It was around 10 p.m. one night in mid-March that the Victoria woman, standing in the driveway of her acreage, saw a UFO.
"I heard a very powerful blowing noise, almost a white noise as it grew louder just to my left and just over the tree line. What came first was a very large, but dull, flashing red beacon in the centre of what began to appear as a massive triangular shape. It was like nothing I have ever seen before.
"As it approached very low, just over the trees and my house, it had a very strange white light on each side of the triangle; they seemed to be extremely bright but did not illuminate the ground at all. As it crossed overhead I thought I should be able to get a good look at it as it was a clear, starry night, but it brought a darkness with it. Darker than the night. Blacker than black, making it unable to distinguish any actual lines."
Well, must admit that's not something you see every day (unless you've been hanging around crematoriums with Keith Richards), which is why UFOlogist Brian Vike, after receiving the written report, forwarded it to the TC.
Vike lives up in Houston, B.C., where for the past seven years he has run HBBC UFO Research -- collecting reports on unexplained sightings, doing an Internet radio show.
He gets maybe 900 UFO reports a year worldwide, had 274 from Canada alone last year. Of those 274, he says maybe 200 could be readily explained away -- aircraft, Venus hanging low on the horizon, that sort of thing. He tries to weed out the hoaxers and kooks, discounts any report where the e-mail address bounces back. That still leaves plenty that's intriguing.
Vike fielded a spate of calls from Ontario in March. "We had reports of triangles. We had disc craft. We had metallic balls." Some people reported lights zig-zagging across the sky. BBC Radio interviewed him about all that this week.
Usually it's B.C. that is Canada's UFO-sighting capital, but lately it's been slow here. "It's either because the aliens went to Florida for a vacation, or the weather has been so crappy." Got to keep a sense of humour in the UFO business.
Anyway, Vike was happy to get that report from Victoria. "From the position of the lights and the shape of the blackness I am sure it was a triangle, quite flat in depth," the woman's statement read. "It moved in a very strange manner, almost hovering, this incredibly massive -- about 200 feet across and almost that long -- powerful craft moving at maybe 10 mph just over my head. It made the strangest noise, not like any kind of engine or jet. It was all very mesmerizing, and thinking back I really was very oddly stunned. I wanted to run to the house for my son but I couldn't take my eyes off it. I watched as it went over my house maybe 200 feet. ... It took up a bit of speed and altitude as it flew away. The lights very clearly started to move horizontally, left and right very quickly. It veered off towards the ocean and was gone."
Now, being a professional skeptic, my automatic suspicion is that the writer either A) was pulling Vike's leg, or B) took the brown acid at Woodstock.
On the other hand, in a world in which there are so few unexplored horizons, it is oddly comforting to remember that improbable doesn't equal impossible, that unproven doesn't mean disproven, that you can never really shut the door.
"I do believe in my heart that there is something out there, some kind of life," says Vike.
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