening of the object, some violet light rays were emitted, he said, but as Michalak was already using special glasses to examine the quartz, the rays didn’t affect him, he claimed. The object was said to have a sulfurous smell and made a humming noise.

Half an hour passed, and Michalak still was observing the spaceship. Suddenly, a door opened, he said, and he could see that the interior of the UFO was very illuminated. He approached closer and heard some voices coming from inside the ship.

Believing that the object was an experimental American flying object, he tried to make a contact in English. As no answers were given, he tried other languages in vain. Nervous, he walked to the open door, and saw a panel and some lights inside the ship.

He did not see anybody, he said, so he waited. Suddenly, the door closed. Despite the surprise, he discovered a colourful glass around the UFO. It was very well conserved, with no cracks. He attempted to touch it, but his glove simply melted, the heat hurting his hand through the glove’s protection.

A metallic box full of holes came off the UFO in what seemed to be a grid-like exhaust vent. A steamy explosion occurred, he said, and some kind of gas was expelled in his direction. Immediately, his clothes started to burn, Michalak said. As the object flew after the other one, Michalak was left behind desperately trying to extinguish the fire.

Once the fire was extinguished, Michalak said he felt pain and sickness and noticed a metallic odour from the inside of his body, like the smell of something electric that is burning. He initially claimed the burns were caused by airplane exhaust. The RCMP later confirmed that Michalak had been drinking beer the night before the sighting he reported.

The Department of National Defence still identifies the Falcon Lake case as unsolved. Michalak died in 1999 at the age of 83.

A Feb. 23, 1971 UFO sighting at 232 Deerwood Dr. by Gisella and Louis Kovacs is on file in the National Archives of Canada and National Research Council of Canada. From about 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. the Kovacs reported to Thompson RCMP that they saw a “plate shaped object about the size of a full moon. This object was flashing from red to green to yellow to blue also a red flash from the north side of the object was sighted.”

Four federal government departments – the Department of Transport, Department of National Defence, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)and the National Research Council – all dealt with reports, sightings and investigations of UFOs across Canada between 1947 and 1970 and were involved with collecting data and conducting investigations on unidentified flying objects (UFOs).  The Defence Research Board, chaired by Winnipeg-born Dr. Omond McKillop Solandt, through an inter-departmental committee, beginning in April 1952 co-ordinated “Project Second Story,” which had as its main purpose collecting,  cataloging and correlating data from UFO sighting reports. The committee created a questionnaire and interrogator’s instruction guide. The reporting method used a system intended to minimize the “personal equation.”  In other words, a weighting factor was created to measure the probability of truth in each report. The committee’s minutes were declassified on July 3, 1968.

Since 1970, the task of investigating UFO reports has fallen largely to the Mounties.

RCMP officers G.H. Donovan and E.C. Wesley who investigated the 1971 Kovacs sighting report at  232 Deerwood Dr. in Thompson noted in their official report “the Kovacs were sober and did not appear to have been drinking when the statements were obtained.”

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