- Flashing lights, globes of colour, hovering objects -
Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have witnessed strange things in the skies
above the province.
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- Airplanes? Stars? Possibly. But at least one person believes
they could actually be extra-terrestrial objects.
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- Brian Vike is director of HBCC UFO Research, based out
of Houston, B.C. Every year, he receives hundreds of reports of sightings
of unidentified flying objects from across the country - some from this
province. This year, he expects to receive more than 300 reports in total,
and so far four have come from Newfoundland and Labrador.
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- "The ones I've been getting seem to be scattered
throughout the province - Goose Bay, Bonavista, St. John's. They're really
all over the place," he says.
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- Vike - who says he started his website, www.hbccufo.com,
out of boredom - has had a longtime interest in science and astronomy,
stemming from the time when he was a small boy and began watching science-fiction
shows on television.
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- His interest in UFOs began about 20 years ago, when he
started researching reported sightings across the country.
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- In 2000, Vike started up the HBCC UFO Research site to
officially accept and record reported sightings. These days, the site gets
about two million hits a month.
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- Vike has been told of cases of UFO sightings in this
province that span the last 50 years.
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- "On the night of April 23, 1999, me and my friend
seen a big orange globe over the water in Bonavista. It scared me so much,
it was like nothing I ever seen before. I went a bit closer and then it
got brighter," reads one submission on Vike's website.
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- "It was an oval disk-like-shaped object that flew
through the night sky a lot faster than a plane. The object had up to six
blinking lights that flashed in a circular motion," reads another
submission, dated March 25, 2004, from New Wes Valley.
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- Vike says people reporting UFO sightings generally see
the same types of things.
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- "People see lights flashing in the sky. You get
people seeing a kind of circular craft with six lights on it; over Goose
Bay there was a pilot who ended up watching a large UFO - it looked like
a flying arrow, he says," he explained.
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- "You get some triangle sightings and cigar-shaped
sightings. There have been some decent reports, but hardly nothing new
at all."
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- Once Vike receives the reported sightings, he asks permission
to post them on his site.
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- He then goes about doing some research, contacting airports
in the area to see what aircraft were in the skies that day, as well as
the military, astronomy programs and Environment Canada, to see if the
sighting could have been caused by weather-related phenomena.
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- Most of the reports, he says, can be accounted for.
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- "I honestly think the majority can be explained,"
he said. "What they're seeing is a lot of times stars. You get a distortion
in the air and they appear to move, but they don't really.
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- "But there is a small percentage that are definitely
unusual, and that's the hard part."
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- http://www.thetelegram.com/
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