In the twilight of the 66th anniversary of the Roswell UFO sighting, a group of three men saw some strange lights over the skies of Frog Lake.
It was just past 11 p.m. on Friday, June 28 when Anthony WhiskeyJack was driving Peter Horse and Dean Quinney home to Frog Lake from Canada Day celebrations in Onion Lake. As Quinney looked out the window of the moving vehicle, he spotted something hovering above a power line.
“I was looking up in the sky and I thought it was a power pole lighting up, but then it started moving,” Quinney said, adding that all three believed it to be a flying saucer. “I was hoping it wouldn’t land. I was pretty shaky.”
WhiskeyJack said the object hovered above the telephone pole, emitting a bright reddish-orange glow but creating no sound at all, before it took off into the skies and began rapidly heading east.
“It was just above the power poles. It was really low, too bad we didn’t get the camera on his phone right away. Dean got excited and he told Peter to videotape it,” he said. “There was no noise, usually you hear a jet plane when you’re that close. It was just a light, like really bright orange fire, and it just took right off . . . It was just there for a couple of seconds, then it started moving slowly then all of the sudden it just went.”
Horse managed to grab a short video of the unidentified object from inside the vehicle, and while it is difficult to make out much through the darkness, there is unmistakably a flickering reddish-orange orb in the sky.
“My friends didn’t believe it,” Horse said of the video, adding that he was already a believer in extra terrestrial life, and he hopes to sell the video to a UFO sighting television show. “We were moving at the time so it was a little difficult.”
WhiskeyJack said he believes the video could be worth a good deal of money to the right buyer.
“These unsolved mysteries, they sell their tapes for a lot of money, and with this one there were no strings or anything going back and forth,” WhiskeyJack said, adding that while he was not previously a believer in alien life, he feels he has now seen proof of its existence. “I never was a believer about those flying saucers, but now I’ve seen one. They do exist.”
Cold Lake 4 Wing Public Affairs Officer Mat Strong informed the Journal that 4 Wing Ops confirmed “no 4 Wing aircraft were flying on the night of 28 June,” which leaves a good deal of speculation surrounding the sighting.
University of Alberta Assistant Professor of Astrophysics Gregory Sivakoff said that while he cannot confirm or deny what WhiskeyJack, Horse and Quinney spotted that evening, he believes the vast majority of UFO sightings can be reasonably explained.
“One of the classic things that often gets mistaken for UFOs are actually the planets. In particular, planets like Venus, and depending on when exactly, Jupiter. They are much brighter than other stars, and particularly with Venus, they’re often relatively low above the horizon,” Sivakoff said.
“When they’re relatively low on the horizon, they’re going through a lot of turbulent air so it may look like things are flickering and their colours may be a little bit different. That’s a classic one, and there are even some things with Venus, where if you’re in a car, since the object itself is very far away it looks like it’s following you when in fact it’s not moving at all.”
Some other occurrences that Sivakoff said are commonly mistaken for UFOs include reflections off man-made objects such as planes or satellites, like the iridium satellite which often reflects lights causing bright flares, falling meteorites, or even birds in the sky.
Sivakoff said he believes that in a world where so many people have access to cameras and video cameras, if there were in fact a case of a flying saucer, the public would know by now.
“Especially in today’s society where we have such great coverage with cell phones and security cameras, etc., it would be really surprising if there were flying saucers up there and we hadn’t come to any conclusive evidence yet,” he said, pointing to the Buzzard Coulee meteor shower in 2008, where a number of people who thought they had spotted a UFO in the skies over Saskatchewan were proven wrong by a police camera that captured footage of the falling meteorites.
