[CNI News thanks AUFORA News Updates (dwatanab@acs.ucalgary.ca) for this item.]
(January 1, 1997) -- Seen anything strange and glowing hovering over Thunder Bay lately? Report directly to agents Scully and Mulder. Maybe the UFO sightings around the city won't attract the attention of the X-Files just yet, but a local chapter of a UFO network is urging people who have seen anything to get in touch with them.
"Every story is valuable in itself, but it's more credible with witnesses," said Ivan Sherlock, director of the Thunder Bay chapter of the Mutual UFO Network. City residents have been calling the Chronicle-Journal for a week with reports of changing black shapes and coloured lights in the sky.
"We saw something over the harbour Saturday," Salvation Army Capt. George Paterson said Monday. He said he and his daughter made the sighting when he picked her up around 3pm. Paterson said he's not a believer in UFO's and thought it was a helicopter or balloon at first. But the object left the area very quickly. "It was definitely there," he said, "and was interesting enough to get my attention."
Lori Eaton and her husband were driving along John Street on December 21 when they saw a white light in the southwest, in the direction of the city landfill site. "We looked up and the white light was gone and there were blue and green lights," she said. "I've never seen anything like it." She said as they got closer, the object seemed to hover over them and was distinctive in the sky. She insists it wasn't a plane or anything else recognizable. Calls to the coast guard, Thunder Bay Harbour Commission, police, air traffic control and Environment Canada haven't yielded any clues.
The search for answers led to a call to the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service in Ottawa. After calling a toll-free number, the person who answered provided another number to call and said: "This is CSIS, we don't give out names," when asked where the new number would lead to. But it was a dead end.
But Sherlock said his group is collecting data on sightings and the more information about each one they gather, the higher the probability of an answer. "Everybody sees something a little different," he said. "If we get 10 people then we can get a general trend." With an average of six sightings in the region, Sherlock said the last one he heard about was in November. The UFO group collects data using a standard questionnaire that asks about the weather and other details of what the witness saw. The information is sent to the provincial head office and put into a database for research at the group's headquarters in Texas.
Original file name: CNI - Ontario UFOs
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