Keep Watching the Skies!
A catalog of local UFO sightings
by Christopher Doty

September 1949
Two years after the first UFO sighting in the United States, 200 "flying saucers" were dropped from an airplane over downtown London. Produced by Watt Letter Service they were paper plates, spray-painted silver with lettering advertising a local charity auction. Eat your heart out, Ed Wood...

(Thanks to Bruce Bennett for letting us know about this item)

March 1950
A few days before April Fool's day two independent sources spotted a flying disc streaking across London, pluming a long, white tail behind it. Mrs. Campbell Fraser of Byron was probably the first person to see the object.

"I just happened to look out the window and saw this white cloud. I watched it and it started to move. It moved very fast and I watched it until it disappeared." The disc was later spotted by a group of school children in the city's east end.

"It shone in the sun and it had white streaks out behind it," said a 12-year-old Bobbie Howson. "That was no jet; all the guys saw it and boy was it travelling."

"It looked like a plane to me," said Bobbie's sister.

"Ah, whadda girls know about planes," retorted another witness, Buddy Bailey.

April 1952
Londoners spot a mystery object travelling at an estimated 1000 miles per hour across area skies. Officials claim it's a British plane travelling from Montreal to Omaha, Nebraska.

November 1953
A week after a class discussion at Pond Mill Public School, Billy and George McKibbon spotted a silver object hovering over an East End sewage plant at approximately 8:30 in the morning.

After watching the object for several minute the two boys ran to school where they reported the incident to their teacher, Grace Williams, who asked the boys to draw what they had seen and then gave them railway fare to go into London and tell the press the story.

July 1955
Over the course of two days a series of unidentified objects were sighted over three Western Ontario points. The tenth was spotted over Elginfield on the afternoon of July 12th by Oscar Hodgins as he was lubricating his tractor.

"It wasn't moving. I figured it must have been one of those new helicopters but there wasn't any rotor blade and it was the wrong shape anyway," said Hodgins. "It had two parallel tubular arms. Towards one end, between the arms, was a round, flat thing resembling an alarm clock."

As Hodgins watched the object circle a Canadian bomber, there was a flash of light from the craft and it disappeared. Ottawa has alerted all RCAF pilots to keep an eye out for any further occurrences.

December 1955
On the morning of December 1st, 16-year-old George Clark woke and took a look out the window of his family's Ingersoll home to check the weather. "This thing caught my eye," he later told a newspaper reporter. "I stared a few seconds to make sure there was something there, then called the rest of the family. Dad told me to get the camera."

As the family gaped on the front lawn, George snapped two exposures of a circular object that moved at an angle with the back end tipped down. The object was dark and transparent in the centre. It did not emit any exhaust fumes and was moving against the wind.

After watching it for three minutes the object turned sharply to the east and disappeared. All negatives relating to the incident have mysteriously disappeared from the files of the London Free Press.

February 1967
At 10 o'clock one evening a 13-year-old astronomer in Lucan noticed an object that was definitely not a plane, helicopter or a meteor travelling west through the sky.

"It really looked queer," said Bruce Currie. "It had a band of red lights around the middle which flashed in rotation. The bottom had blue-greenish streaks and the upper half glowed blue. It had this funny little tower on top with yellow lines," says Bruce Currie. The boy tries to take a photo of the object but the film comes out blank.

Currie's report is confirmed by an OPP constable at a nearby detachment who claims he saw "a flashing orangy-coloured ojbect" in the sky.

.October 1967
A family returning from a 4-H meeting in Middlesex County found their car chased by a overhead object spraying colour.

"It was not a glow, it was just a mess of lights," recalled the driver, Mrs. Julius Erdely. "We had this feeling it was following us. And you know how you get that inner feeling that someone is staring at you."

The car turned on to a local farm where a neighbour spotted the object.

"When I went out it was going southwest. All I saw was the red light and the white lights. The red one looked the size of a football," said Fred Coad. "But it wasn't an airplane. There was absolutely no noise."

February 1968
An object hovered one moment, moved up and down slightly and then took off in a westerly direction towards London at a terrific speed on the evening of February 25th.

"We weren't really able to identify the shape of it because of the black (sky) background, but it did have a very bright white light at the front of the vehicle and three red lights in a triangular pattern at the rear," said David Priest of Dorchester who phoned in the first report at 7:30 p.m. He noted that the object gave off a slight hum, "not the drone of an airplane."

Bruce Phillips of London later noticed lights in the sky as he was driving home. He parked his car and dashed into the house for a pair of binoculars.

"It came from the east, hovered, then appeared to travel back in the same path it came from," said Phillips. "I didn't hear a noise but it was quite large and moved very rapidly when it went into motion."

The object did not register on radar screens at the London Airport.

April 1977
Ten objects are spotted hovering over London. They emit a white light which turns red and then fades away after appoximately 15 minutes. Scientists at Cronyn Observatory believe the phenomenon is a hoax put together by university engineering students. They argue the lights are flares attached to army surplus weather balloons.