Bold text - my questions/comments
Plain text - P.J. Harstons's comments

Yeah, Michael Strainic (MUFON - Blaine), I was talking to him yesterday, and he approached news/north. He wanted copies of the stories and I guess perhaps his organization isn't all that well known up here and they've been having a tough time getting information on the sightings. So I talked to him at length yesterday and he said, "Well, you know P.J., the UFO sightings aren't just happening...," like so far I've had reports from Trout Lake, Fort Simpson, Hay River, Hay River Reserve, Fort Resolution, that's where it all started, "...they're not just happening there, they're happening everywhere between here and Resolute Bay.

Holy smokes.

Yeah, in fact, a scientist who is linked with this Mutual UFO Network, saw the thing, the light or whatever it is, he saw it a couple of night ago, and he doesn't know what the hell it is! They're working on a couple of theories right now that what some people have seen is either Venus or another planet or another star and there's been air disturbance...

Yeah, that was in the article.

Yeah, some people have seen that, there's no question of that. But what other people have seen, there's no record of a star or a planet being in that section. It's the south-western sky, more west than south I believe. There's not supposed to be anything there. There's not supposed to be a star or a planet there. So that can mean two things as far as these MUFON people are concerned: it could be the American military testing out some new gadget - which they say has happened before and wouldn't necessarily be uncommon...

Right.

..but, y'know, that might explain a couple of the sightings, but with all of these sightings happening and everyone describing the same thing, and with the remoteness of the communities, people wouldn't see it on TV every night and say, "Oh yeah, I saw the same thing." People are genuinely isolated from reports so they don't know other people have seen the same thing. So they're saying that look, it's gotta be, there has to be something else out there, whether it's maybe an astronomical body that they don't know about, although they've checked with various... what are those places called that have the big telescopes...

Oh, observatories?

Yeah, they've checked with observatories. Nobody has a record of a renegade star or planet or anything being in that part of the sky. So they're left with a unidentified flying object. What that UFO is - is it an alien ship? Y'know, like, I'm not a believer, so of course I say no, of course it's not an alien ship, because that's ridiculous. But what else could it be? So it could be an American military gadget, or an alien spaceship, so you take your pick. Now as far as something flying overtop cars and trucks and stuff like that.. I just heard the mayor of Fort Resolution talking about that on TV today.

Oh really? What show was that on?

It was on a Jane Hauton (sp?) how.

What channel is that on?

They carry it on ITV. Now, I've never seen it before, but Michael Strainic told me that in Vancouver it was on CTV, so it must be a nationally syndicated talk show picked up by different channels. But, yeah, the Jane Hauton show, it's coast to coast, and it's a phone in, panel production show, and they were talking about all of this stuff, and the mayor of Fort Resolution was on it, and Michael Strainic was on it, and they had an author, a journalist who's been studying NASA reports and stuff like that. Now in Canada, just to take the subject just a little bit, in 1994 there was, according to MUFON, there was 140 UFO sightings. Last year, there was almost 500, and when I was talking to Michael Strainic yesterday, he was saying that in BC last summer a lot of these were daytime sightings are there were a lot of reports of abductions and that sort of thing. Now, of course, in the Northwest Territories, the only sightings to date have been nocturnal, or night time sightings. (not true, he corrects himself at the end - Blaine). Now what they are, geez, you're guess is as good as mine, but y'know, I tell ya - I've been seeing a couple of things in the sky for the last three months...

You've seen them?!

Yeah, I've seen what everybody else has seen: a bright light that seems to flash red, green, blue, yellow and white that's in a place that's isolated from all the other starts, that's fairly low - it's not right along the horizon, y'know it looks to be a couple of feet above the tree line, and that could be a couple of miles, but when you look at it looks to be a couple of feet above the tree line. No other stars around it, but there are tons of stars in the sky, the moon's hanging up there, but there'll be this one incredibly bright light. And it's not always in the same place when I see it. I've seen it in two regular spots, but it's not always in that place. Now, I've never seen it speed away or anything like that, but I've left to do something else and come back ten minutes later and it's been gone. Whether it's a star that's dipped below the horizon or whatever, I don't know. But I know what a lot of these people are talking about, and yeah, it's weird! But I haven't lived in the north very long. I've been in the Deh Cho for 6 months, and I've been in Yellowknife for 10 months before that, and then before that I was in Manitoba for two years. So I don't know if when it gets fifty below out, the stars always look like this, or is there always one bright star. I don't have enough background to be able to say "it is a star, it isn't a star" But it's weird. It doesn't do anything, but it's unusual. I've never seen anything like it before. But, on the other hand, for the first 2 months I was seeing it I didn't think anything of it. Like, I just thought, "That's cool"

How many times do you think you've seen it?

