Research and Investigation into Anomalous Light Phenomena
on and over Lake Ontario, Ontario, Canada
Having spent some interesting hours with the late Hugh Cochrane at his home in Toronto - and on the telephone in long, fascinating conversation - I would like to include some quotes from his 1980 book "GATEWAY TO OBLIVION - the Great Lakes' Bermuda Triangle".
As I often reread his book yet again, finding more similarities with my experiences, it is clear that these anomalies have been seen around the lake for centuries.
Thw following is from the chapter "The Unexplained Objects". I have added sub-headings.
The Alderman and an Orange Globe
"At 10.30 PM. on June 17, 1968, James Bryers, an alderman for Scarborough, Ontario, and his wife stepped from their car in their driveway in time to see a huge orange globe of light pass over their house just above treetop height. During the five minutes they watched this object it seemed to be breaking up and bright orange chunks appeared to fly off. These chunks would glow brightly, vanish, then reappear, still glowing, only to vanish again seconds later.
The Bryers home is within a few hundred yards of the edge of Scarborough Bluffs on the shore of Lake Ontario. The object moved forward, paused to hover and rise, then moved ahead again as it followed the edge of the bluffs and finally disappeared in the distance.
A second glowing object
The couple entered the home at ten forty-five and their son, who had been watching from a window, spotted a second glowing orange object coming from the east on the same course as the first, but at a slightly higher altitude. As it repeated the maneuvers of the first object, the couple and their son had an opportunity to compare it with a commercial aircraft that flew overhead.
Although the plane was at a much higher altitude, the couple felt that the pilot must have seen the brilliant object because there was no moon in the sky. However, no such confirmation was received when they contacted the Toronto International Airport. This second sighting lasted for approximately five minutes before the object disappeared over the lake.
A third glowing object
By eleven-twenty the Bryers had put the matter aside for the time being and had settled down in their living room to finish off some paperwork related to their business. Within minutes the alderman's wife called out as she glanced out the window and saw a third glowing object coming from the same direction.
This one was even lower than the first two - almost at treetop height. It was also huge compared to the first two. The alderman estimated that this one measured two to three inches on a ruler held at arm's length, and at this time the object was approximately a mile away. This would make the object over one hundred feet across.
Taking his binoculars, the alderman ran to the backyard and climbed on a three-foot wall for a better look. However, the object was moving faster and he was only able to hold it in view for three to four seconds before it passed by and went below the level of the trees.
A central hub and spokes
Alerting one of his neighbors and telling him there was a UFO over his house, Bryers ran to the end of the street near the bluffs where he was joined by two teenagers who had also been watching the objects. From then until it was completely lost from view, the trio took turns watching the object through binoculars.
This third object was described as being very round, large and flat. The underside appeared to have a central hub and spokes which appeared dark against the rest of the craft. It was giving off an intense yellow-orange color that seemed to be coming from inside the object. It was also noted that the bright glow did not reflect on the rooftops or trees as the UFO passed over. Nor did it pause to hover and rise as did the first two.
None of these objects made any sounds and none had any signs of clearance lights which conventional aircraft have.
All told, some twenty individuals witnessed these strange globes of light. Their agreement on what they saw rules out any suggestion of imagination on the part of the witnesses.
Contacted by US and Canadian Military
In a communication from Mr. Bryers in January 1978 I was told that he had been contacted by the U.S. military with a request for a complete report on the sightings. This was followed by a similar request from Canadian military authorities. In both cases he was assured he would be contacted after the investigations had been completed. To this date, ten years later, Mr. Bryers had heard nothing from them."
Nothing on Radar
"Around 7 p.m. December 10, 1969, the sky was clear enough for the pilot of a light aircraft flying across Lake Ontario to see the lights of Kingston 170 miles to the east. He was flying at an altitude of three thousand feet and was midpoint in his flight from St. Catharines, Ontario, to Toronto Island Airport, when he noticed a bright light hovering close to the lake. The light was white and appeared to oscillate up and down with no side movement. When the pilot contacted Toronto radar, he was informed that they were not picking up a blip in that sector, but he continued to watch the light for ten minutes.
A few minutes later another small plane came into the area, and its pilot also reported the bright white light, which he watched for five minutes. At that point the light ceased oscillating and disappeared to the southeast at a very high rate of speed.
When local UFO investigators learned of the incident they checked and found that no weather balloons had been released in that area, nor were there any other aircraft aside from those mentioned."
UFO activity around Lake Ontario increases
"During the summer of 1974 and on into the spring of 1975, reports of strange objects seen in the Lake Ontario region reached new heights. Some observers stated that the objects had a definite shape unlike conventional aircraft: others reported that they saw only lights that glowed brightly. In many cases the objects gave the impression that they were under intelligent control; others appeared to move randomly without apparent purpose.
Around 9 p.m. on March 13th 1975, a woman (name witheld for privacy), who was driving along the shore of Lake Ontario in Niagara-on-the-Lake, caught a glimpse of a cluster of lights near the shore. At first she assumed they were lights on a sand dredge operating on the lake, but as she passed by an opening in the trees she looked again and saw that they had moved. She went around the block and stopped to get a better look and saw that the lights were too bright for a barge.
