Sunday, May 10, 2015
May, 1967: Edmontonians claim to see UFO
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Edmonton teen Ricky Banyard drew this picture of a
UFO that he said he watched for two hours hovering over Mount Pleasant
Cemetery one early May morning in 1967.
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EDMONTON - A 14-year-old boy who
claimed to have watched an unidentified flying object for four hours provided
the most detailed report of any UFO in the Edmonton area.
A bespectacled Ricky Banyard was walking to his south side home across from Mount Pleasant Cemetery at 2 a.m. the day before when he noticed a “space ship” and began a vigil. He saw a white-beamed light moving over the neighbourhood and followed it over several blocks before it disappeared. He saw it a second time when he reached his doorstep and went and told his friend Glenn Coates who joined him.
“We got some binoculars and watched
it for a while.” When his friend had to go home, Banyard kept watching then
followed it into the cemetery where he hid beneath some trees. The
spherical-shaped ship with red and green lights, and top and bottom portions
that spun, was 200 to 300 feet in the air and made a “muffled whistling noise
as it hovered. A white ribbon of light came from the bottom of it and spread
out in a rectangular shape about 15 centimetres above the ground. The ground
was white, as though white hot under it.
“When I stepped out from the trees
for a better look, the light disappeared then there was kind of a screaming
noise like a jet starting up.
“All the lights in the ship went
out and there were about seven or eight bangs and it took off.” Several
rectangular-shaped black streaks that marked the sand-gravel roads in the
cemetery could be seen later that day. Cemetery foreman Joseph Laforge noted a
grader had gone over the roads the day before and had exposed some of the
cinder base under the gravel.
“But these ones here,” he said
pointing to two other large marks, “I don’t know about them ... they look
pretty unusual.”
Banyard sketched the ship and
showed it to several other people who said they too saw the “ship” or light
beam, and all agreed that was what the object looked like. The teen’s story
attracted about up to two dozen UFO watchers to the cemetery every night for
the next week. The first night, 25 grave markers were overturned. Most visitors
carried cameras and binoculars and stayed 30 minutes before scrambling back
into their cars, shivering.
Two days after Banyard’s
experience, a middle-aged couple living in the same area, said they saw an
object with red and blue flashing lights on its edges and a bright white light
from underneath the hovering object.
The object flew away when she went
to call the Journal, reappeared five minutes later, then vanished again while
she placed a second call to the paper. “Don’t use my name,” the women told a
reporter. “People will be calling me and accusing me of being a kook.”
Ten days later, 29-year-old Jack
Strangman, a school janitor, reported seeing a “whitish, oval-shaped” object
through binoculars around 11:30 p.m. over Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Two hours
earlier, Norman Fibke who was working in his backyard in the area of 101st
Avenue and 90th Street, said he saw a “really bright, egg-shaped” object with
two red lights at each end hover at “the height of a plane,” then come down at
a “terrific rate of speed” before heading west and disappearing over Alex
Taylor School. It definitely wasn’t a plane, he said.
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