On Tuesday, November 11, 1975, I was just a few months into my first reporting job, mostly as the police reporter, on the Sudbury (Ontario) Star. That day would unexpectedly provide me with my first news “scoop,” a UFO story that would eventually be picked up across North America, first by the wire services and eventually papers from The New York Times to the National Enquirer.

It was the first time that then North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) confirmed on the record that it had scrambled jets to investigate the possible UFO sighting.

When I got up each morning, I would tune into the local radio news, to get an idea of what my colleagues on the overnight and early morning shifts had picked up.

That morning there were two lead stories. The first was that the police, the then Sudbury Regional Police and the Ontario Provincial Police, which patrolled the highway and smaller communities, had seen strange lights in the sky, which some were calling UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects)

The second story concerned a Great Lakes freighter, the Edmund Fitzgerald, that was reported missing after a severe storm and possibly sunk near the eastern shore of Lake Superior. The location, just northwest of Sault Ste Marie, made the Edmund Fitzgerald a local story. A search was underway both on the US and Canadian sides of the lake. (According to the Associated Press the last radio message from the Edmund Fitzgerald was heard after 7 pm on November 10).

The third story was about Remembrance Day observances.

In the 1970s, reporters had easier access to the police than they do today when media relations professionals spin a story. That morning, I and Sudbury’s two radio reporters gathered at Regional Police headquarters for the morning briefing followed by a briefing by the next-door Ontario Provincial Police regional headquarters.

We were told that two regional police officers saw four objects in the sky beginning around 4 am. One seemed to move in a jerking motion, another remained stationary. The officers continued to watch the four objects until they went off duty at 7 am, as the sun was beginning to come up and the skies brightened. Another police officer saw several objects in the sky with pulsating lights and again moving in a jerking motion. Two more officers saw a bright object to the west of Sudbury. When they looked through binoculars the item was cylindrical and lighting up the clouds above.

A provincial police officer from the nearby Dowling detachment reported he had followed a bright object above the highway near the town of Chelmsford. The OPP also reported that a dispatcher had seen a bright object in the sky at Hailebury 100 miles (160 kilometres) to the east.

Just to the northeast of Sudbury, was the mining town of Falconbridge, also then home to Canadian Forces Station Falconbridge, a NORAD early warning radar station part of the Pinetree Line.

Sources told me that four people at the radar station had visually spotted the bright objects.

I called a base spokesman who told me there was no correlation between what they saw and what the cops had seen and told me to call National Defence headquarters in Ottawa.

As it was Remembrance Day, my call was forwarded to a press relations officer at DND Operations rather than going through the usual public relations chain, which likely was an advantage.

After checking with some higher ups, the officer told me what had happened.

To quote my story for the Sudbury Star that day (it was then an afternoon paper)

In Ottawa, National Defence Headquarters confirmed that four people at the radar station, alerted by the police, saw three bright circles with black dots about 6:15 am. The objects were photographed by base staff.
The UFOs picked up on radar moving upward between 42,000 and 72,000 feet. They were visible about 30 nautical miles from the station for about 14 minutes. Other objects too far away to be observed were seen by the station staff.

In 1975, the Sudbury Star, due to the neglect by the family that had owned and then managed it, was stuck in the past. It was a hot type newspaper, with linotype machines and hot lead page presses at a time when most newspapers had already transitioned to web off set printing with phototypesetting where columns were pasted onto a sheet. The Thomson newspaper chain had bought the paper in 1955 but had allowed the original family to run it until in early 1975, when the mismanagement was too bad to ignore and new management was brought in.

With the presses in the basement roaring, it was time for a follow up on the UFO story. That included getting an on the record comment from NORAD. When I called NORAD, as an aspiring science writer, I suspected the usual “weather balloon” statement typical of that era.

What I got was surprisingly different.

Canadian headquarters for NORAD in 1975 was at the nearby Canadian Forces Base North Bay.

The spokesman at CFB North Bay told me that two F-106 Michigan Air National Guard fighter jets from the 171st Fighter Interceptor Squadron had scrambled from Selfridge Michigan at 12:50 pm (several hours after the initial sighting by Sudbury Regional Police). He told me call NORAD headquarters in Colorado for confirmation.

Dale Kindschi, a public information officer for NORAD called me back, confirming that the object had been tracked by radar. He said an object was picked up on the Falconbridge radar station about 30 nautical miles to the south. He added that whatever was spotted visually by the station personnel—three glowing lights with dark centres—weren’t necessarily the same things seen on radar.
Kindschi said the US fighters did not see anything when they responded.