Oh, dozens. Literally dozens of times. Just about every time there's a clear sky. Usually I see it the first time it's around 5:30, 6 o'clock, and then sometimes I'll see it around 11 o'clock. But it's not so unusual or so abnormal looking that... y'know, there's no noise, there's no big flashing, it's not like a police light or anything like that. But there's a very subtle colour change to it, and if you watch it, especially as you move your eyes away from it, it changes colour: green, red, blue, and it's a pulsating or pulsing light. To me, that's what everyone else has been describing, so I assume it's the same thing. Now, if it's aliens trying to contact us, (laughter) I don't believe that, but there's people out there who do, and they might be right, I don't know.

If you don't mind, I just made up a short list of questions I just wanted to ask.

Sure

I guess, just a bit of background. You've already said you've only been in the North about 16 months now?

Yeah, between Yellowknife and Fort Simpson.

Previous to being up there, have you ever covered this kind of stuff before?

Oh yeah, just about every year I think that I've been in journalism. I've been in journalism for about five or six years now, and when I was in Manitoba, similar things happened, but usually they were explained by meteorites. In fact, I remember, 3 years ago, I think it was 3 years ago, there was some kind of meteor shower and we got a whole bunch of phone calls shortly after that occurred saying, "Oh, there was UFOs... bunch of UFOs in the sky last night" that was easily explained. But you know, yeah, I've looked into this sort of thing before.

Okay. You said you've been seeing this light for a couple of months, how did you first... did you first see it on your own, or did someone tell you about it? When was the first sighting of it?

No, I saw it on my own, it was before Christmas. Like I said, I didn't think it was... it looked unusual, because it was a light that wasn't, there were no other stars around it, but I just assumed it was a star that I'd never seen before that changed colours. I'm not big on astronomy, so I didn't know stars weren't supposed to change colour all the time, so I just figured it was a star that changed colours, and it looked pretty, so...

And this is in Fort Resolution it was seen? Or is it Fort Simpson?

In Fort Simpson I saw it. Now, in Fort Simpson there's been sightings of this since November. But one guy in particular, a fairly respected elder in the community, he didn't come forward until after the Fort Resolution sightings, because he didn't think any one would believe him, and he didn't want people to think he was a crazy old man. What he described is similar to what I saw, and if he saw it in November, I saw it in December and still seeing it now, and other people are seeing it, so I'm almost positive it's the same thing.

And it's all been nocturnal sightings? None in the day?

No, none in the day. Even though the moon is up in the day, y'know how sometimes you can see the moon in the day, you can see the moon, but you don't see the star until at least part of the sky is black. It'll show up in the sky when part of the sky is still that really rich blue colour and the other part of the sky is black, and it'll show up then, but it won't show up if the whole sky has a bit of daylight in it.

You've been seeing it yourself, and did you talk to other people about it...

Yep.

So when was the earliest claim to have seen it? Would it have been in November, the elder?

Yeah, November.

Okay. And it said in the paper approximately 50 people have seen this?

In Fort Resolution. That was the first Fort Resolution sighting.

And so all of this now that's been going on has been in Fort Simpson, the stuff you've been seeing and everything...

It's all over. A majority of the sightings have been from Fort Resolution, but the first sighting was in Fort Simpson, but that wasn't reported until after the Fort Resolution sightings were reported.

How far apart are the two communities - Fort Res. and Fort Simpson?

They're quite a ways apart. See, Fort Res. is across the lake from you guys (Yellowknife - Blaine) more or less, and we are 6 and a half hours away from them. Yeah, see, they're on the southeast side of Great Slave Lake, and we're way west of Great Slave Lake on the Mackenzie.

It said in the paper, I guess this is the Fort Res. one, that someone actually videotaped it?

Yeah, I think it was a ranger, a Northern ranger who videotaped it, and I guess that videotape now is in the hands of the Department of National Defence.

The only copy of it?

Yeah, that's what I heard, but who knows if other people have taken video tapes. I talked to the RCMP constable there in Fort Resolution and I also talked to Col. Leblanc (DND) and the video doesn't look like much. The biggest problem you have here is you got a shining light in the middle of black, in the middle of nothing, so you got no reference points, so you can't tell if this thing is moving or if somebody is moving the camera. You can't tell how steady the camera is because there's nothing in the foreground or background or anywhere to say whether or not the person who has the camera is holding the camera steady or not. It basically looks like the light is moving around on a screen.

Have you actually seen the video?

No, I haven't seen it, but apparently it doesn't look like too much.

Also in the first article, there's mention of a Jim Bronskill from the Canadian Press who investigated stuff in the National Archives. Was he actually up there investigating or was that just over the phone...

