It Moved So Fast, Over A Great Distance
A Riverdale couple was so convinced they saw UFOs over Grey Mountain, a.k.a Canyon Mountain that they called the RCMP and the local air traffic control tower.I have never seen anything remotely like this in my life, says Jane Z. Doe, who wants to remain anonymous out of concerns over how the public would react to her experience. It moved so fast, over a great distance, so quickly. I have never seen anything like it in my life.
The couple were at home on the couch in their livingroom watching TV at about 6:30 p.m. when John directed his partner’s attention to where he saw four bright lights dancing over Grey Mountain. Jane saw but two of the lights, though she was entirely captured in the 10 seconds or so that she watched, until she bolted for her camera just feet away in the dining room.
Too late. They were gone.
They didn’t move off in any direction, but simply vanished, disappeared into thin air, says John.
Both Jane & John maintain they do not believe in extraterrestrials, and are convinced what they witnessed must have a natural explanation. They know of nothing, however, to explain what they saw.
John thought it might be an emergency flare initially. But with several years working in the aviation industry, and being familiar with the use of emergency flares, he quickly ruled it out as watched them for somewhere around 15 to 20 seconds.
But flares do not climb, he said. And these things were dancing around. It looked like flares, but it did not act like them. Nor could the four lights be the results of fireworks, John is convinced, as is Jane.
Never in my wildest dreams would I think I would see lights that I cannot explain, she says.
While the couple do not believe in spacecraft from another planet, or little green men, they felt compelled to call the police, just in case there was something of an emergency on Grey Mountain. Before the officer arrived at their door, Jane had already hopped into the car with her camera to go up the Grey Mountain Road, pulled by the allure of something unexplainable. John stayed home to explain what he saw to the Mountie.
Jane found nothing. She later called the airport’s air traffic control tower to see if anyone up there had sighted anything. Nobody had. On Tuesday morning, Jane contacted a local expert on geology to inquire about the possibility of some sort of magnetic anomaly causing the balls of light in the sky. Grey Mountain, after all, is on a fault line, she thought. Nothing doing.
She scanned the Internet for information on ball lightning, a known phenomenon that occurs instead of the regular lighting bolts that are more familiar. There were dark clouds in the sky behind the lights, which is one of the reasons they were so defined, she explained. From the information she read, however, it could not have been ball lightning. Ball lightning, for instance, is described as relatively small, about 5" in size. The balls over Grey Mountain were much larger, larger than the trees that line the ridges.
Jane describes the lights as bright yellow, while John says they were more of a hot white light, like burning phosphorous. Whatever the color, it was the movement of the lights that has mystified them both. One of the two lights she saw zig zagged downward, sideways to the east, and then straight upward, while the second ball shot straight across at a fantastic speed, she said.
Jane & John, both with professional careers, were somewhat reluctant to explain their experience publicly. They were hoping to first of all catch wind of someone else’s story about the balls of light, as sort of a validation without any prompting.
Anybody looking in that general area would have seen them, John said.
The RCMP have not received any other calls about what Jane & John reported. The officer who investigated, and drove up Grey Mountain after interviewing John, and subsequently talked to Jane on the roadside, said none of the volunteers out picking up litter on the Grey Mountain Road reported seeing anything.
An added similar sighting:
About 42 hours before the Riverdale couple saw objects over Grey Mountain on May 7 that was reported in the May 9, 2007 Whitehorse Star there was another sighting in the same area.
A man had gone to the Whitehorse movie theater to pick up his son, who had gone to see Spiderman 3. His son was attending the late show and the movie goers had not come out of the theater yet. The man was waiting in his car and the time was around midnight when the man was looking towards the east over the far away hills to the left of Grey Mountain. There was a bright object that appeared to be a bright star or planet just above the horizon. Although this man has had a major UFO sighting before, he didn’t think that this particular light was anything unusual.
He watched the object for about 2 minutes and thought he may have detected some movement of the light. Then suddenly the light started rapidly getting smaller and smaller and at the same time rising rapidly to the right. In 2 to 3 seconds it had disappeared into the distance. Now, that was strange, he thought. As far as he knows he was the only witness from the parking lot who saw this.
Although this sighting was not reported until July 4, the exact date of this sighting was possible to establish accurately. The witness mentioned that the sighting occurred two to tree days prior to the Monday May 7 UFO sighting by the couple in the Whitehorse Star article which he had read. The witness was picking up his son at the Whitehorse movie theater, and the son recalled that this was the night of the Spiderman 3 premiere. The son had gone to see the late show which was finished just after midnight. The premiere occurred on Friday, May 4. Therefore the sighting occurred just after midnight on Saturday May 5, 2007.