As a fan of the X-Files I have always believed that there is someone else out there in the skies. However, sometimes I thought my late father was nuts when he insisted I join him in a spaceship watch outside on his driveway. In the late 60’s he claimed to have seen something up in those starry skies on Miltimore Road hovering over the Brome Pond area– which I blamed it on too much exhaust coming out of his Ford Pinto. In 1974 it happened again and this time he made me sit for what seemed like hours to see what he claimed was another UFO. Of course I never saw anything unusual and usually handed him a glass of wine and told him to go watch The Rockford Files.
Today, going through the news archives I found out that there were indeed many UFO sightings in the Eastern Townships in that time frame and my father, Arthur Knight, might not have been so crazy after all. In the late 60’s many sightings in the Sherbrooke area have been documented and Michael Phelps sent a letter to the Sudbury Star in 1990in response to a request by the newspaper for personal encounters.
The letter discussed a 1968 incident at an Ayer’s Cliff cottage on the shores of Lake Massawippi that his family was renting. Walking home one evening the whole sky was lit up like giant spotlights being turned on. He looked across the lake and saw 3 or 4 balls descend and after a few seconds they were gone. His sister had seen the same thing, but later they found out that it had not been a visit from beyond, rather it had been nothing but what they call ‘earthquake lights’. These lights in the sky are caused by electrical properties of certain rocks in specific settings. When nature stresses certain rocks, electric charges are activated, as if you switched on a battery in the Earth’s crust.
On the 15th of July in 1974, a UFO wave swept the Sudbury, Ontario and once again the Eastern Townships area. Among these were some UFOs that had a bell shape and that was what my father had insisted he had seen in his second encounter. In October of the same year a bell-shaped UFO was also seen between Deauville and Rock Forest, and in this case, the object was orange in colour.
So today I sit here, over 30 years later, and wonder what my father actually saw. Did he see spaceships, or was it natural mineral gas lights coming off nearby Gale Pond? For those that have no idea what I am talking about– Gale Pond, which is now called Lac Gale, sits on top of Gale Mountain in Bromont.
As a kid we used to climb the rough trail up the mountain where a former volcanic crater sat at the top, disguised as a natural lake. There we would mingle with the campers of Gale Camp that Reverend Peacock of the Anglican church in Cowansville had begun in 1944. Kids would swim off the dam on the south end of Gale Pond and the water warmed up faster than any other lake after a good rainstorm. But did we ever see any spaceships coming out of the water, or was there anything else that would have been labeled odd? Not that I remember! The only thing that would have had something similar to wild lights and burning speed would have been the Farr boy’s toboggan zipping down that trail coming from the top of Gale Mountain.
So what did my Dad see? Personally, I believe there are just two possibilities– either we are alone in this universe, or we are not. I guess we will never know– but after doing research for this story, more of my childhood came back in a flood of memories. It’s just so hard to forget an area that gave me so much to remember– even on the subject of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
During 1994, many residents from the region west of Ottawa reported bright lights in the sky that they are sure are neither planes from nearby Carp Airport nor falling meteors. At least one U.S. investigator believes he knows what’s going on. The area is “saturated” with UFO activity, says Bob Oechsler, of Maryland. “There does appear to be some form of (alien) activity in that area, and there has been for some time.”
Lee Cole, an accountant who lives in Carp, was the most recent to report something inexplicable. On Dec. 1, 1994 Cole and her seven-year-old son, Jason, were driving home along McGee Side Road when they saw a large, bright light in the middle of the road. They followed the light for a while, Cole says, when it dipped behind the tree line and disappeared. “I thought, ‘If that was an airplane, it just landed on the 417.”
At that point, Cole had passed her house, so she pulled into a driveway to turn the car around. As she backed out, the same kind of light appeared in front of her. Cole started driving slowly up the road. The light stayed in front of her car. “It was so intense flood lights, like a stadium.” She began to flash her high beams to see if the light could be a helicopter or airplane, although there was no noise, she says. “At that point, it came down and at us. I started to get scared.” She turned into her driveway, and rolled down the window. The light had come around to her left side. “I was absolutely struck by the silence. There was no noise.”
Cole drove into her garage, closed the door, and called her husband. By the time he got outside, there was nothing to see. A few days later, Cole got in touch with Oechsler, a former NASA employee who for the past three years has been investigating UFO sightings full-time. Oechsler has visited West Carleton eight times to investigate alleged UFO sightings. In May, 1992, he first came to the area after he received an anonymous tape of an alleged UFO landing near Almonte in 1991. The tape was shown on an episode of the U.S. television show Unsolved Mysteries last February.
