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Nov. 16, 1997 - Art Bell
17:48
Dreamland with Art Bell - Linda Howe - Lights over the Northwest
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Welcome to Dreamland, a program dedicated to an examination of areas in the human experience
not easily nor neatly put in a box.
Things seen at the edge of vision, awakening a part of the mind as yet not mapped.
Every bit as real as the air we breathe, but don't see.
This is Dreamland.
Another Sunday, another Dreamland.
Good evening, everybody.
If you want an update on what occurred over the northwest part of the U.S.
on Friday night, whoa, what a show that was.
Linda Moulton Howe has that coming up in her report in a moment, followed by a very, very unusual interview.
A man who made a lot of money.
In the commodities trading markets in Chicago, Mark Ritchie, and then spent a lot of it going to the rainforest.
He's written a book called Spirit of the Rainforest.
Oh my, what an interview that's going to be.
Spent a lot of time with a rainforest shaman.
We'll talk about that tonight, and much more, on Dreamland.
I'm Art Bell, and so we'll get to it shortly.
Perciv from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
It is the Emmy award-winning documentary producer, Linda Moulton Howe, investigator into crop circles, animal mutilations, general scientific reporter.
And regular feature on Dreamland from Philadelphia, here's Linda Moulton-Howe.
Hi, Linda.
Well, hi, Art.
And following up your Friday Marathon, as the whole country knows by now, that Friday evening, November 14th, between 9.12 and 9.15 p.m.
Pacific Standard Time, hundreds of residents in Washington and Oregon Reported seeing a huge flash of light followed by what some compared to a 4th of July fireworks explosion.
And in fact there were eyewitness reports in Canada as well.
Some people even captured the event on videotape and the bright objects have been shown on TV news yesterday and today in Canada and the United States.
Police, fire and sheriff's offices were contacted for an explanation and here's an example of one sheriff's dispatcher response.
Right.
We did get calls.
And we were advised it was a meteor shower.
But one man who disagreed with the meteor explanation should know.
He was an eyewitness to the entire event and is president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, based in Vancouver, BC.
Ken Henrickson estimates he has spent 400 hours sky-gazing and told me... But it was 100% it was not a meteor storm.
100% that it wasn't a meteor storm.
Yeah, there was no way that it was a meteor storm.
What were you doing that caused you to be able to see this?
Oh, it's a beautiful night.
I was out walking my dog, of all things.
I had walked away from it.
I was behind a building from it.
Whatever reason, the dog didn't come, so I turned around to go get him, and I looked up, and it just flashed and appeared, and then just shot straight down towards the horizon.
And then it traveled about halfway down the sky, almost in a straight line down, very slowly.
And then broke up, um, about halfway.
How many pieces?
Thirty-six.
Thirty-six pieces?
You could count them?
Why?
Forty-five seconds is a long time.
So you were able to watch this for forty-five seconds?
Oh, it was stunning.
It was stunning.
It took thirty seconds before it broke.
So it was, you know, a total of just over a minute, minute and a quarter.
And you watched that whole thing, and the color was?
It was white, white, white, and it left, uh, I don't even know how to describe it.
Just streamers of almost like diamond dust on black felt.
And from your point of view as president of the Astronomical Society in Vancouver, why was this not a meteor shower?
Well, one is it came in as a solid body that broke up.
I've seen bolides before, big bright bolides.
This was close.
This was very close.
It just didn't have that characteristic look to it, and it was traveling much too slow.
Like I said, the first half took maybe 30 seconds, and the second half took about 45 seconds from the point it broke, started to break up.
It was actually decelerating as it was breaking up.
There's no way that would have been a bolide.
It would have been coming... To get that far into the atmosphere, it would have been coming pretty fast.
It wouldn't have lasted more than 3 to 10 seconds.
And what you saw with your own eyes lasted about 45 seconds falling down from the sky.
Yeah, the first 30 degrees of it, um, the first half of it, before it broke up, was about 20 to 30 seconds.
Um, and then about halfway down the sky in the north, uh, that's when it started to break up.
Um, and after the break up, it was another 45 seconds before it made landfall.
In the Vancouver area?
In the Vancouver area.
It missed the city by about 50 kilometers, I'd say.
But it wouldn't have gotten all the way to the Idaho border?
No, this was north of Vancouver.
Right, and there was... Yeah, but you would have seen it for 500 miles south.
Well, there are some confusing reports of red objects in formation.
