Orbs, Blue Meanies, and the Truth Part 2: The Investigation

 

Orbs,  Blue Meanies, and the Truth Part 2: The Investigation

The fact that I had gotten so close to the small ground light at the bridge in April 1976 lead to a major investigation into what these new UFO objects were. We would, however, only get close one more time.

The main UFO in this flap of sightings was known as Charlie Red Star He had been caught on the ground only once. In that occasion, as a TV crew set 8 and 1/3 miles east of the location, the object was caught jumping into the air from ground to 5000 feet in three frames of film. This equated 2 5000 feet being jumped from a dead stop in 1/8 of a second.

Flash Frame from CKY Film

It was this UFO caught on film that would inspire me to go for the first time to Carmen to see what was going on. Had this object not been caught on the ground, I probably would never have gone, as I had no interest in UFO's.

The other odd thing about this object being caught on the ground was that the individual running the camera pushed the trigger to shoot just as the object jumped in the ground. Years later I suspected that this might have indicated that the object jumping off the ground was a planned event. It appeared to me looking back that for some reason the phenomena wanted me to go to Carmen.

This was Charlie Red Star behind a wind row of trees just before it jumped into the sky and there to be caught on film.

That is the same situation that had occured at the bridge. The first time I went, I got very close, got film, and that inspired me to spend another year in the area studying not only the large objects flying around the sky but the small objects on the ground. In the end I spent the better part of two years in the area trying to see the object and talking to people in and around Carman Manitoba who had UFO sightings.

After the first event with the ground light at the bridge I was out the very next night trying to get close for a good photograph, or to jump on it which I had not been able to do the night before.

My friend who 20 years later would be very sceptical when I met him at the library was also out on the second night. He was with a friend, and I recall them racing down the various mile roads in the area, without their lights on, chasing the ground lights that were still visible in the area.

I believe that the ground lights may still have been orange the second night, but I am pretty sure after that they changed to a wait light that closely resembled a car coming down the road. We were able to distinguish which was a car and which was a ground light by viewing the object with binoculars.

In the binoculars a car could be easily spotted as it's lights could be seen clearly giving off beams of light they were directed down the road. When orbs or ground lights were seen in binoculars, the telltale beams of light were not present. After I first noticed this, I began to describe the ground lights as deadlights. They could be very intensely bright, but they did not give us much light to illuminate the area around it. It resembled modern day LED lights which did not exist at the time.

I had noticed this about the ground light that was on the bridge the night before. I could clearly recall that it was along the wooden railings on the side of the bridge. It was no more than two inches from the railings, but even though it was very intense light, there was just a faint orange glow on the bridge railing. I recall thinking why was the very bright light not lighting up the entire countryside.

Night after night I would go out to try to solve the ground light mystery. We tried to use infrared film to get a better idea of what we were looking at, but that failed because nobody knew how to read the infrared film and what it meant.

We tried to get around the object in coming in from the backside, but that did not work. we tried driving down the road slowly to push the object farther down the road. I would quickly jump out of the car and hide in the ditch. The car would continue to push the object down the road and the idea was to win the car came back and crossed where I was the light at the end of the road would follow it and it would come right across on the road from where I was lying in the ditch. We tried this a couple of times but it didn't work. I would get back in the car and as we drove away the light would now follow us.

Eventually, we gave up and resorted to the only thing that worked. We would flash a light at the Two objects that were at the end of the road. One would be a little bit brighter than the other. We would then flash a flashlight directly at the brighter of the two, and it would flare up. The second object would stay dimly lit just on the side of the road beside the bright flaring object.

As the object flared we would take photographs. That was all we could really do. Various people would have ideas especially when it came to cameras and lenses. One night a gentleman brought a 2500 millimeter telephoto lens set up on a tripod to get a close up look at the light. That failed because the lens was able to pick up the heat coming off the road and this caused a very WAVY photograph in which really nothing was visible.

The amount we were able to film was limited in the 1970s. We did not have any financing from anybody to do the investigation so we were forced to pay for gas back and forth every night. More importantly of photography at that time was 35 millimeter which meant we could only shoot 24 or 48 photographs at night, and that would have to be processed and paid for out of our own pockets.

On one occasion I got tremendously good photographs of larger objects flying around in the sky. They were so good did I instructed the film processor's to not cut the negative. I wanted a record of which photograph was taken after which photograph. Mistakenly I said that it did not want any photographs done from the negative. As had happened a few times before, I figured I had the evidence they would be accepted by everybody as definitive.

When did filmstrip came back to me I viewed the images by holding them up to the light. They looked as good as I had imagined they would turn out. I put them in the canister and sent them to Wendell Stevens to analyze and to verify how good these photographs had been. They never arrived. People would immediately imagine a government conspiracy, but I never saw it that way. I immediately knew that I had gone cheap on the packaging. I had used just a normal envelope and had not packaged it as a package which I should have done. This was one of the big regrets I had in the research I did for the two years that I was there.

As word spread many people would approach me and ask whether they could come and view what we were seeing. Over the year that I studied the ground lights I must have taken three or four dozen people to the one site where the ground light was the most active.

During the one year I also discovered that there were other areas where these objects would sit on the road. These ground lights however, we're not as active and they appeared to be farther down the road.

Every time I took people out for the first time, we would go through the 1st half hour convincing the person that the object they were looking at was not a car or a farm like. Each person, when they first saw it, would state that it looked like a car coming down the road.

I would say, “how long do you think it will take for the car to get to us?”

They would reply, “5 minutes.”

At the end of five minutes, I would say to them, “do you still think it's a car?”

They would reply, “no, but maybe it's a farm light down the road.”

We would then demonstrate to the new person that it was not a farm right down the road. That would lead to them wanting to go down a side road and come in from behind it. I would tell him that we had tried this before and it doesn't work but they would continue to insist until we showed them that this wouldn't work as well.

This constant skepticism was very wearing on the system. Eventually, when new people would want to have me take them out, I would draw them a map as to where to go and tell them to have a good time.