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News
photos by Nicole Fitzgerald
UNIDENTIFIABLE
WHITE LIGHT: Stewart caught the tail
end of a movie when he was startled
from his chair by an unidentifiable
round light streaking across the
valley. Combined with his house being
stationed at 3,000 feet (Smithers sits
at approximately 1,750 feet) and large
bay windows, Stewart has an ideal
bird's eye view of air traffic.
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On July 29,
winding down from a day on his Telkwa farm,
Gordon Stewart settled into his chair facing two
bay windows, overlooking the valley for a
late-night movie.
At 10:45 p.m., a bright light flashed by his
field of vision, raising him from his chair,
astonished at the peculiarity and speed of the
sight.
After walking onto the front porch for a clearer
view, only silence filled the valley sky smudged
with light cloud cover.
He called the RCMP. There was no air force
activity in the area.
He woke his wife Joanna, who had already turned
in for the night without hearing or seeing
anything. On sharing his description of the
round, white light with a yellowish hue, he
learned his wife had seen the same light in the
same location a couple of months earlier.
“I didn’t want to tell him because he’d think I
was crazy,” Joanna recounted.
Earlier that evening at 10:20 p.m. in Houston, a
Canfor employee stepped from a forklift to
examine a phosphorescent like white ball of
light with yellow undertones, which appeared to
hover, before slowly crawling across the sky
line.
The worker called out to two fellow co-workers
who caught sight of the glowing light, which
grew a tail as it gained momentum.
The phenomenon gained speed towards Tweedsmuir
Park and shot out of view over the horizon.
“I called them over because I wanted prove that
I saw something and that I wasn’t crazy,” the
Canfor employee explained.
Despite having two witnesses, the Canfor
employee wished to remain anonymous.
Despite his wife having seen the same
phenomenon, Stewart was relieved a similar
sighting was reported the same day.
Crazy and UFO are often terms that go hand in
hand when trying to determine an experience that
appears to be out of this world.
Already this year, over 70 unidentifiable
sightings have been reported in northern B.C.
Only two days before the Telkwa/Houston
sighting, an erratically moving, bright light
was spotted in Prince George. Sightings in
Prince Rupert and Port Simpson were reported the
same day of Stewart’s experience. The two days
that followed it reports from Terrace were filed
on a glowing, cigar-shaped craft and four
multiple sightings of an unidentifiable light.
“There is so much going on here it’s nuts,”
Houston B.C. Canada UFO researcher Brian Vikes
remarked.
Vikes suspects action in space is growing with
the number of hits he receives on his UFO Web
site.
“Recently, I have been getting numerous hits,”
he said. “Everything from the National Defense
Department to Federal Aviation.”
He also noted that open information transitions
between himself and the national Department of
Defense has since clammed up with the publishing
of the recent sighting in Telkwa — where three
women attested to seeing an unidentified object
with bright lights.
“No one wants to say anything and I am kind of
wondering why,” he questioned. “Is the military
running a project we are not aware of? Something
has happened I just don’t know what — yet.”
Many of these speculated extraterrestrial
occurrences have been explained away as
meteorites, flying exercises, space debris and
the result of power towers.
A recent space ship sighting in Smithers turned
out to be the planets Jupiter and Venus.
Stewart dismisses many of these suspicions in
his case.
He began by explaining that the object flew in a
flat line unlike meteorite or space debris’s
falling arc pattern.
Planes might be a credible explanation, but
because no sound was detected and the size of
the light — the size of a pick up truck from the
distance he sat at — flew so low, a plane wasn’t
a logical solution in Stewart’s mind.
According to Central Mountain Air, there were no
late night flights except for a training run
July 29. Northern Thunderbird training was up
between 10:07-11:04, however, a Central Mountain
Air spokesperson saw no connection between the
occurrences. She speculated that the tiny Cessna
185 would not emit a bright light of that
magnitude and its engines would be heard at a
close proximity.
Although a comet spotted the same evening would
solve Stewart’s mystery, its glowing green
light, arc-shaped flight and Hudson Bay Mountain
location did not pair up with what he saw —
leaving Stewart questioning, “What the heck was
it?”
For Stewart, the speed of the light was the most
notable. “If you had blinked, you would have
missed it, it was that fast,” he said. He
assessed the light reached faster than the speed
of light [sound?] at over 650 miles per hour.
Stewart is well acquainted to gauging speed, he
assessed, after driving dragsters that reached
up to 200 miles per hour.
As to whether he believes in another life force
travelling through the universe, Stewart has
always believed since reading space comic books
as a kid, that people on earth weren’t the only
ones out here.
“There’s too much on earth not to disbelieve,”
he argued, noting other phenomena such as the
Pyramids. “I think there was someone before us.”
Despite Stewart’s open mind towards other life
forms, he talked himself through other possible
explanations, but came to the same conclusion:
“I knew I saw something out of the ordinary.”
Although highly skeptical, the Canfor employee
agreed his sighting was something more than an
everyday occurrence. “In my mind it looked
like a meteorite,” he comforted himself, but
wavered as he turned the 20 second experience
over in his mind. “But, it was like no meteorite
I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen meteorite showers
before, but they never looked anything like
this. I really don’t know what it was.”
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