During the next few days, he says, he had about 50 to 75 “good quality” reports of sightings in the same area. In Canada, the National Research Council is the keeper of sighting reports, gathering them from police and military. NRC scientist Ron Burrows says the council gets “about 100” reports annually from across Canada. None of the reports is investigated.
The NRC gets about three calls a month directly from people who want to report a sighting, said Denise Cardinal, a computer programmer who takes the reports. Roland Armitage, mayor of West Carleton, says UFO sightings are nothing new. “I’ve been reading about them for as long as I can remember.”
Lee Cole witnessed intense bright lights one night last month. “I’ve lived in this area all my life,” says Armitage, 68. Frank Condelli and his daughter were driving into Carp the same night as Cole when they saw a light in the sky. “There have been enough sightings around here . . . that leads one to believe there’s something extraordinary going on,” Condelli says.
The Carp-Guardian case of Eastern Ontario, is the most controversial in Canadian UFO history. The story involves A UFO crash retrieval, aliens, Canadian and American investigators, the RCMP, TV show producers and a handful of witnesses
On August 18, 1991, West Carleton, Ontario housewife Diane Labenek was home when she heard her dogs barking. When she looked out the window to investigate, she saw a UFO-type object in a field nearby with red flames and lots of smoke. The ship then lifted up and disappeared into the trees. Diane claimed that about ten minutes after the ship left, a helicopter flew over the area where she saw the lights, and then flew over her house and vanished. Diane went to the site the next day, but she found nothing and only told her husband and mother about the incident.
AMERICAN TELEVISION NETWORKS INVESTIGATE UNEXPLAINED UFO SIGHTINGS NEAR ALMONTE The Almonte Gazette
Feb. 3, 1993
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UFO researcher Bob Oechsler waved a hand over the pile of documents and photos on the kitchen table. “This is a landmark case in ufology (the study of UFOs),” he said. The pictures on the table show a blur of multi-colored lights in a disc shape and white faces with black almond-shaped eyes. Most of them were taken off a video sent to Oechsler anonymously almost a year age. Since then, Oechsler has methodically and meticulously analyzed the video and the site near the Old Almonte and Corkery Roads.
His case was convincing enough to draw two major American television networks there to film. NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries airs its version this Wednesday on cable at 8 p.m. and this Friday on CJOH. The Fox network’s story on Sightings hits the airwaves Feb. 12. Oechsler’s involvement began when he received the videotape at his Annapolis, Maryland home last February.
The Video
The 32 minutes of footage show a “mostly white” linear light with red flares off to the left and a flashing light on top, said Oechsler. The color of the lights ranges from red to blue to green from one end to the other. Smoke billows out from under the lights and moves to the right. As the photographer moves closer, reflections off the disk show a rounded turret in the centre with a vertical blue strobe on top and “fins” or slates around its edge.
Closing in even more, “Guardian” gets shaky close-ups of the upper strobe.
The sound track has sounds of barking dogs and a “ratchet” sound. (NBC spent $115,000 to recreate this whole effect with no success, said Oechsler.) The rest of the tape is taken up with freeze frames or still shots of supposed aliens standing in tall grass. Some are holding bright lights in their hands.
Hooded figures with large almond shaped eyes have short snouts and little facial detail.
The tape was wrapped in six pages of accompanying information, some typed on fake Department of National Defense (DND) letterhead. The documents showed a map of the Corkery area and a page of hand-drawn symbols with a map of the same area. There is also a photocopy of two Polaroid shots with grass lit by a flash in the foreground and a row of lights in the back.
Lightfoot and Oechsler asked if the Labeneks had seen anything unusual. It turns out Diane Labenek had seen an unusual set of lights when tucking her children into bed around 11 p.m. Aug. 18 1991, said Oechsler. She had also witnessed the November, 1989 event. (Because of her agreement with NBC, Labenek cannot tell her story until after the broadcast.)
She drew pictures that were “geometrically correct” to the video and gave details about the incident not captured on tape, like the craft’s departure. A neighbor recalls seeing “red lightning” and a white light with a gold halo the same night, according to Oechsler.
Within a half hour of the sighting, and for months afterward, the Labenek home became the target for unusually active helicopter activity. The black, seamless, unmarked choppers hover over the house sometimes low enough to see in the Labenek’s windows. Twice they have blown shingles off the house and the outside shed.
DND has given the Labeneks pictures of its machinery to prove it is not their doing. That element still remains a mystery. Only the cattle know for sure!
Case File: Guardian UFO Location: West Carleton, Ontario Date: August 18, 1991 Description: West Carleton is a historic township in Eastern Ontario, Canada. It is located in the rural parts of the new City of Ottawa, west of Kanata. Local Diane Labenek described a UFO craft she described with a blue flashing light on top and another light on the bottom with burning red flames.
