This article was published in the daily newspaper The Daily Colonist, of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, on March 11, 1977.
By STEPHEN HUME
Colonist Reporter
Ships from outer space regularly visit Vancouver Island to recharge themselves from B.C. Hydro power lines.
A Duncan man who is one of Canada's authorities on unidentified flying objects - says three or four UFO sightings a month on Vancouver Island are not unreasonable.
"It's a fact that these objects apparently recharge themselves by being in proximity with our power lines," John Magor said in an interview Thursday.
Magor said two teenage sisters who reported they saw a UFO Wednesday night above the 2700-block Richmond in Saanich, made an authentic sighting of a type of ship that frequently visits Vancouver Island.
The girls, Susanna and Maria Stratford, said the object dropped like a falling star and hovered about 30 feet from the ground.
It was big as a house, they said, and it hummed. It was round and shiny witha bright red flashing light on top.
Although a spokesman at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory reported nothing unusual Wednesday night, the sisters are convinced they saw a UFO. And so is Magor.
A Victoria radio station had several phone calls Thursday morning from people who said they saw a similar object hovering near Victoria General Hospital Wednesday night.
Magor says typical UFOs of the type that frequent the Island are round, with a dome-shaped light on top, and are often quite large. They usually make a humming sound, he said, and have both speed and ability to hover.
"Hospitals are a weird point of attraction for UFOs, and oddly enough, so are graveyards," he said.
Magor said one of the best sightings on the Island came on New Year's Day, 1970. Several nurses in the Cowichan District Hospital in Duncan saw a UFO outside the third-storey level of the hospital, he said.
"One nurse said she saw two fine-looking male specimens in the UFO. She said they looked exactly like people, only more so. Her descriptions of the occupants closely matched sightings in other parts of the world.
Magor believes the UFOs that are sighted are extraterrestrial - from parts of the universe beyond the earth. He said they are seen everywhere in the world and often make landings near witnesses.
He said in September, 1961, a husband and wife, during an automobile trip from Canada to the United States, were taken aboard a UFO and shown a starmap of the universe by the captain.
The incident was documented by psychiatrists who hypnotized the couple, Barney and Betty Hill, he said.
Magor theorizes in his book, Our UFO Visitors, to be published this spring by Hancock House in Saanichton, that we are all related to ex-terrestrial visitors who came to earth centuries ago.
I think they've followed the development of our world beyond our memory of history. I think they had a hand in populating it. It's very likely thousands of years ago they did visit earth and left their own kind to help manipulate our evolution."
Magor said this would explain how man could have made such an unexplained leap in evolution from the monkey-ape that was considered by the 19th century biologist Darwin to be our predecessor. UFO visitors may be the missing link, he said.
Magor said the new book is the first Canadian book on UFOs to he published for general circulation.
Meanwhile, the flying saucers are visiting the province at the rate of about 25 a month, he said.