The lights were arranged in a triangular pattern of red and blue with the largest light, a silver colour, at the bottom close to the water. Off to one side was another set of lights, which was gold-coloured, and above these were two morelights that appeared to rise and fall.
The brightest of all the lights seemed to sway back and forth and was at least four times larger than any of the others. At times, this light would vanish momentarily, then reappear.
Unable to figure out what the lights were, the woman went home and phoned her daughter, who also lived near the lake shore. The daughter said that she, too, had been watching the strange antics of the lights and added that, during the time when the lights had been near her home, the family dog had cowered in fear.
This sighting was confirmed by local police, who also viewed the lights while on patrol along the shore. However, there was no explanation as to what the lights were.
Not a plane on fire
Mrs. D. Wilmot, a Burlington, Ontario woman, looked out her fourth-floor apartment window around 10.45 on the evening of March 17, 1975 and thought she was seeing a flaming plane about to crash into Lake Ontario. She soon realized this was no plane on fire.
It was, she said, a twenty-foot-long fluorescent object five fee high with a domed top that glowed orange. For five minutes she watched it from her window as it hovered fifteen hundred feet out from shore. It then appeared to oscillate and rise slowly upward and finally shot off go the west and was lost from view behind the corner of the apartment building.
None of the other residents of the building reported seeing anything unusual, but most admitted to having their drapes closed at that time.
Disc-shaped object over quarry
The following day, the eighteenth, the Hamilton Spectator published a front-page photograph of a disk-shaped craft, or UFO, that had been photographed a short distance outside Hamilton by a Waterdown High School student, Pat McCarthy.
The student had been photographing wildlife in a nearby quarry when he looked up and saw the object. He had just enough time to photograph it, then it was gone.
Over the next few days, experts examined the photograph for evidence of a hoax but were unable to prove that the photograph had been rigged or tampered with in any way.
Golden-coloured objects travelling west
On the twentieth, a few days after this incident, another UFO sighting was made at Toronto's east end Beaches district. The objects were seen by two adults and several children from a pier on the beach at around 11.30 PM. They were described as golden-colored and were seen traveling west down the lake and over the shore.
At the time of the sighting the moon was visible, and one of the objects approached the observers and hovered for a short period before moving on. The witnesses described this one as appearing to be the size of the moon and exhibiting red and green lights. This one also shot off to the west at high speed.
During this sighting an aircraft passed by, allowing the observers to make a comparison of its lights to those of the UFO. But the hovering and the sudden high-speed maneuvers made the witnesses certain they were not observing any conventional aircraft.
UFOs over Pickering nuclear power plant
Twice during the following week phantom lights put in an appearance. These were made during the evening hours close to the atomic power plant at Pickering on the shore of Lake Ontario between Toronto and Oshawa. In one of the sightings residents in the area observed the lights as they hovered near the shore and as they passed over the generating plant. More than a dozen UFOs were counted passing overhead or maneuvering out over the lake.
The next sighting occurred around six-thirty one evening and lasted until eleven forty-five. At this time the lights were observed by five ambulance drivers, a police officer, and two radio newsmen. Before it was over, it had lasted six hours.
In this sighting they were described as multicolored pulsating lights - blue, yellow, red and green - but it could not be determined if they were attached to any sort of craft. When they were examined through binoculars, it was obvious they were not stars. The sightings were made from a point one and a half miles back from the shore and just east of Ajax, Ontario. At times the lights appeared to be just above the lake and moving to the west at a very slow pace.
A UFO landing
Shortly after midnight one of the ambulance drivers observed another UFO. This one came in from the lake and passed over the 401 Highway and landed in a field a few hundred yards north of the westbound lane. When the ambulance driver and a UFO investigator visited the site the following morning, they discovered a burn ring in the field measuring almost thirty feet across. Strangely, none of the drivers on this busy section of highway seemed to have noticed the UFO and no other witnesses reported it.
By April 5, the strange lights were being observed just east of Oshawa. This time, Paul Smith, a salesman, sighted a cluster of colored lights as they traveled down the lake to the west. They were moving too rapidly for the man to get his binoculars to get a better view of them, but the sighting stirred his curiosity so much that he kept a close watch on the lake for the next few nights to see if the lights would make a return visit.
On the eleventh, his vigilance paid off when he sighted a small cluster of lights a half mile above Oshawa. Within minutes after he called the police and and the local newspaper editor, a police officer and the editor arrived at his home and together they watched the phenomenon for over an hour.
The Photograph
In the meantime, scanty newspaper reports showed that the lights were back in the south west corner of Lake Ontario again. The reports aroused a young photographer and on the evening of April 8, Peter Werner set up his camera on the shore at Niagara-on-the-Lake and took a photograph on a five-to-six minute exposure of the lights as they performed over the water.
The photograph shows several unusual lights streaking back and forth in independent maneuvers. In this photograph nearby tree branches and the skyline of Toronto, along with the eighteen-hundred-foot tall CN Tower on the opposite side of the lake, were clearly outlined and unblurred."