Since the paper was already on the streets, we held the story until the next afternoon, Wednesday, November 12, 1975.

At the time, it was customary for the library staff to dictate the Star’s stories of provincial and national interest to the rewrite desk at Canadian Press in Toronto. From there the Associated Press must have picked up the story because in the next couple of days I got calls from US talk radio stations asking about the event.

There was one more angle that I followed up. CFB North Bay was just minutes away by jet from Sudbury. So why weren’t planes scrambled from there? With the public information system at DND headquarters in Ottawa up and working after Remembrance Day, a spokesman said the CF-100s at North Bay’s 414 Squadron were considered obsolete for interception operations. The CF-100 was a 1950s vintage fighter jet while the Michigan F-106s were specifically designed for interceptor operations. The CF-100s at North Bay were used for training ad aerial reconnaissance. As well bureaucracy intervened, North Bay was in the 22nd NORAD district while nearby Sudbury was in the 23rd District, and that was within the Michigan response zone.

There were more sightings of bright lights in the sky over the next two days, by both police and residents. Now both DND headquarters and NORAD were saying they had no records that would match the sightings. Those sightings and ones a few days later as well as sightings earlier across that part of northern Ontario that summer were later recorded by UFO trackers as an indication that something was happening the skies.

(In August I had driven to Sheguiandah on Manitoulin Island after many residents reported bright lights and UFOs over the previous week. I stayed up until midnight with one of the families but saw nothing. I checked with the Little Current detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police, CFS Falconbridge and the control tower at the airport at Sault Ste. Marie Ontario, who reported nothing unusual. Many, but not all the sightings had mundane explanations, including the Perseid meteor shower that happens every year between August 10 and 13, the red supergiant star Antares setting on the horizon, appearing through the atmosphere to be flashing, the distant masthead lights of a sailboat)

On the afternoon of Thursday, November 13, in a follow up I was told that the radar blip was a “persistent phenomenon.” A source also told me that base personnel had attempted to photograph the object.

I contacted J. Allen Hynek, chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern University in Chicago, and an advisor to the United States Air Force on Unidentified Flying Objects and part of Project Blue Book which studied UFOs from 1952 to 1969.

In my story that appeared on Friday, November 14, Hynek said CFS Falconbridge had picked up a “radar visual” adding “a radar visual pattern, it’s not unusual, but when NORAD confirms something, it is not unusual, it’s not a hoax.” The critical thing was motion, Hynek told me, if the object doesn’t move, it is usually a bright star and both Venus and Jupiter were visible in northern Ontario skies at the time.

(I met Hynek a few weeks later in Toronto for coffee after he had appeared on an interview show on TV Ontario)

Another expert, Ian Haliday of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics at the National Research Council in Ottawa told me that the objects were likely Venus or Jupiter. “At this time when the planets are bright in the sky, we expect a lot of UFO sightings,” he said.

At the time that was the last story I wrote on what would be called “the Falconbridge Incident.” There were other stories to cover.

Soon those who followed the UFO stories were saying that it was the first time that NORAD had confirmed on the record that it had picked up something on radar and launched interceptors.

The following spring, I got a call early one morning from a man named Bob Pratt, who said he was a reporter for the National Enquirer tabloid. He wanted to know about the Falconbridge incident. Pratt was in Toronto following up a false lead about UFOs there and had been told that Sudbury was where the story was.

A few days, later he was in Sudbury, talking to me, the police and the witnesses, the officers at CFS Falconbridge and at NORAD Canadian headquarters in North Bay.

(According to his obituaries, Robert Pratt who died in 2005 covered UFOs for the National Enquirer for several years. He began as skeptic but by 1975, when he arrived in Sudbury, after interviewing numerous witnesses, he was beginning to believe that UFOs were real. He would go on to write books about UFOS and flew to Brazil to investigate reports there of UFOs in the Amazon.)

His story didn’t appear in the Enquirer until months later, on August 3, 1976, just as I resigned from the Sudbury Star to backpack travel in Europe.

Pratt quoted Lt Col. Brian Wooding of the 22nd NORAD Defense Control Sector, “We get quite a few reports but to my knowledge this is about the only one we’ve actually seen on radar and the only time we’ve got to the of scrambling interceptors.”

Kindschi told Pratt the Michigan interceptors had been scrambled at 10:45 am (two hours earlier than he told me.) He also told Pratt the UFO had been tracked intermittently on radar for six hours.