They saw close enough to the horizon, just like... just the atmospheric diffraction, meaning that the air moving in the water inside the air should have been lensing the light, so you would have been getting reds and blues and all kinds of strange colors.
Those red objects in formation that I mentioned to the astronomer came from a report that Peter Davenport at the UFO Reporting Center in Seattle received from Tanascut, Washington, in the Okanagan National Forest.
Tanascut is almost in the center of Washington and not far from the Canadian border, east and a little south of Vancouver, not north, as the astronomer saw the debris falling.
Perhaps the objects seen through the lower atmosphere might have looked red to witnesses in Tanascut.
Or possibly there was something else moving in the sky further east.
Here's what the Okanagan County Sheriff's Dispatcher told me when I called.
That it appeared to be... Well, as a matter of fact, I'll read you what I have.
Thank you.
Unidentified red lights flying in a formation through the county in a northward direction.
That's it.
And you're reading from what?
I'm reading from our main file list.
And how many people called in with that description?
I don't have that precise information.
But more than half a dozen?
Somewhere right at that number.
And the color was definitely described as red.
It says red.
I also called the North American Airspace Defense Command, known as NORAD, that works with the U.S.
Space Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Their job is to monitor, track, and catalog over 8,000 man-made objects orbiting Earth, ranging from satellites to rocket launch debris.
Scott Johnson in the Public Affairs Office told me NORAD had tracked what exploded over Vancouver.
An SL-12 Russian rocket body.
The launch was conducted on the 12th of November.
This is the spent rocket body that comes off the booster.
And it orbits for a while, for a few days, and it came back in and burned up.
Was NORAD tracking this Russian... Oh, yes.
Uh-huh.
We monitor and track and catalog over 8,000 man-made objects in space.
And how long had you been monitoring, waiting for it to come down?
Well, a couple of days.
We didn't know exactly when it was going to come in, of course.
But, like I say, that happens so quickly sometimes.
It depends on the drag coefficients and all the other things.
And what was, like, the nature of what people said?
Well, that's basically a bright object coming in and breaking into many pieces over the city of Vancouver.
Seattle, of course, saw from a distance to the north.
But primarily, most of the calls have come from Vancouver.
And you never got any calls further east?
No, no calls further east.
Only calls from Seattle, Vancouver, British Columbia, and Victoria, British Columbia, which is an island Right off the coast there.
Next to Vancouver.
And NORAD tracked the Russian object down to that point?
That's correct, Jim.
And anything that went further east... Is a question mark?
It's a question mark.
I had told Officer Johnson about the Tanaska Report, and he was puzzled.
So was Marty Kellogg in Sandpoint, Idaho, around 9.15 p.m.
Friday, about the same time that the Russian rocket fell apart.
She was driving with her young son when they saw seven glowing white lights in the sky, not moving at all.
Marty Kellogg.
It wasn't something far away that was moving.
It could have been an airplane.
There were these huge lights in the sky, stationary, not moving.
Were they in a line or...?
Yes, there was a definite formation.
There were four on the top in a straight line, and if you draw four straight circles in a straight line, you have three spaces between those circles.
And the bottom were three, and they were in those spaces.
So it was like a formation of four on top and three below, all in a line.
You have these seven bright lights, and every time I describe it, I hold my hands up and I hold them up in a circle that's about the size of a large coffee cup saucer.
And the one of them, the one on the bottom, the most forward or the most north, had three lights coming out of the middle band of it.
One light was blue, one light was red, one light was green.
And the light that was coming out of it was kind of like a translucent light.
You saw a definite color.
You know, we can just... Kim and I talked about the color real quickly.
But it wasn't like a solid light.
It was kind of like a Putting a drop of food coloring in a glass of water, that sort of translucent color.
The others, all the others, were just solid globes, except the most southern one on the top was about a third larger than all the others, and it had a tail of light.
We stopped, we looked at it, we talked for a few minutes, and then they were gone.
Well, how did they go?
They were just gone.
Well?
There was no movement.
They didn't disappear.
They didn't go to the right, go to the left, zoom off.
They were gone.
It's like if you had seven lights in the sky and you took a switch and you turned off the light.
Instantaneously, the tail, everything instantaneously was gone.
About that same time, back west toward Vancouver, in Abbotsford, British Columbia, apparently pieces of the Russian rocket were falling to the ground.
The John and Pat Kramer family even heard and felt huge booms.
