The Ottawa Journal from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • Page 70

touched. There was no sign of fire. The edges of the ring were quite sharp. Shortly afterwards he found three more such rings in another field, one of them a half ring beside a rock pile, as if the craft had tried to land and been tipped over by the. rocks an oddly clumsy thing for an interstellar craft to -do, TOlher as if -an astronaut had made it safely to the moon then broken his neck tripping over a pebble.

Within a few-days Agincourt, Ont, electrician who is one of Canada's foremost ufplogists, had heard about the incident, and by the next weekend he was on the spot with his family, his notebooks, his printed UFO Sighting Questionnaire, his tape measure and his camera. The rings were still there, as sharp as ever. McKay measured every inch of them. The kids, as kids do, got restless. To McKay, it was one more piece of evi-.

dence that we are being visited by beings from outer space. To the kids it was a boring bunch of grass and a tot -of running around- The rings are almost always the same, says McKay, a specialist in landing traces. Sometimes they show a cog wheel effect Almost always there is a "nest as if a high wind had swirled' the grass. The grass is always dehydrated. Sometimes there are.

three indentations in the earth within the-ring, like an undercarriage. McKay once measured these holes and at the bottom of one found a white powder. He had it analyzed and it "turned out to -be -pure uric add in astonishingly high concentrations. What to make of that? He shrugs (ufo-logists shrug a lot). Uric Could it be could it possibly be that the UFOs are using earth as a comfort station? who doubles as Ontario di-'- rector for a US-based international UFO group called Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is a good example of the less eccentric, more scientifically minded ufologist (he first became terested professionally when he heard that UFOs were said to be able to induce electrical failures from a tance, a useful trick).

He believes he approaches" the problem with the proper scientific skepticism. He is also aware of the dangers of media ridicule. What are UFOs like? "The consensus," he says carefully, "is that they are between 30 and 40 feet in diameter, typically the flatfish disc shape, but sometimes ball-shaped or cigar-shaped." But what are they? in UFO means unidentified. That means we don't yet know. Their behavior indicates -mat- Aey are4eyond-tefTestrial capabilities, therefore they must originate elsewhere." Orthodox science says they probably don't exist at all.

How do you know they do? "There is plenty of circumstantial evidence, and lots of hard new evi- -dence that is not readily available to the public And there is no evidence proving they don't exist" What are the pilots like? He shrugs again. "Who says, they -are piloted? Maybe they are robot ships." -HenryMcKay doesn't believe in little green men from Mars. (It is doubtful, actually, whether anyone ever did; it seems to have been a headline writer's catch phrase, like bra-burner.) And yet, and yet a combing of the UFO literature reveals that there is a consensus, of a quarrelsome sort, and the words little and green both figure The pilots are said to be: hominids about one metre tall, with thin, childlike arms, dressed in grey or green (possibly a uniform); they pilot disc-'rrkeTTvV(UFO jargon for an Extra-Terrestrial Vehicle) with a raised cabin; their home system is the K-type star Arcturus A dissenting opinion is that UFOs come from Null-Space, an Other Dimension, near Earth but not near, far, but not really far, distant possibly in time and certainly into at least a fourth dimension This theory seems to be gaining currency. Rubbish, says Henry McKay, all rubbish. All this detracts from the real -business of serious researchers, which is the collection of reliable data; the loonier ufologists appear to the public, the less responsible people want to deal with them and the less independent data exists.

"People don't report sightings the way they did," he says, sadly. "They are afraid of being thought crazy. Some airlines ground any pilot who reports UFOs, because they consider a sighting evidence of instability UFO pilots are said to be hominids about one metre tall, with thin, childlike arms is it any wonder pilots don't report them any "And government?" Here he shakes his head. "For one reason or another governments are simply not telling the truth. They keep the truth hidden.

They suppress evidence. We all know this. Occasionally the mail goes astray. We knowrThere is a conspiracy of silence among the military and the government. They don't want people lo-know." McKay's own research, hampered by non-co-operative government and sketchy information from many parts of Canada, has discovered no pattern to UFO activity.

They appear at random times in random places to a random selection of He himself has only seen a UFO once, and he's not even sure of that It was just a light he couldn't expfain by any other means. He doesn't have a need to see UFOs. He knows. And besides, he's seen eight or nine different landing traces in a radius of "150 miles around Toronto. There is one giveaway pattern in the UFO literature.

Alas, they are always on the point of making some significant and conclusive discovery. They are on the point of exhuming some alien corpse in a Texan grave, and as soon as the autopsy is done They are on the point of analyzing some strange metallic debris from an alien spaceship, and they soon will be able to prove Nothing is ever heard of these cases again, though similar ones, have been recurring since the 50s. But the UFO people possess, if nothing else, a sunny optimism. They know. Which is why they are convinced the government must be ob-' scuring the evidence.

If they know, how could the government, with its National Research Council' and radar and technological wizardry fail to know? The largest scale study ever done on UFOs was commissioned by the US air force from the University of Colorado. It concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that UFOs ever existed, though it conceded that a good many reports remained unexplained. UFOs were either ball lightning, marsh gas, earth' satellites, airplanes, clouds, birds, or hoaxes. Ufologists angrily reject this report as incomplete and prejudiced.They refer to it as The Great Coverup, sometimes by changing one letter in the name of the report's principal author, Professor Condon, Argosy-magazine, in its usual vivid way, once speculated that UFOs were really earth-type experimental aircraft being manufactured "in the primeval forests of British The ar-; tide caused little more than snickers in those same forests, by then thor-' oughly logged and explored; there are two distinct spheres of UFO activity in Canada, one along the north south axis of the BC side of the Rockies, and the other an arc from the Manitoba border along the top of Ontario down to the Ottawa River. There have been almost no sightings east of Quebec.

Maybe Maritimers are too looking for foreign submarines in the deep to be watching the skies. It is very difficult to say how many ufologists are active in Canada. Since the-Winnipeg-based Canadian Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (CAPRO) collapsed a few years ago for lack, of funds, there has been no national body of UFO watchers. There is a group called the Canadian UFO Bureau, but it's realty confined "to Toronto. There are groups in many tities, including Victoria; Vancouver; Duncan, BC; Calgary; Edmonton; Winnipeg; Toronto; Montreal and Ste- -Therese, Que.

Often, a city will be host to more than one group. Often, too, these groups won't speak to each other not all of them share a dedication to the scientific method, and the adherents to some of the woollier theories drive the others right up the wall. There are two Canadian provin-dal directors of the US group MUFON (McKay and John Musgrave of Edmonton); each of these is trying to set up a provincial network to co-ordinate sighting reports. TheUS National Investigation Committee for Aerial Phenomena which is the largest UFO group has a number of.