City Nuts For UFOs
Story spurs more reports
By Natalie Pona, Staff Reporter
Winnipeg has developed an eerie resemblance to Area 51 in the
last couple of days. Since a story about local air traffic
controllers who saw a light zoom through the sky appeared in The
Sun on Monday, the newspaper has been flooded with e-mails from
people who say they witnessed a similar phenomenon.
A husband and wife, who did not include their names, wrote to
say they frequently see alien aircraft.
"All we have to do is look out our apartment window, look
towards the city centre and sometimes we see them I sometimes
think we are going nuts."
Small, bright object
A woman named Deb said she spotted a small, bright object in the
sky while she was on a plane.
"It appeared lower than the plane but in the distance. I
followed it across the sky in the opposite direction ... until
it grew too small to see. And it was fast. I remember thinking
that I couldn't come up with any logical explanation as to what
the object was," Deb wrote.
A man named Steve e-mailed about the story's headline: UFO seen
whizzing over city.
"So I hope nobody got wet!" Steve's note quipped.
Doug Creamer, a pipe fitter from Alberta, said he saw two white
disks floating through the sky earlier this month.
It was the first time he saw a UFO, he said.
"You don't want to say it out loud ... people would just think
I'm nuts," Creamer said.
Area 51 is the U.S. military base located north of Las Vegas
that is frequently associated with UFO conspiracy theories.
Chris Rutkowski, a Winnipeg UFO researcher, said sightings are
up this year across Canada. The country averages 700 yearly, he said.
"People are returning to having a sense of awe and wonder about
their place in the universe," he said.
Nervousness about world politics may be provoking more people to
look for meaning in life.
"People are looking above and beyond for help. A lot are looking
introspectively," Rutkowski said.
Rutkowski said there were nine national reports of UFOs of
similar description on the night the object was seen by the air
traffic controllers.
The new sightings will help with his investigation into the
origin of the UFO seen by the controllers.
"For the most part, people who report UFOs are actually seeing
something in the sky. We can usually explain it with an actual
(astronomical) event," he said.
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