This article was published by the Halifax Daily News and also via Canada.com on August 18, 2002. Writer is Jerry West.
An amateur astronomer says a huge, black object glided over Cow Bay early Tuesday morning [Aug 13], blocking out the stars and bringing with it an unnatural silence.
The woman watched a meteor, streaking from the Big Dipper, disappear behind an unidentified flying object in the clear night sky about 2:15 a.m.
"Suddenly, the sky started to go black, like someone was pulling a black curtain across the sky," the woman, who doesn’t want her name published, wrote to Bedford’s Don Ledger, a pilot and part-time UFO researcher.
The object was triangular, and travelling very slowly, with the point at the back, she said. It seemed to be about 600 metres up — the height of planes from Shearwater airbase that fly over her house — and eventually covered the 25-metre clearing she was standing in, next to her home. Ledger calculates the triangle would be about 240 metres along each side.
And then there was the quiet.
"Pheasants that live on the other side of her fence, that are normally rustling around, got quiet; crickets stopped chirping... The normal night noises just stopped," Ledger said, recounting the woman’s experience.
He hasn’t ruled out a military aircraft, but thinks it would be virtually impossible to make something that large travel that slowly unless it was lighter than air, like a blimp.
It certainly couldn’t be an American B-2 stealth bomber, although they are triangular in shape, Ledger said.
The stealth bombers emit a rumbling sound difficult to pinpoint, but not difficult to hear, he said.
"If you’ve ever seen one, you know they’re not silent," he said.
A B-2 is about 21 metres in length, with a wingspan of about 52 metres.
The sighting is similar to others Ledger has heard of. In August 2000, a Halifax police officer reputedly saw a huge black triangle about 200 metres long fly overhead, but Ledger hasn’t tracked him down. Another person Ledger spoke to said he had seen a large black triangle near Pugwash in 1988.
When Ledger posted details of the sighting on the National UFO Reporting Center Web site (http://www.nwlink.com/~ufocntr/, one ufologist was intrigued by the quieting effect, Ledger said. The ufologist e-mailed him with an account of two people who had seen a black triangle overhead, but when they tried to speak, they couldn’t hear each other, in spite of the silence.
A rash of triangular UFO sightings took place in Belgium around 1990, with many of the triangles exhibiting glowing lights, Ledger said.
One man photographed a UFO, and two Belgian air force F-16s followed one, but they were outpaced, even though the planes can travel at Mach Two, according to Ledger.
Anyone with more information on UFOs may contact Don Ledger at 832-1984.
