This article was published in the daily newspaper The Province, of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on April 12, 1975.
Erik Watt, managing editor of Oshawa Times and a star-gazer and former aviation writer, saw something strange in the sky early Friday. The following story, copyright by Oshawa Times, is an account of his experience.
Canadian Press
OSHAWA, Ont. There may not be little green men in flying saucers over Durham region, but there's something up there, by George!
I know. I saw it, as did at least three other people, a young married couple, and a city policeman.
What it was, none of us know; it was far too distant to make out any shape. But whatever it was, it was flashing red, green and white, and just hanging there, about 30 degrees above the northern horizon, shortly after midnight.
From what I saw, the UFO seemed to be the same sort of object reported about a month ago near the Pickering nuclear power station by several observers.
It wasn't a star and it wasn't an aircraft or helicopter.
When I first saw the UFO, a few minutes after Paul Smith of Oshawa called The Times at midnight, it was alone in that section of the sky. He and his wife had been watching it for about half an hour before I arrived, and he said it appeared to be moving slowly north.
I watched the object for about 10 minutes.
Earlier, Smith had talked to someone at Oshawa Airport, who said there were no aircraft in the vicinity.
By the time I got home, the UFO had moved slightly to the east but by now it was forming the lower point of an inverted triangle with two stars on the top points.
I checked each of the stars and the UFO carefully, to see whether some atmospheric trick was making the stars appear to flash. The stars stayed steadily white. The UFO continued to flash red, green and white.
I drove to the Durham regional police headquarters where Constable Norm Treen and I both saw the UFO through binoculars.
I have done a lot of star-gazing and I've seen the planet Venus often enough not to confuse it with anything else.
I spent 15 years as a reporter specializing in aviation, and that was no aircraft or helicopter.
What it was, I haven't a clue, but any reservations I have had in the past about the legitimacy of UFOs no longer exist.