It sounded like almost fireworks, except they were quite a bit stronger, like, you know, it impacted the walls a little bit more, you know, the percussion.
So it was, you know, fairly strong, and there were about, you know, maybe four, five, or six booms.
And, uh, uh, and I was just actually talking to my daughter since that phone call and she, uh, saw them, uh, in the sky.
And we actually, the, the, uh, TV stations here showed them.
It looked like, uh...
Streaks of light with bright spots and sort of like, you know, almost like fireworks.
I just called the Abbotsford Police for you to see if the police, they said that their phones were ringing off the hooks because there was so much shuddering.
Like we not only saw it, we felt it.
But that they do not have any reports of debris in the field.
However, in the Vancouver Sun it says debris fell in Burnaby.
British Columbia, which is a suburb of Vancouver, and Abbotsford, and the ocean.
So, Art, I think that what has occurred here on Friday was more than one event.
Oh, I... Listen, Linda.
Yeah.
Let's go back to what the NORAD fellow said for a second.
He said, if I heard it correctly, essentially what NORAD said on Friday, and that is that They would have seen it in Seattle, perhaps Vancouver, but anything further east of that, they would be unable to account for.
And they're still claiming this one down essentially in the Pacific.
Well, the astronomer said that this should have been seen for 500 miles at the top where he saw it begin and maybe the explosion.
So it might explain some of the reports.
Clearly, if there are booms and shudders in Abbotsford, Burnaby and that area, it means that some of this did fall in Canada.
And this is exactly consistent with the astronomer.
He said that there would be landfall from these objects.
All right.
That's the astronomer.
Now, I talked to... I can't tell you how many people Friday night from Seattle, including the news director of KLMO, who said, hey, look, this thing did not land in the ocean.
I stood here and watched it pass from west to east over my head and continue east.
I talked to people As far east as Eastern Washington, who said they saw it going over their heads.
Right, and the Vancouver Sun clearly has had somebody report that they have had material fall just exactly like the Kramers heard these booms.
And I'm curious if anyone listening knows of, has any debris that has fallen.
If they could contact you and me, I'd sure like to know about this.
Uh, and my fax number is area code 215-491-9842.
That's area code 215-491-9842.
That's area code 215-491-9842.
And my mailing address is post office box 300 in Jamison, Pennsylvania.
Zip code 1892.
That's post office box 300 in Jameson, PA.
Zip code 18929.
And I want to, Art, also thank you and Peter Davenport in the UFO Reporting Center for contacting me on the Tanaskit, the Abbotsford, and the Sandpoint people because It's especially noteworthy to realize that Idaho is an entirely another state further east and whatever Marty Kellogg and her son watched, he said for at least five to ten minutes
And raising her hands up and saying that to her they would have been the size of coffee cup saucers, seven of them stacked still in the air from somewhere five to seven to ten minutes.
We are not talking about what happened over Victoria and I would encourage anybody listening who also saw other objects further east, east in Washington, east in Oregon, Idaho, Uh, if they would contact me.
I got a fax on Friday myself from a man in Wyoming who had seen a very bright, startlingly bright object.
Uh, that evening, whether or not all of these things are connected, there certainly were more than one event occurring on, uh, Friday, November 14th.
Well, then, in many ways, this is memorable of the Phoenix incident, because, on the one hand, uh, a lot of people tried to explain that, you'll recall, as flares.
In this case, an SL-12.
Well, you know, I... However, uh, in both cases, we've got Firm sightings, many many many, that occurred elsewhere apparently simultaneously.
Right, but I do think that we do have this Russian launch on November 12th that NORAD was tracking and that they knew it was about to come down, this debris piece, and the astronomer who actually watched this entire event with a lot of stargazing experience and knowledge said his first reaction was My God, the mirror is finally coming down because he emphasized it was so slow that it was consistent with something very low in Earth orbit that when it does begin to hit the friction of the atmosphere, it's moving slowly, it can break up spectacularly, but you don't have the speed that you have with bolides.
Absolutely fascinating.
I mean, truly fascinating, the whole thing.
Linda, we're out of time.
Um, so, if you have more, I can hold you briefly, uh, if not, we should terminate now.
No, there are two really important stories that I'll hold for next week.
Uh, they really are important, I know what they are, I'm not gonna tell.
Okay.
Alright, Linda, thank you very much.
That's, uh, Linda Moulton Howe from Philadelphia, and I don't know if that helps you put together what happened Friday, but it's got a lot of people still scratching their heads.
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