50 Years Ago: Canada's "Summer of UFOs."
In the summer of 1975, fifty years ago, Canada was in the midst of a major UFO wave. Literally hundreds of sightings of odd objects in the sky were reported by witnesses to the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), the RCMP, and other agencies.
Above: A photo of a UFO in Manitoba from the summer of 1975.
The 1975 wave began early in the year. On February 23, for example, Glenn Bradley watched two large cylindrical objects like “grain silos” floating above Matachewan, Ontario. Both objects directed white floodlights down to the ground and had bright lights on their tops. The objects travelled west at about 30 mph. Bradley followed them in his pickup truck and when outside the lights of the town he could see that the two “silos” were accompanied by smaller UFOs, all darting about at high speed and appearing to be entering and exiting the larger objects.
Things picked up on April 10, when Barry Kocay and two others of Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan, saw an oval light surrounded by smaller lights moving in the sky west of the town, heading north.
That same night, Bob and Elaine Diemert of Carman, Manitoba, watched a red light flying low past their airfield just outside the town.
This would the first of many sightings of “Charlie Redstar,” the name given to the red ball of light that seemed to later haunt the area throughout the spring and summer of 1975.
On April 18, six witnesses, four of whom were RCMP constables, observed a white UFO for two hours as it hung in the sky west of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
Back in Manitoba, Beaconia residents Marie Klatt and her husband reported to RCMP that on June 4, 1975, they had watched an object like a spinning “inverted light bulb” moving south to north over Lake Winnipeg.
Across to the east coast of Canada, on July 2, 1975, Ray Timmons of Cumberland, Prince Edward Island, reported a UFO to RCMP.
Charlie Redstar was even seen in Winnipeg on July 4th.
Only a few days later, on July 6, at approximately 4:30 or 5:00 P.M., tobacco farmer Joe Borda observed a silver domed-shaped UFO on his field of tobacco plants in Mount Pleasant, Ontario. The object was approximately 400 yards away from where he was standing and Borda assumed it was just a neighbour’s stainless-steel irrigation truck or tank. It was later reported that none of the neighbours had their work vehicles out that day. On July 8, while examining his field, Borda found a depression about 20-30 feet in diameter of damaged tobacco plants at the spot where the object was seen. Some of the leaves from the plants within the depression were burnt brown, other plants were flattened, and some were found broken at the stem.
Back to Carman: on July 7, 1975, Mrs. Freddie Giesbrecht reported to RCMP that she had seen a UFO to the east of her farmhouse.
On July 21, a former RCAF communications officer and DEW Line operator reported a UFO to Calgary RCMP.
On July 26, something weird was over Lake Tomiko in Ontario, when two witnesses reported seeing an orange object that was bright enough to light up the lake.
And on Mantoulin Island, in early August, four witnesses saw an oval craft the “size of two cars,” which the NRC believed as being “likely Jupiter.”
All in all, there are hundreds of pages of documentation on UFOs reported in Canada in 1975, most from the summer. There are 134 cases in the Ufology Research database for Manitoba alone in 1975, which are themselves only a small fraction of the more than 2,000 pages of documentation of UFO cases in the NRC files from all of Canada that year, from all provinces and territories. The handful of documents within this article are from the NRC files and Ufology Research.
In Canada, 1975 was apparently the “Summer of UFOs.”