NOTE: Hugh included the photograph in this chapter.
I was then in contact with the aforementioned Harry Picken who kindly sent me a photocopy of high school student Peter Werner's photograph plus a full analysis of what he saw in the photograph.
The photo' was taken from Niagara-on-the-Lake. Click on the image below to view full-size version:
Narration by Harry B. Picken I included this narration because the lights that Harry and others were seeing back in the 1970s closely resemble those which I have seen on my own lake watches.
"The photograph was made between 9 and 10 P.M. and a local UFO investigator, who called Toronto International Airport, learned that there were no commercial aircraft in that corner of the lake during that time. Even if there had been, the streaks in this photograph indicate abrupt halts and sharp turns that no aircraft built today (1980) could make.
Harry B. Picken and the orange-yellow globes of light
Around 9.30 P.M. on the night of April 9th,1975, the wife of an aeronautical engineer sighted a group of strange lights out over the lake and called her husband, Harry B. Picken. This couple live(d) near the shore of Lake Ontario where the Niagara River enters the lake, and from this vantage point they have (had) a good view over the water.
The husband ran out to the driveway, and with a pair of binoculars was able to get a clear look at the lights, which he later described as three yellow-orange globes arranged in triangular fashion. He estimated their height to be close to forty of fifty thousand feet. He stated that periodically the lights grew extremely bright and during this "blooming" they appeared much larger, then faded to almost nothing and began to grow bright again. This process was repeated time and again during the half hour that the couple observed the lights.
Picken further stated that when viewed through binoculars, each of the lights could be seen to be made up of two lights closely spaced on a horizontal plane with a slight space between them.
However, at the times they faded out, they were replaced by numerous small flickering lights of various colors arranged in a haphazard fashion. During the time of the sighting, all of the objects remained in the same position. In the end they simply faded away and did not return.
As this highly qualified aeronautical engineer pointed out late in 1977, he and his friends have often watched these pulsating orange lights over the lake. He is also aware that the area where the lights are most often seen is directly under the Vector 36 flight path into Toronto's International Airport. This, he said, allows a comparison with conventional aircraft lights. Unlike them, however, these lights are closer to that produced by sodium vapour and they appear to expend thousands of watts of energy when they are brilliant."
Another UFO over a quarry
"Sometimes news of UFO events does get around. The lights seen by the Oshawa salesman, the policeman and the editor were written up in the Oshawa Times and a Cornwall, Ontario, truck driver Gordon Barrie, contacted the newspaper to tell them that one evening, two days after the Oshawa sighting, he had seen exactly the same type of object coming down in a quarry at Cornwall, two hundred miles to the east. The object had first been seen hovering over the Domtar plant where it remained for five minutes, then it rose up and headed toward Lake Ontario.
On April 17 the Cornwall radio station carried a report phoned in by two different couples who had observed similar UFOs with red, green and white lights. These UFOs had appeared above Number 2 Highway and were last seen following the road west.
In these accounts there is a similarity in all the descriptions given by the witnesses in widely scattered areas, indicating a close relationahip that cannot be denied. Some appear to be nothing more than lights without a definite source, and none seem to fit the category of aircraft lights.
There is even some evidence that the lights may be a result of some sort of propulsion system that powers the UFOs and this causes a radiation or halation in the visible portion of the spectrum. This appears to be the case in those sightings where a brilliant glow appears on top of, or underneath, a UFO just as it starts to speed away from the scene.
(Ref: Paul R. Hill - Illumination and Performance)
More than Poltergeists
Some UFO investigators are inclined to believe that all such sightings, whether lights or objects, are all directly related to craft from another planet or dimension. An equal number of UFO investigators reject all nocturnal lights as providing too little hard evidence to be worth investigating or as being related to some other little-known phenomenon and not part of the UFO events.
Some have gone so far as to say that these nocturnal lights, while they closely resemble some of the well-documented descriptions of UFOs, are in reality "poltergeists", intended to distract the attention of the public from the true UFO events.
While this argument continues pro and con, there is one UFO investigator who believes the increasing activity of these nocturnal lights at the western end of Lake Ontario suggests something more than poltergeists.
Malcolm Williams, an investigator with the Northeastern UFO Organization, feels that the high percentage of these sightings in this one area adds support to the theory put out by Ivan T. Sanderson in his book Invisible Residents. Sanderson suggests that the UFOs are piloted by visitors from another planet and their appearances near water indicate that these beings are using the water areas of Earth as bases for their operations.
Williams has examined maps showing the depths of Lake Ontario at the western end where the lights have been seen, and believes he has located two deep depressions joined by a long narrow channel. This, he says, could reinforce Sanderson's theory.
For the present (1980), no underwater explorations of the area are planned, and it appears that these strange lights are destined to remain a mystery for some time yet."
Hugh's book is out of print, but can be found in public libraries.
"GATEWAY TO OBLIVION - The Great Lakes' Bermuda Triangle."
Copyright © Hugh F. Cochrane 1980
Doubleday Canada Limited, Toronto, Canada.
ISBN: 0-385-15376-7