The Yukon is fairly generally known (at least to
initiates) as a sanctuary of the screwball or
nut. Statistics show that as you drive up the
Alaska Highway the temperature is apt to drop
and your chances of adventure to increase. You
may meet rugged individualists glorying in such
names as Buzz-saw Jimmy or Wigwam Harry. A bear
or moose may appear. It’s possible . . . . but
you know all that.
What Yukoners were NOT noted for,
until recently, was seeing the light. Now it
looks as if they’re off on a sky-watching kick
with eerie implications.
On Jan. 1, a Whitehorse resident
saw a range of red lights in the sky while she
was baby-sitting in the downtown area. The
lights resembled 60-watt bulbs colored a deep
red, she said, and appeared to “go up and down.”
No porch lights were on anywhere and no similar
mundane explanation presented itself. The lady
saw the lights between two and three a.m., an
hour when most people’s powers of observation
are somewhat blunted. At first she was reluctant
to make her report and invite ridicule. A few
days later, she thought better of it and phoned
the editor of the Whitehorse Star.
The Star editor was sceptical. He
printed her story but privately dismissed her as
a crackpot.
A week later, I left the Star
office where I’m employed as a reporter and
began to walk home. The date was Jan 7 or 8, the
time soon after 5 p.m. It was dark. I live in
the downtown area not far from where the
editor’s caller saw her lights. And to my
horror, before I’d walked a couple of blocks, I
saw them too.
They were like 60-watt bulbs
colored a deep red, and they went up and down.
They seemed to hover above the town with no
accompanying noise, and their movement was
reminiscent of a “mobile”. They did not travel
across the sky. I estimated their position as
somewhere between the centre of Whitehorse and
the airport, a distance of perhaps two or three
miles.
My immediate reaction was to keep
quiet about it, just as the first light-watcher
had done. Then, a few days later, I mentioned it
to a friend – the sort of person often referred
to as a “reliable source” – and he confessed
that he, too, had seen the light.
This brought the total of local
enlightenment to three. I told the editor about
it, and was earnestly advised to concentrate on
the sideways while walking home. (At this time
of year they’re coated with near-lethal ice, and
if there’s one thing he hates, it’s sending
someone out to cover an assignment, with a
broken leg).
It was no good trying to tell
anybody, they all laughed like drains at the
mere mention of lights in the sky. The local CBC
station sent somebody to interview me on the
understanding that the whole thing was a gag.
I persuaded the editor to check
with the weather office, the police, the local
flying services. Nobody had seen anything Up
There, or so they said.
Then we suddenly got another
report. Two local residents driving home from a
movie, late at night on Jan 28 saw the red
lights just as our first viewer had described
them, and to make it better still, they were
both sober sceptics, not given to acknowledging
messages from above.
Another independent witness
(knowing nothing of the others) volunteered the
information that she’d seen “red lights” from
her living room window on Jan 8 and had not
mentioned it in case her husband thought she was
crazy.
IS THIS THE ANSWER? A few days
after the story on this page was written, the
Whitehorse Star reported that following numerous
reports of deep glowing red lights dipping over
the city a Star red light hunting expedition set
out to track down the source of the lights.
Government agencies were
questioned. Weather office experts were hounded
with questions. Every group which might have
some connection with the troubling reports of
“red lights in the sky” were chased down.
And then, one government employee
said “I saw 2 of those so-called mysterious red
lights the other night. I also heard 2 bangs
that sounded like gun shots.”
He chuckled, opened his desk
drawer and produced a small plastic box
containing a metal rod and a handful of
capsules.
“I got to thinking when I got
home about these signal kits on the Yukon and
Northwest Territories Prospector’s Assistance
Program,” he said. “These signals are shot out
of this gun and the flares go about 300 feet
into the air.”
The kit was borrowed and tried.
The flares were a deep glowing red. But, is this
the answer? Surely, if someone were shooting off
flares, the word would be all over Whitehorse by
this time, and there would be nothing
"mysterious" about signal flares issued to
prospectors.
A local pilot told us that around
the beginning or January, the RCMP had sent a
couple of officers up to Haines Junction by
helicopter to investigate reports of mysterious
lights in the sky. They had been unable to trace
the lights to any definite source. This report
was verified when we called the local RCMP
office in Whitehorse, but they suggested that
the lights might have been flares.
Further enquiries of the
Meteorological Office at Whitehorse revealed
that they have recently been putting up weather
balloons, though not equipped with hovering deep
red lights.
So far, every attempt to find a
simple explanation that must exist has been
blocked by somebody’s reluctance to venture an
official opinion.
The lights were there, and people
saw them. So what were - or are - they? If some
in local government departments could explain
it, why don‘t they?
If they’re just being coy, they
can’t blame local residents for speculating,
like the man who saw the lights from his car on
his way home.
"They were red lights, and they
hovered," he said firmly. "And I look at it this
way. We keep bragging about how we're going to
land somebody on the moon. How can we be sure
there isn’t already a race up there that’s
planning to land somebody on US????"
HOMEPAGE