Case
History: On August 18, 1991, West Carleton, Ontario housewife Diane Labenek was home when she heard her dogs barking. When she looked out the window to investigate, she saw red flames and smoke coming from a field nearby. She then saw a UFO-type object landing next to the flames in the field. The ship then lifted up and disappeared into the trees. Diane claimed that about ten minutes after the ship left, a helicopter flew over the area where she saw the lights. The helicopter then flew over her house and vanished. Read more here.. CLICK
Filmmaker re-examines the mystery of the Carp UFO sighting decades ago BLAIR CRAWFORD
It’s the unsolved mystery of an unsolved mystery. Who was “Guardian” the person whose blurry videotape of strange flashing lights in a field near Carp more than 30 years ago lured UFO researchers and TV crews to West Carleton like conspiracy theorists to an Area 51 picnic. It’s the question Toronto filmmaker Nick Crowe plans to explore when he visits the area next month to film a documentary on the events of the fall of 1989 for CBC’s Point of View. The film, Searching for Guardian, is looking at the eye witness reports of a purported spacecraft landing and lurid claims of aliens who worked with the Nazis and planned to enslave humans.
“A lot of serious UFO types don’t even bother with it because there was something so strange about it and people thought it was just a hoax,” Crowe said. “We’re treating this less like, ‘Whoa. Did a UFO really land there?’ to ‘Why did someone go to so much trouble to do this? What’s the human story behind this?'” Whoever launched the unidentified alien frenzy went to a lot of trouble. The incidents spanned over several years and included claims of a UFO crash landing near Manion Corners on Old Almonte Road and an “eye witness” report from a woman, Diane Labenek, who claimed to have seen a strange, brightly lit craft land in a field near her house the night of Nov. 4, 1989.
Coupled with those stories was the video mailed to several UFO researchers in Canada and the U.S., signed only with the name “Guardian” and a thumbprint. The nighttime video shows abrightlylit object with a blue flashing strobe approach a clump of bright flares in what appears to be a landing zone. The video, though blurry and inconclusive, didn’t appear to have been doctored, Crowe said. “It was a fairly convincing attempt at showing a spaceship landing,” he said. “The feeling among people with expertise in photographic analysis was that it was a pickup truck with road flares.”
The tape became fodder for several TV shows, most notably Unsolved Mysteries, which aired on Fox from 1987 to 1996. Canadian UFO enthusiasts who investigated the Guardian video and Labenek’s claims concluded it was all a hoax, but in February 1992, Guardian mailed another copy of the video to a prominent U.S. UFO researcher, Bob Oechsler. That was enough to bring a crew from Unsolved Mysteries to Carp. The show interviewed Oechsler and others and featured a recreation of Labenek’s sighting, played by Labenek herself. But the highlight was the Guardian video, which host actor Robert Stack gravely intoned was “to be shown for the first time ever on national television.”
“That’s what everyone remembers that videotape” Crowe said. Searchingfor Guardian is a natural follow for Crowe, whose previous documentary, Spaceman, was about an eccentric 32-year-old B.C. mechanic who was building a spaceship in his yard. The man vanished before it was finished, telling his family he was going on a journey with extraterrestrials. It’s the human story behind the Guardian hoax that intrigues Crowe, but finding area residents with first-hand memories of the incident has been difficult. “What we’re lacking is anyone who had a personal connection to it. We’re not making something salacious or a ‘gotcha’ piece looking to explain the whole thing away.”
At the end of the 1992 Unsolved Mystery broadcast, a stone-faced Stack resolves the West Carleton mystery leaves only questions, “Questions perhaps the person called Guardian alone can answer.” If you have memories of the West Carleton UFO story, you can contact Crowe at nick.crowesaloon-media.com. bcrawfordpostmedia.com
I did a post last week about aliens allegedly abducting a local Almonte woman. If you have seen anything, PM me on Facebook. This week Amanda Armstrong contacted me with her sightings.
Here is her account:
Hey Linda!
As promised, here’s my recount of the UFO sightings.
The first took place March 15, 2014. My husband Brandon & I were sitting in my hospital room at the Civic, I had undergone emergency spinal surgery just a couple weeks prior. My window faced out towards the city, though nothing exciting could ever be seen. I was going through my usual round of medication through my picc line, when I glanced out the window and noticed a bright ball of light. After mentioning it to Brandon, we both thought at first that perhaps it was a plane. The first thought that usually goes through everyone’s minds when they can’t explain what it is they’re seeing. This was around mid afternoon, so the fact we were seeing something that bright, was quite odd.
