Brian Vike's Favorite
Cases.
Newspaper Article.
By Andrew Hudson.
Interior News.
Brian Vike is one of
the best-known UFO watchers in Canada. Google “red orange light” and his Vike
Factor blog pops up.
A boy across the
street from Brian Vike’s house was tilting a new-looking telescope at the moon.
Chances are, he saw
what any budding stargazer would expect to see—eye-popping views of the massive
lava basins and colossal impact craters that scar the lunar surface.
But if Vike’s young
neighbour ever spots something strange in the Bulkley Valley sky, something he
can’t explain, he won’t have to go far to make a UFO report.
“Just what I need,”
said Vike, laughing.
Brian Vike is one of
the best-known UFO watchers in Canada. Google “red orange light” or “large
circular UFO” and his Vike Factor blog pops up in the top results.
The site lists 1,712
sightings reports for last year alone.
“Most people, I
really do believe, are genuine,” Vike said.
“Their seeing
something doesn’t mean it’s extraterrestrial or anything like that. But they
are seeing something, and what is it?”
In one report dated
New Year’s Day, a man from Duncan, B.C. told Vike that his girlfriend had
repeatedly told him about the pairs of “strange orbs” she had seen glowing red
and orange in the sky.
“I thought she was
off her rocker until last night when I seen this myself,” he wrote to Vike.
“We watched in awe
trying to figure out what they could possibly be. An airplane or a helicopter
always has beacon lights—these did not!”
Vike said reports
come in waves, and it’s not unheard of to get 300 a week.
“It’s amazing stuff,
but most of it’s explainable,” Vike said. A lot of the glowing “orbs” turn out
to be Chinese paper lanterns—thin paper lanterns that can float up hundreds of
feet in the air on the heat of a tiny candle.
In fact, Vike said
that lantern “sightings” have become a bit of a nuisance since more and more
people in Western countries have started lighting them for weddings and
holidays.
Some people get a
little upset to hear that their UFO sighting might be nothing more than a hot
paper bag.
“You don’t want to
tell too many people that because they’ll start cursing at you,” said Vike,
laughing.
Standing six feet
tall and wearing a plain black baseball cap, it’s hard to imagine anyone
getting upset with Vike.
He has a friendly,
funny manner that would make him a shoe-in for one of the Lone Gunmen—the squad
of amateur conspiracy busters who used to make cameos on The X-Files TV show.
But before he flies
off into science fiction, Vike has to check off a list of real-world
possibilities for every new UFO report.
That’s the idea, he
said—to try and help people discover what they saw.
Vike often starts
with websites like Heavens Above, which posts real-time tracking data for
satellites, the International Space Station, space shuttle flights and visible
meteor passes.
On New Year’s Eve,
for example, Vike got a string of UFO sightings from across Arizona, New Mexico
and southern Colorado that seemed to follow in the wake of a brightly burning
meteor.
Vike also tries to
follow launch times at big air bases like the Vandenberg air force base in
northern California.
“They’ll send up a
lot of rockets, space satellites, and military hardware,” Vike said.
“A lot of people are
interested in that alone.”
Many people who
stumble on Vike’s website report things they saw years ago. From 1993, Vike
noticed a wave of sightings are most likely from people who saw F-117 Nighthawk
stealth fighters flying low over North America to fight in the first Gulf War.
“I had a whole whack
of reports of triangles coming in along their flight path,” he said.
Military jets,
northern lights, space junk and comets—those are all sightings that even alien
hopefuls aren’t likely to be disappointed in.
But Vike said it’s
easy to be caught off guard by much more Earthly things.
Vike said he once a
V-shaped something fly over his home in Houston. He got pretty excited before
he heard wings and realized it was a flock of geese.
“At night time, you
get town or city lights and they’re low enough that the lights hit their
bellies and you get that big V-shape,” he said, laughing.
Still, other reports
don’t lend themselves to easy explanation.
This January, a crew
from the Canadian Discovery Channel will speak with Vike on camera about a
“missing time” case.
Two Kelowna women
told Vike that on July 31, 2003, they were walking a dog along a lake and saw
three strange lights in the sky. The lights came together in a triangle shape,
they said, before dropping and hovering over the highway.
“They claim that they
had missing time, and the next morning bruising, bleeding noses,” he said. “And
they’ve been very sick since.”
What is really
interesting about the Kelowna case, Vike said, is that it is one of many
strange reports that followed the terrible number of forest fires in the
Okanogan that year.
Despite slowing down
a bit, and shutting down a larger website that was getting some 2.5 million
hits a month, Vike is still in high demand for his UFO expertise.
For years, he has
fielded calls from the likes of CBC and BBC radio, the Discovery Channel and
others.
“I just spent more
time on this than anything else,” he said. “I think that’s why it kept moving
along.”
Fifty years ago, Vike
said he was just like the boy across the street, armed with a 50 mm Sears
telescope from his parents and a boundless curiosity.
“Yep—I always look in
the sky,” he said.
“You never know what
you’re going to see.”
Interior News -
https://www.interior-news.com/
The Newspaper Article
- https://www.interior-news.com/community/our-town-bright-lights-in-the-valley/