No, I just talked to him over the phone. He did a long story for Canadian Press on UFOs and to do that story he was in the National Archives and he went through sightings Canadians have had for the last twenty or thirty years. He didn't know about the Fort Resolution sightings until I called him, but he wasn't surprised.

Really?

Yeah, because the north is a fairly active place for... not necessarily UFO sightings, but for astronomical sightings. Because of the Northern Lights are up here, and because of the cold temperatures, and the spot that we are in the world, things happen here that we can see that a lot of other people can't, whether or not it's because our skies our clear and we don't have city smog and stuff like that or whether it's because of our location relatively north, with the Northern Lights and stuff. A lot of sightings have been registered from the north of unexplainable lights in the sky and stuff like that.

Jim Bronskill mentioned that there was a sighting in Pond Inlet a few years ago?

Yeah, actually there's been lots of sightings in Pond Inlet since World War II. I don't have the details on it, but Pond Inlet has been a fairly active place for this sort of thing. Now, I don't know how you'd get more information on what Pond Inlet has seen over the years, I don't know if they'd have at news/north in Yellowknife. Cooper Langford was telling me before about Pond Inlet, and when I talked to Jim Bronskill, he brought up Pond Inlet too, so, y'know, two guys brought up Pond Inlet and that's telling me something's been going on there in the past. And I don't know exactly what it is... And another place, a couple of years ago, Fort McPherson had some sightings, and I didn't really look into those either.

When Bronskill was going into the Canadian Archives, I know nothing about this, but did he have to physically go into the archives?

Yeah, basically it's in shoebox-sized cardboard containers that have drawings and police reports... See, the RCMP used to investigate UFOs actively, it was part of their jobs. I talked to the cops here and in Yellowknife about it and they all remember 25 years ago, whenever somebody called in to say they saw a UFO, they were required to go out and fill out a regular sheet, just like they would for an assault or drunk driver - "Witness saw UFO at such-and-such a point and such-and-such a time" and those would all go into their divisional headquarters and from there would probably be passed on to Regina or Ottawa. So, yeah, the National Archives have an extensive collection of drawings and police reports and eyewitness statements from the past, but from what I understand they no longer collect those.

The Alberta UFO Research Association - were they actually up in Fort Res. or is that all a phone investigation?

All phone stuff, yeah, they're all doing it by phone and Internet and all that stuff.

Also, almost as a closing point at the end of the second article, you mention that they were investigating a UFO sighting in Yellowknife last summer. Did you find out anything about that?

What was that... that was... was it a daily sighting? Yeah, it was the only northern sighting the Alberta sighting looked into.

The photos that accompanied the article, were those just staged photos?

Yeah, actually I have way better ones coming out next week.

Really?

Yeah, I don't have real ones. I just have a big black towel with cut out stars and a spaceship on a black piece of thread. They're gonna look cool in my paper. Yeah, the ones... I think Astrid Kruze took those, and not only are they not photos of aliens or UFOs, but I think they're a composite of computer graphics and scanned images.

Wow, that's ambitious!

I think she has a daughter that has a toy dinosaur...

Yeah, I thought that was a toy dinosaur!

Yeah, part of a dinosaur. We spare no expense!

You were saying "...in your paper" - that'd be the...

The Deh Cho Drum.

Are you writing articles on this in that as well?

Yeah.

Is there any way I'd be able to obtain back issues or articles?

Yeah, you could just go into the Yellowknifer / news/north office there in town and, yeah, you can get them right there.

And when does it come out?

It comes out every Thursday.

Every Thursday, so was there something yesterday in it?

No, I don't think I had a follow-up in my paper. Actually, in my paper, I've just had the one story...

Which was?

"Elder Sees Mystery Lights" and that's from January 11.

And how would I get a copy of that back issue?

Just go into news/north / Yellowknifer there and ask for it. We're all owned by Northern News Services, so you can get back issues there.

On Monday, your follow-up article, that's going to be in news/north?

Mm-hmm.

And what about the Deh Cho Drum on this coming Thursday?

Yeah, I'm going to have a new different article.

Oh wow...

Yeah. Normally, I would say, "Look guys, this is a bunch of crap. People are just getting hyped and they're starting to see things." Normally, I would say that, but I look at it this way: There's gotta be something going on. There's people all over Canada interested in this, so it can't be as simple as we're all just seeing the planet Venus and we don't know what the hell we're looking at. It can't be that simple, otherwise we wouldn't have these people from Vancouver and Calgary and Toronto and all these places interested in what we're seeing, otherwise they would look at it and say, "Yeah, these people are obviously playing a big joke on the rest of Canada, we're not going to play into their hands," because the media's very skeptical. We always are, because, I don't know why it is, but we don't believe in stuff, but there has to be something more to this, there has to be. I don't know what it is, and I'm leaning more towards the American military exercise-thing...