At first it stayed in one place, hovering over the city. We didn’t dare to take our eyes off of it, we watched in complete awe & almost disbelief. I’m a loyal listener to the paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM, so the fact I was seeing what no doubt appeared to be a UFO, was amazing! After 10 minutes or so, of this bright light just hovering over the city, it started to move towards the hospital. Admittedly, this is when I started to get a bit freaked out. As it came closer, the light grew brighter. Then before we knew it, it was gone. Completely vanished. I turned to Brandon and said “Well, we just witnessed a UFO”. I then made an off hand joke, that if they had taken us, they better have fixed my spinal cord. Cause it’s believed, that even when you see a UFO, but experience no time loss, they still have taken you. Very creepy thought.
The second sighting took place here in Carleton Place. I wish that I could remember the exact day/month, but for the life of me, I can’t. I do know that it happened this past Fall, around 4pm.
My Mom & I were coming out of the Walmart parking lot. As we pulled up to the lights, I looked straight out into the distance, as I often do. Right away I spotted a bright light not far in the distance. I watched closely to rule out the usual aircrafts, and quickly I realized it was hovering in that one area. As the light changed, and we turned left onto McNeely, I continued to watch it. It grew brighter & brighter, still without moving. Then just before we hit the bridge, it was gone, as if it had never been there.
This type of sighting has been very frequent all across Canada, and the US. As reported weekly on Coast to Coast by Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center. (http://www.nuforc.org/index.html)
The most interesting thing about this sighting, was the location of it. What is out that way, East of town towards Ottawa? Farms and a Military base, two very frequent hot spots for UFO sightings.
With that said, many times coming home late at night from Ottawa, looking out in the distance towards town (in the Dwyer Hill area, and beyond), very bright lights can be seen hovering in the sky. Could these be Military “exercises” or UFOs? It’s hard to say. But one thing is certain, UFOs have been here.
Recently I read that European countries like France and Belgium have publicly acknowledged the existence of UFOs, and have released previously classified information on the subject. There have been too many credible sightings and encounters with UFOs. Who they are, and what they want– we may never know, but they are out there.
The first time my world was introduced to space information was in 1961 when Alan Shepherd went 116 miles up in space. My mother sat in her wheelchair and cried her eyes out, and repeated over and over,
“That poor man’s wife! What is she going to do without him?”
Of course Shepherd was just fine, and my mother marveled at what had just transpired. I, of course, was more interested in American Bandstand then entering into space travel. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, and I insist that no one dare knock mine down about aliens. When my kids went to elementary school, rumour was that one of their mother’s friends had been abducted by aliens outside of Almonte, Ontario. She had actually lived to tell the tale.
Her story would eventually sell, self published, for $4.99 in the coming year at local bookstores throughout Lanark County. Mum even appeared on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries and some suggested “up and down the line” she might had have moon rocks in her head. I sometimes think that most of the alien hoaxes belong in the World Weekly News, but I do believe in Area 51 and the Almonte abduction. Maybe the calls the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) received last year from Prescott, Ontario, were not just the lights from the local Riverside Pontiac Buick car lot.
Last summer I did go to the exact spot where the local mother was allegedly abducted. Nothing but rolling land, and lots of power lines that go all the way to the huge power dam in Arnprior, Ontario. This would be the same dam where people have constantly reported alien sightings.
As I stood there by the side of the road with nary a car going by me; I shivered. There was nothing but total silence, except for the sounds of live power sifting through the lines and waiting for the odd spaceship to gas up.
I was kind of worried standing there in the middle of nowhere, but I figured I was pretty safe. Yes, I remembered the ways you can be abducted, and yes, I made sure I was prepared.
Personally I think an up and coming trend for Apple might be the “TinFoil Hat App for the iPhone” so your communications are not monitored by aliens or Men in Black.
Mulder? Scully?
Time to watch X-Files!
Epilogue
Amanda Armstrong just told me : I’ve seen a couple in the past year. One in Ottawa last March, and the most recent a few months ago, while driving on McNeely. Personally,I never did see an alien that day outside of Almonte, ON. and I wondered why until I saw a comment on a blog I did about aliens last year. Gorlockness, a random blogging alien who does indeed write on Open Salon told me why. His exact message was:
“We had our sites set on Ur sight in Canada but U moved. We are getting new coordinates now. Do U require the probe to be warmed ahead of time?
Keeping aye on U, linda, waiting for U to leave bizzy city and come back, come back …to remote rural Renfrew, Ontario… Renfrew is, i beleev, Canadas area 51- it’s a date”
lindaseccaspina 