UFO Survey Says We’re The No. 3 Town For Sightings

Brian Vike's Favorite Cases.

Newspaper Article.

By Jennifer Lang.

Move over Kermode bear. A flying saucer might make a more fitting symbol for Terrace.

It turns out Terrace is B.C.’s UFO capital  - and one of the top spots in the country for sightings – according to a national survey released last week.

In fact, a record number of sightings here helped push Terrace into the 2002 Canadian UFO Surveys’ top for the first time.

Remarkably, Terrace is in third place – behind such urban heavyweights as Toronto and Vancouver.

The survey counted 25 eyewitness reports from here in 2002.

Calgary and Hamilton also appeared in the top 10 for the first time. Other urban areas reporting a significant number of sightings were Winnipeg, Edmonton, Ottawa and Whitehorse.

In all, the survey compiled 483 eyewitness reports from across the country, with one third or 176, originating in Canada’s westernmost province.

Contrast that with just six UFO sightings reported in Saskatchewan last years.

Joining Terrace in the top four is Houston, B.C., home of Brian Vike, the northwest’s resident UFO researcher.

Vike, who investigates reports of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena, including crop circles, says his phone has been ringing off the hook since the survey was released last week.

Terrace residents have been seeing some curious objects in the sky over the past year, according to Vike’s website.

Some flying objects were barrel-shaped, while others looked more like cigars or had blinking lights.

Unlike stars or airplanes, they moved oddly over such familiar locales as Braun’s Island, Jackpine Flats and the southwest skies towards Prince Rupert.

Vike is just one of the contributors who assist in compiling the survey, which consists of reports from regionally-based UFO researchers from across Canada that are compiled into one database.

The survey is headed up by Geoff Dittman and Chris Rutkowski of Ufology Research of Manitoba (UFO ROM), a prairie-based group that has been compiling UFO reports since 1989.

The survey defines UFOs as any unknown flying object seen by a witness.

That means the survey includes reports that were later found to be known objects, such as stars, plants, meteors, or aircraft.

The researchers believe it’s important to verify that eyewitnesses who report UFOs have indeed seen something – rather than imagined it.

The survey suggests most UFOs are actually conventional aircraft or an astronomical object.

On average, about 13 per cent of sightings are unexplained. Last year, 87 cases were unknown out of 483.

“As with previous studies, the 2002 Canadian UFO Survey does not offer any positive proof that UFOs are either alien spacecraft or a specific natural phenomenon,” the report says.

Most sightings, about 4 out of 5 , occur at night, but reports of “daylight discs” accounted for 15.8 per cent of sightings last year.

Sightings in 2002 peaked during the months of July and August, but also in February, according to the report, a pattern that held true in the northwest.

The typical UFO sighting is witnessed by two people, suggesting the witnesses are actually seeing something real, the survey says.

The report assigns a “strangeness” rating between one and nine to each sighting, with nine being the strangest.

The 2002 survey’s average strangeness rating is 3.6 – which is not strange at all, the report says.

“Hollywood-style flying saucers are, in reality, relatively uncommon in UFO reports. “

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We’re UFO Central

Brian Vike's Favorite Cases.

Newspaper Article.

Researcher Brian Vike says Terrace is a B.C. hot spot for unusual sightings.

By Jennifer Lang

It all started around 9:00 p.m. on a dark winter’s eve in February.

Three women from Houston, B.C. were driving home from Smithers after a  day of shopping when they noticed something unusual in the sky.

A bright, shinning object was visible high in the clouds above them. They thought it was the moon. Then it did something strange. It moved.

Without warning it swept through the cloud bank, dropped down towards the dark forest next to the highway, flew over their vehicle and vanished out of sight.

Enter Brian Vike, an independent field researcher who’s been a full-time investigator into strange occurrences across northern B.C. for the past four years.

“They’re just normal folks,” Vike says. But what they seen scared the heck out of them. One of them didn’t even go to work and had to have someone stay with her for about a week. “

A mutual friend put them in touch with Vike, a former forest industry worker who lives in Houston, B.C.

Vike, 50, is a friendly sounding guy with a plain way of talking. He likes to interview people face to face. That way he can see if they’re telling the truth.  The women, seated around a kitchen table as they told their story, were visibly nervous. On February 1 they’d seen a huge, boomerang-shaped object with seven rectangular lights across the bottom.

“These people here are credible. They’re not a bunch of hooligans, “ he says. They’re church-goers who are married with children. And they’re definitely not the only normal folks” in northern B.C. who’ve seen a UFO lately.

After the Telkwa sighting, other reports from people along the Highway 16 route began to trickle into Vike’s investigative headquarters, HBCC UFO Research.

He wondered if the sightings were connected, so he issued a call all along Highway 16, asking anyone who had seen anything unusual in the sky to contact him. He was inundated with reports by phone, email and through the post as Vike’s request appeared in newspapers from Prince George to Kitimat.

But what he wasn’t prepared for the sheer number – a whopping 66 unexplained sightings from communities along, and north of, the Highway – making UFO history.

Terrace, Vike says is the undisputed hot spot of the region, with 17 sightings from here alone. He received three sightings from Kitimat, two from Cranberry Junction, eight from Kitwanga, four in Old Hazelton and one in New Hazelton.

That’s not counting the sightings that have come in from further east. “That’s a lot of sightings,” Vike says, adding most of the reports came in during February and March.

They share some similarities, but mostly the reports are different. Some UFOs looked like meteors or stars that changed direction all of a sudden. “Meteors don’t do that and stars, of course, stay stationary.”

Other report involved a group of older men  who were camping south of Burns Lake when they saw an object they thought was an airplane at first. It stopped in the distance above a field.

“He described it as, ‘the light was sweeping something.’ Then it was gone faster than it even arrived. So what was that?” A group driving into Terrace watched a cube shaped cloud hover above the peak of a mountain near Usk and then vanish.

Vike, who used to volunteer at the H.R. MacMillan Planetarium in Vancouver and also a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, may be a scientist at heart. “What I am trying to do is look into (the report) and come up  with possibilities that might fit.”

Venus, also known as the Evening Star, has been responsible for countless UFO reports. The planet has tricked a few people who should know better, including astronauts and pilots.

Other UFOs are found to be aircraft, meteors, satellites , stars or even blimps. Still, most of the northwest sightings remained unexplained -  for now.

“Is there an attraction to Alcan? There’s a big power source there.” So far he’s ruled out secret military exercises above regional airports, but there’s more work to be done.

He still has to contact observatories, and aviation agencies like Nav Canada. Data can also be run through astronomy programs to see if a sighting can be correlated with a known object.

“I can tell you right now, a lot of them are not going to have answers.” He says. Meanwhile, Vike, the Telkwa sighting and the Terrace reports are slated to be the focus of an up-coming episode of a new Discovery Channel show.

“Our town is excited,” he says. “I’m invited to the next council meeting – whenever that is!”

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