This article was published in the daily newspaper The Winnipeg Sun, Canada, on April 21, 2004.
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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.
