by Charles Lear
On January 1, 1970, the new year dawned in Canada with a UFO and occupants report. This was in the midst of a flap centered on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It was investigated by John Magor, editor and publisher of the Canadian UFO Report, and he provided a report to the Victoria Times. The Victoria Times published an article on the case on page 1 of the January 5, 1970 edition (page 10 of link), and Magor published his version in the Volume 1, Number 7, summer issue of the Canadian UFO Report.
News indicating there was an ongoing flap in the area turns up in the December 22, 1969 edition (page 8 of link) of the Victorian Times under the headline “Look Up Islanders, The UFOs Are Watching You.” A sighting by four witnesses in the Ladysmith area is described. Two of the witnesses, Graham Toole, 21, and Albert Birkeland, 22, reported they were driving when they saw an object with three lights, white on top and red on the bottom. Mr. and Mrs. Ray Knight reported seeing what the reporter for the times wrote “must be the same object.” According to the article, they agreed with Toole and Birkeland that it “moved about a mile a second.” Mr. Knight said that he had seen an object in September where “you could see the cabin lights clearly.” The article also describes a “greyish saucer-shaped object with a transparent center” seen by five people over an elementary school in Duncan.
The occupant report came from a nurse who worked the night shift at Cowichan District Hospital in Duncan. According to Magor’s article (page 4 of link) “UFO Occupants Seen Near Hospital” in the Canadian UFO Report, Doreen Kendall was checking on an elderly patient in the extended care ward around 5:00 a.m. on January 1, 1970. She turned on a light and went to part the drapes of a nearby window to let in some fresh air. He said that as she pulled the drapes open, “a brilliant light hit me in the eyes.” She said that 60 feet away, there was a large, bright object and that she could see it clearly.
Miss Kendall was on the second floor and said the object, which she described as circular, was just above the children’s ward, which was on the third floor. It had a silver, bowl-shaped bottom and a domed top made of some sort of clear glass or plastic that was lit up from the inside, allowing her to see into it. There were lights around it “like a necklace.”
She said she saw two figures inside that were male-like, one behind the other. She described them this way: “They looked like fine, tall, well-built men. They were dressed in tight-fitting suits of the same (dark) material that covered their heads, but their hands were bare and I noticed how human they looked. Their flesh seemed just like ours.”
She said she never felt so peaceful in her life and wished she could talk to them. She noticed she was seeing more and more of the interior and realized the craft was tilting.
The creature in front was looking with intensity at a large instrument panel as if it was dealing with something important. This gave Kendall the impression that they might have been having mechanical problems. She thought they might have landed on the roof of the children’s ward and were having trouble taking off.
Kendall came from a family of racecar enthusiasts, so the instrument panel was of particular interest to her. She said there were what looked like instruments of different sizes inset into the chrome-like metal of the panel.
She then remembered her patient, Freida Wilson, whom she had come to check on. She said that, at this point, “I guess I hesitated. I felt I mustn’t make a noise or do anything that would break the trend of what was happening.”
Magor tells the reader that the creature in the back turned and faced her “almost as if her thoughts were being read.” She said she couldn’t see its face because it was covered with “a darkish material that looked softer than the rest of his suit. She was sure the creature saw her because of what happened next: the creature turned and touched the back of the creature in the front. The creature in front then grabbed a lever and pushed it “back and forth.” The craft started to circle counter-clockwise and Kendall called to Wilson to come and look.
Magor spoke to Wilson, and she said she came over and saw a bright light about the size of a car. She didn’t see a top of bottom or any of the details described by Kendall. She said the object circled slowly and then moved off. She described it as being too bright to be a plastic bag with candles as some people had reportedly suggested. According to her, “it would take a million candles to make it as bright as that.”
Two other nurses, intrigued by the comments being made by Kendall and Wilson, went and looked out another window. They saw a “bright light” moving off in the distance, and two more nurses who went to look were too late to see anything.
Magor tells the reader that the nurses didn’t go public with their story and that he was alerted to it by a nurse at the hospital who was a friend of his.