by PATRICK LEJTENYI

People of this city don’t seem all that keen on spotting UFOs. According to the sober 2001 Canadian UFO survey, published by Ufology Research of Manitoba (UFOROM), we rank 10th nationwide, with four reports last year. Vancouver ranks first, with 17. Ottawa is a close second at 15, and Surrey and Burnaby, both suburbs of Vancouver, are numbers three and four. The survey attributes this to “the aggressive and successful marketing of ufology in B.C. by one particular organization, UFOBC.”

There were 374 reports of UFO sightings in Canada last year, and of these, 57, or 15.2 per cent, were unexplained. Here are some of the more interesting sightings from around Montreal, as reported by UFO Québec, a specialty mag.

November 9, 1990 Several dozen people at the rooftop pool of the Bonaventure Hotel saw eight to 10 lights forming into a circle above them, giving off bright white rays. The phenomenon lasted three hours, from 7 to 10 p.m., and moved slowly northwards. While no one could identify the lights, few, according to the next day’s report in La Presse, were ready to express their belief that they were visited by aliens.

The RCMP were called in to investigate the matter, which they deemed “serious.” Two years later, the 25-page Guénette-Haines Report, subtitled “Details surrounding a large stationary aerial object above Montreal,” suggested the lights were caused by some sort of huge physical object 540 metres in diameter. Its origin and nature remain a mystery.

May 31, 1962 Just after 9 p.m., as she was hanging her laundry up to dry, a woman living on the third floor of a building at the corner of St-Denis and Bellechasse saw a slow-moving, barrel-shaped object around 10 feet high and six feet in circumference hovering between 20 and 30 metres in the air. Through the object’s windows, the woman says she saw two beings dressed like astronauts. They were said to be very pale. It disappeared after a minute or two. While subsequently ignored and ridiculed by family and authorities, the woman swears that what she saw was real, but admits life would have been easier if she hadn’t seen it at all.
August 5, 1996 Léo Knop and a friend were sitting in a car at the intersection of Parc and Mont-Royal on their way home from work when they noticed a strange light over the city’s south-south-east. They said the white light, about 45 degrees above the horizon, moved very rapidly from left to right and up and down. Knop called Claude Racine, an investigator for Québec Insolite, a group that keeps track of UFO sightings, on his cell phone during the sighting.

November 29, 1998 Around 10:30 p.m., Jenifer Migneault and Yanick Galipeau were driving south along Highway 10 near St-Jean when they saw a huge, slightly oval-shaped “wheel” of 10 lights, with another five lights within it. The wheel, she says, was big enough to cover about 70 per cent of her field of vision, and was visible for about 20 minutes. She stopped several times on the road to look at them again, as did about 10 other cars. The phenomenon was above the 5,200-feet cloud ceiling.

Mid-summer 1967 Between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m., six men swimming at a public pool on the South Shore saw a formation of seven or eight bright, spherical objects streaking across the southern sky. The objects, moving fast, would start, stop and then tear off in different directions, making extreme manoeuvres in a seemingly random pattern. All were different colours: red, orange, yellow and green.

After 10 or 15 minutes, all but one disappeared. The remaining object landed in a clearing near a housing development. Intensely curious, two of the men approached the large, yellow object, which they described as between 40 and 50 feet high and emitting a sound similar to that of a diesel engine but at alternating frequencies. Near the top third portion of the craft were dark, tinted windows, which the men could not see through. No occupants emerged, and no doors or hatches could be detected. After about 20 minutes, the vessel quickly rose off the ground and vanished into the western sky.

When the men contacted a local radio station to report the sighting and to enquire as to whether anyone else saw it, they were treated with skepticism (from www.ufo-ufo-ufo.com). :