A Riverdale couple was so convinced they saw unidentified flying objects
over Grey Mountain on Monday evening 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 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 living watching TV at about 6:30 p.m. when John Doe 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 metres 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 and John maintain they do not
believe in extraterrestrial aliens, 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
lightning balls, 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 balls of lightning.
Balls of lightning, for instance, are described as relatively small, 15 to
20 centimetres 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 colour, it was the movement of
the lights that has mystified them both.
One of the two lights she saw zigzagged
downward, sideways to the east, and then straight upward, while the second
ball shot straight across at a fantastic speed, she said.
Jane and 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 and 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.
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