Really?

Oh sure, it's got to be that, because it can't be aliens, there's no such thing!

Well, y'know, if you ever get hooked up to the Internet... I've always been skeptical too, I've always been curious, but in the past week I've found some of the most amazing stuff written on secrets the US is trying to keep, I mean... It sounds so unreal if I tried to tell you it, but it makes you wonder...

Well, y'know, I could sit here on a Friday night and make up a whole bunch of secrets the Canadian government isn't telling anybody...

(laugh) That's true too, but...

I know what you mean though. There's so many people who have information and there's all these testimonials from people who have been abducted and have seen spaceships. Now, the thing that sets these sightings apart from them is nobody is saying that they saw a spaceship. Nobody has ever said, "I saw a flying saucer," or "I saw a cigar-shaped object with all kinds of lights around it, antennas, and a little staircase." Nobody is saying that. All they're saying is they got this light that flashes different colours and is in a place that it isn't supposed to be in. That's what they're saying. So, what can you say - "Oh, you're full of shit, there's no such thing as a flashing light." So, what is it that they're saying? I thought that this would have been figured out a long time ago. I figured somebody would say it's a weather balloon or this and that, but it's just gaining more and more interest, and more and more people are seeing it, and I don't think they're making it up. I think that they're just discovering they've been looking at it for a long time and it hasn't clued in to them that it's not supposed be there.

What have the feedback on the articles on the sightings been? No one's actually said they've seen a UFO, sorry, and alien spaceship or anything...

Anything that they can describe as a spaceship, yeah, nobody's saying that. Nobody's said they've seen a "spaceship."

You mentioned some of the scientific theories - Venus, American military - but what's the general consensus of the people?

What do the people think?

Yeah.

The people don't know, they don't know what it is. Some of the people who have seen this are old-timers, 60, 70 years old. These are people who don't make things up generally. We're talking about Dene people, and part of the Dene culture is story-telling, and they pass histories on from generation to generation by telling stories. And by "stories" I don't mean fiction, but non-fiction. Well these people are coming up and saying, "We've never seen anything like this before." They've seen fire in the sky, balls of fire streaming across the sky, and a lot of those cases those could be meteors, they could be satellites crashing into the earth, whatever, those are a little more easily explainable. But also, things like that are more visually exciting than what we're seeing here now. What we're seeing here now, except for the latest sightings of these things chasing cars or whatever, it's a fairly mundane thing. It's a flashing light in the sky. So people aren't scared or worried or upset, but I would say they're maybe a little unsettled. Because they don't know what it is, they're really starting to wonder what the hell it is. Some people are saying, "Is it aliens? Could it be aliens? Is it a spaceship? What is it?" and I think most people just want to know what it is.

When we first started talking, you told me about the lights following people in their cars and skidoos. I'm wondering if you could repeat that so I could get it on tape and transcribe it. Just what's been happening and what people have been seeing and everything...

Oh sure. The latest reports from Fort Resolution and the area, from motorists and trappers, the lights have been following vehicles - skidoos and trucks mainly - and the light will stop overhead of the skidoo, the truck, and when that happens, the vehicle goes dead. Some of the trappers are used to their snowmobiles going dead, so they change the sparkplugs and fiddle around with the engine and start it back up again, but they haven't had any luck getting their vehicles going until this light leaves. Once the light leaves, the truck can be started up again, or the snowmobile can be started up. That's the latest information from Fort Resolution.

This light, how high above is it?

I'm assuming within 500 feet or so, but they didn't really say anything. I'm assuming that it's still quite high.

How long would the lights stay over? How long would this last?

They haven't said anything, but I'm assuming it's five-ten minutes, not hours or anything like that. It would have to be five or ten minutes for a guy to open up his snowmobile and change his plugs.

And how many people have reported this?

About four or five so far.

And that's just been in the last week?

Yeah, I think it's just in the last week that it's been reported, but I don't know how long it's been going on. But more and more reports are coming out as people find out other people have seen it. Up here, people don't want to be perceived as being crazy, and they're skeptical. They don't want to come out and say, "I saw some lights." That's the latest.

Is this topic going to be an on-going topic for you to write about in the two papers?

Yes, until it's figured out. It might not be every week, but we'll keep doing follow-ups until something gets figured out.

That's great. This is kind of on a sidetrack, but since all these sightings have been taking place, I've been thinking about the Russian satellite that crashed in the NWT. I'm wondering what you know about that or if that's come up at all since this has started?

Now I can't remember if that happened near Pond Inlet too... I know it was somewhere in the north... I remember it vaguely, but I was still in Ontario or Vancouver when it happened.

Well, that's pretty much all I wanted to ask you...

(and then we just wrapped up our conversation and exchanged phone numbers)