Page Content (OCR)
out of the sky and disappear into the waters of the Cornwallis River dike on the afternoon of September 15. A professor from the National Research Council’s meteorite committee interviewed them, and the story appeared in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Chronicle-Herald on September 18. The boys said the object first hovered in the air, “‘oscillating like a spinning top,” before it dipped down into the water. They estimated it was about 15 feet across and 6 feet high. It made no noise, and the water didn’t even splash when it submerged. Elsewhere in Canada, a wave of low-level sightings, landings and creature appearances took place in the villages around Montreal, Quebec, that week. Canadian researcher Gene Duplantier collected the many reports and prepared a comprehensive summary for his magazine, Sau- cers, Space and Science. Other close sightings occurred on September 13, 16 and 17 in assorted areas in the province of Ontario. On Wednesday, November 20, 1968, another train of strange lights traversed the British Isles, going from north-northwest to south-southeast. These were formations of multicolored objects with short tails in their wakes. They appeared at approximately 7 P.M. and were seen that night in northwestern Europe as well. One of the many witnesses, Commander V. J. Chown of Woodford, Essex, said the lights appeared ‘‘to be assembled as if around an invisible tube, rather like the old GrafZeppelin in shape.” He was impressed by the way the objects remained in rigid formation “‘just like warships.’’ The Royal Observatory at Hurstmonceux watched the lights and identified them as the Russian rocket Cosmos 253 re-entering the atmosphere. Dr. Bernard Finch checked with the Russian embassy in London, and they flatly denied this. Early in the fall of 1968, I issued a cautious prediction to ufologists around the country, alerting them to the possibility of a new wave of sightings early in January 1969. I had run a thorough study of the flaps of January 1966 and 1967, and had found that January was a neglected flap month. Most researchers concentrated on the months of March-April and July-August. Few were aware of the many other cycles and time patterns involved in the phenomenon. The January cycle can be traced as far back as 1934, when there was a major wave in Scandinavia. The neglected November-December cycle began in 1896 and was repeated in 1909. Charting the Enigma / 143 The January Flap