The commanding officer of CFS Falconbridge, Maj. Robert Oliver, told Pratt the full reports on the incident were initially classified as part of normal procedures but a while later the commander of NORAD four-star Air Force general Daniel James Jr. ordered it declassified. (James, was the first African American to reach four-star rank in all branches of the US military . He began his career as an instructor for other Black pilots, the famous Tuskegee Airmen and later served in Korea and Vietnam)

Pratt reported that it was Oliver who took the photographs that I reported but Oliver told Pratt that they didn’t turn out. (A probable explnation since the UFOs were seen at night)

The declassified report surfaced four years later when, on October 14, 1979, it appeared in the New York Times Magazine in the story U.F.O. Files the Untold story by science writer
Patrick Huyghe (paywalled) who has also written books on UFOs and other subjects.

As Huyghe quoted it in the Times, it read

CONFIDENTIAL. “Subject: Suspicious Unknown Air Activity.” Dated Nov. 11, 1975

“Since 28 Oct 75 numerous reports of suspicious objects have been received at the NORAD COC [North American Air Defense Combat Operations Center]. Reliable military personnel at Loring AFB [Air Force Base], Maine, Wurtsmith AFB, Michigan, Malmstrom AFB, [Montana], Minot AFB, [North Dakota], and Canadian Forces Station, Falconbridge, Ontario, Canada, have visually sighted suspicious objects.
“Objects at Loring and Wurtsmith were characterized to be helicopters. Missile site personnel, security alert teams and Air Defense personnel at Malmstrom Montana reported object which sounded like a jet aircraft. FAA advised ‘There were no jet aircraft in the vicinity.’ Malmstrom search and height finder radars carried the object between 9,000 ft and 15,600 ft at a speed of seven knots. … F‐106s scrambled from Malmstrom could not make contact due to darkness and low altitude. Site personnel reported the objects as low as 200 ft and said that as the interceptors approached the lights went out. After the interceptors had passed the lights came on again. One hour after the F‐106s returned to base, missile site personnel reported the object increased to a high speed, raised in altitude and could not be discerned from the stars….
“I have expressed my concern to SAFOI [Air Force Information Office] that we come up soonest with a proposed answer to queries from the press to prevent overreaction by the public to reports by the media that may be blown out of proportion. To date efforts by Air Guard helicopters, SAC [Strategic Air Command] helicopters and NORAD F‐106s have failed to produce positive ID.”

Using Freedom of Information and declassified documents Hughye went on to report.

Numerous daily updates kept the Joint Chiefs of Staff informed of these incursions by U.F.O.’s in the fall of 1975. Representatives of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency as well as a handful of other Government desks received copies of the National Military Command Center’s reports on the incidents. One report said that an unidentified object “demonstrated a clear intent in the weapons storage area.” Though Air Force records show that the C.I.A. was notified several times of these penetrations over nuclear missile and bomber bases, the agency has acknowledged only one such notification. Subsequent investigations by the Air Force into the sightings at Loring Air Force Base, Maine, where the remarkable series of events began, did not reveal a cause for the sightings.

The article then goes on to give a history of UFO sightings in the US and government reaction.

At the time the United States military was worried that the UFOs could be from the then Soviet Union rather than extra-terrestrials. Today, what the US now calls UAP unidentified aerial phenomena are still being reported with the anxiety now directed at China and its growing technological expertise.
As the declassified reports indicate, something was happening over the skies of North America around Remembrance Day 1975. It appears from the declassified report that most of the other sightings were by military personnel, not civilians.

So it may be that my reporting helped prompt the US and Canadian militaries to officially admit for the first time that they had tried to intercept a UFO.

Links

Falconbridge

Local UFO researchers continued to investigate the incident into the 1990s

The Falconbridge sighting is sometimes mixed with up another Canadian incident at Falcon Lake in Manitoba in 1967

Edmund Fitzgerald

The original Associated Press report on the Edmund Fitzgerald

How the AP got the Edmund Fitzgerald story

Star Trek and a UFO

A little fun, the Star Trek Original Series episode Tomorrow is Yesterday

In Tomorrow is Yesterday, broadcast in January 1967, a black hole sends the Enterprise goes back in time to 1969, and into Earth’s atmosphere where it appears over Omaha, Nebraska and a USAF radar technician picks up a UFO. A F-104 starfighter is dispatched to intercept and spots the Enterprise, but as the episode evolves and time travel works again, the pilot first sees the ship and then it disappears.