Brian Vike's
Favorite Cases.
Newspaper Article.
By Jennifer Lang
Terrace Standard
7-23-3
Terrace's reputation as B.C.'s UFO capital
is creating a new kind of tourism boom in the region.
Curious travellers from across North
America are inquiring about the tourism facilities in communities across
Highway 16, including Terrace, says a UFO researcher based in Houston, B.C.
"You would be surprised just how many
emails I get over the months requesting information for our areas," says
Brian Vike, editor of Canadian Communicator, a magazine specializing in the
paranormal, and director of HBCC-UFO Research.
Earlier this year, Terrace cracked the top
10 in a national UFO survey, earning third place, just ahead of Houston, where
Vike operates a toll-free UFO hotline so he can collect and investigate
eye-witness reports.
Terrace recorded the third highest number
of UFO sightings in the country last year, bringing national and international
attention to the region, Vike says.
The resulting publicity means the
northwest is rapidly emerging as one of the best places to see UFOs in Canada.
Savvy tourists know they're more likely to
see a flying saucer than the elusive Kermode bear, the white form of a black
bear that is the city's official symbol.
Vike says he's often contacted by UFO
buffs and the just plain curious who want to know about the region's tourist
attractions and accommodations.
"Many have never been up this
way," Vike says. "So I give them the lowdown on what our communities
have."
He tells them about camp sites in the
area, the excellent hiking, fishing and boating opportunities here, the
beautiful scenery and the range of wildlife.
"As a matter of fact, I receive so
many emails, I was going to put up a page on my website which would give
information to tourists on what we have."
Vike says 2003 is shaping up to be another
record year for UFO sightings in the skies over Terrace, where 25 sightings
were recorded last year, suggesting more national and international attention
could be on its way.
"Right now Terrace has darn near
caught up to last year's total count for sightings," he says.
UFO-related tourism is a growing market in
the rest of the world.
Vulcan, a town of 1,700 in southern
Alberta that's home to a replica starship and a tourist information centre
built to look like a space station, isn't the only place cashing in on its Sci
Fi cachet.
St. Paul, Alberta was out of the gate back
in 1967, when it built the world's first UFO landing pad, ensuring that future
space travel would be safe for all intergalactic beings.
"All visitors from earth or otherwise
are welcome to this territory and to the Town of St. Paul," reads an
inscription beside the 12-metre-diameter concrete pad.
The tiny U.S. town of Rachel, Nevada,
meanwhile, has capitalized on its proximity to the mysterious Area 51, thought
to be a secret U.S. military base.
Rachel's tourism industry began to take
off in the late 1980s, thanks to its reputation as a reliable location for
sightings, drawing ever larger numbers of "UFO tourists".
Nearby Nevada State Highway 375 was
officially renamed the "Extraterrestrial Highway" to reflect the
large number of sightings along this stretch of road.
Enterprising community leaders in other
countries have boarded the UFO tourism spaceship, too.
Last year, a Chilean mayor took the bold
move of designating the region near his town as an official UFO tourism zone
because so many sightings have taken place in the Andes mountains there.
That's the kind of notoriety places like
Terrace, Houston, and other Highway 16 towns could easily take advantage of.
While Terrace may presently lack an
officially-sanctioned UFO tourism strategy, Vike is functioning as an
unofficial intergalactic ambassador, sharing the region's latest eye-witness
reports and his own pet theories with a curious world.
From Houston headquarters, he keeps busy
doing interviews with newspapers, TV shows and radio talk shows all over North
America.
Canada's Life network shot 18 hours of
footage with Vike in Houston, Smithers and Telkwa in February. A documentary
will air this fall season or early in the new year.
"All of this is great for
tourism," he says, reminding northwest residents to keep their eyes to the
skies this summer.
Vike has noticed a new pattern in the most
recent reports: more eyewitnesses in the northwest are reporting objects in the
sky, instead of just unexplained, or oddly-moving lights.
One sighting reported by multiple
witnesses across a wide geographic area involved gigantic triangles.
Others have reported seeing crescent or
ring-shaped objects in the sky.
Vike adds a number of eyewitnesses
reported seeing a large, saucer-shaped disk travelling from Mill Bay on
Vancouver Island to Kitimat past the Alcan Smelter and on towards Prince Rupert
and Terrace.
Vike, a former forestry industry worker,
tries to uncover likely explanations for what eyewitnesses have seen.
The planet Venus is sometimes mistaken for
a UFO. Other sightings are later found to be aircraft, meteors, satellites,
stars or even blimps, says Vike, who once belonged to the Royal Astronomical
Society and volunteered at the planetarium in Vancouver.
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