INTRODUCTION
It was June 20, 1997, and although I was not to meet Dennis until almost a year later, I happened to be just a few hundred feet away from him. It was Friday afternoon, just 42 hours after Dennis and Bob’s sighting of the small triangle. I took my family out to the Lake Laberge campground to attend a going away picnic for a co-worker.
A conversation ensued; " Where was everybody going for summer vacation? " I mentioned that we were going to Roswell, New Mexico for the 50th Anniversary of the alleged crash of a Flying Saucer. Immediately, one of my co-workers mentioned; "Well, you know what? I was just down by the water, and there was a guy there saying he saw this triangular thing zip over his cabin and out onto the lake and the next day there were several fighter jets which flew down the lake". He also related the man’s description of the strange flapping sound the man heard and how distraught he appeared to be.
Wow ! I immediately rushed down to the lakeshore to speak with the gentleman, but of course he was gone. I wrote down a short description of the incident related to me by the co-worker and made a mental note to try to locate the witness at some later date.
I also recalled that the day before (Thursday, June 19) seeing F-18 fighters flying around and landing in Whitehorse, the day after Dennis and Bob's sighting. My wife and I went down to the airport to have a closer look at them that day. We saw several F-18 fighter planes parked on the tarmac. They were American planes and after hearing about the UFO sighting the following day, I thought that it would be a good idea to record that fact in my notebook.
Note: Whitehorse no longer has a military base but is an occasional fuel and overnight stop for military aircraft traveling between Alaska and the rest of the US. About 3 or 4 times per year based on how many times I see them (therefore only an estimate). Some of these stopovers involve Canadian military planes.
Dennis ended up calling a fellow UFO researcher Lorraine Bretlyn in December 1997. She interviewed him and a brief report was filed with the Annual Canadian UFO Survey organized by Chris Rutkowski out of Winnipeg, Manitoba. We wanted Dennis to fill in more details of the case but we were unable to reach him.
Following a local newspaper article on UFOs we did in May of 1998, Dennis called again and we were pleased to discover that he had conducted his own investigation and research. I met with him and he supplied me with several documents resulting from his research. Dennis’ sincerity and diligence to find out what this object might have been impressed us. He was still fairly keyed up by the incident, as if it happened just weeks ago.
A lot of the research material that he gathered was on unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). He also had written responses from Yukon Government and from Canadian Forces Northern Area (Department of National Defence). We were quite pleased and thankful for the letters that Dennis received from these two sources - something which is not always forthcoming. Although they do not provide hard answers they were at the very least courteous to Dennis’ request for information.
ANALYSIS OF THE FLIGHT CHARACTERISTICS Figure 4 shows an illustration of the object when Dennis first saw it. He estimates that the object was about 30m (100ft) above his cabin. I interviewed Bob his neighbor 120 metres (400ft) to the north and had him point out the location where he first saw the triangle. He pointed to an area above the treeline, which appeared consistent with Dennis’ estimate of the elevation. Figure 4. After Dennis first heard the sound, he looked up and first saw the object rapidly flying over his cabin.
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Figure 5 shows an
illustration of the flying triangle as he saw it fly out towards Richthofen Island, just
before it started to "shimmy" and perform an abrupt 20 to 30 degree turn to the
right. It then headed for the tip of the island also shown in the photo. Talking to
Dennis more about this manoeuvre, he said, "it definitely did not bank to the
side" during its sharp turn manoeuvre. He went on to describe the "shimmy"
motion as more of a jiggle, almost fluid like.
Figure 5. Just before the object turned rapidly to the right and headed for the tip of the island, it started to "shimmy" at the location indicated.
To aid in velocity calculations, the possible trajectory of
the flying triangle is shown in a map of the area (Figure 6). Dennis figured he lost sight
of the object near the tip of Richthofen Island (Point "B"). This would put the
object about 3 kilometres (1.86 miles) away from the witnesses at the end of the 2 to 3
second sighting. However, since the stereoscopic vision of a pair human eyes can only
discern distances up to 150 metres (500 ft), additional analysis was needed to assess if
the 3 km distance was reasonable.
Figure 6). Map indicating witness location and the estimated path of the triangular UFO. Witness at point A saw the object disappear from view at point "B", about 3 kilometers away. To make a conservative estimate on the speed of the object, it was assumed that the object may have been too small to be seen at point "C", about 1.5 kilometers away. Map was scanned from a 1:50,000 scale map. NTS# 105E/3E.
This was done by calculating the distance at which an object of that size would have been too small to be seen. Since the object was flying almost directly away from him, it would have been only about 1.2m (4ft) wide. Would a black 1.2 m wide object against a forest green background still be visible at a distance of 3000 metres? To assess this we conducted an informal test.
We scaled the problem down by a factor of 1000 by cutting out a small 1.2 millimetre (0.05") black square and pasting it on a forest green background. Dennis was able to see this black square up to a distance of 4000 mm (13 ft) away. This would suggest that if the object was 1.2 metres wide that he should still be able to see it at a distance of more than 3 kilometres. However, to obtain a conservative estimate of the velocity we considered that Dennis may have lost sight of the object half way to the tip of the island, about 1.5 kilometres. The following table shows the possible range of speeds calculated for the triangle based on the two distances and the estimated time range of the sighting.
LAKE
LABERGE TRIANGLE MAIN PAGE