Prince George resident Brad Camozzi was outside in the yard of his home in the Lakewood subdivision enjoying the warmth of his hot tub Wednesday night around 9 p.m. when he saw something in the sky above he could not explain.
There were four bright round orange lights traveling silently following similar paths moving in a northwesterly direction. He banged on the window to alert his girlfriend, Lisa Morgan, who came out and saw the same lights and took out her phone to record it. One by one, the lights disappeared. Some gradually got smaller and some remained the same size before they vanished from sight.
“It looked like a giant orange light, like a pumpkin,” said the 51-year-old Camozzi.
“I saw one and then all of sudden there was a second one and a third one and then there was a fourth one. We thought it was kind of strange because they went for a ways and then they went out. Five or 10 minutes later they came out again and I saw all four of them again. It was the same kind of deal where it was kind of one and one behind it, and then another one and another one and then, boom, they were gone.
“The weird part was the formation they were in,” he said. “They were kind of on an angle, about the same distance apart. At first I thought they were planes but they were going too slow to be planes to be one behind each other there and I was thinking ‘I hope there’s other people seeing this.’ I don’t doubt that there’s something else out there.”
On the video Morgan recorded, the orange lights show up as small white dots and the clip lacks the clarity needed to help determine what they were.
This reporter also saw the lights from my backyard deck. I jumped out of my chair in the living room when my wife Joyce told me to come quickly onto the deck and we saw two round orange lights that appeared larger than a typical aircraft at night. One got smaller before it disappeared and the other maintained its size before the light went out. There was no engine sound, so they could not have been drones, airplanes or helicopters.
Joyce witnessed a similar incident about three weeks ago from our home in the Heritage district and that time she saw three orange lights moving together over the city before they suddenly vanished. That happened at about 2 a.m. that night.
So were those unidentified flying objects visitors from another planet or is there some valid scientific explanation?
One of Camozzi’s Facebook friends, Brian Engbrecht, said it could have been candle lanterns made of paper light enough so the heat of the attached candle causes them to rise in the sky. The orange glow is the lanterns catching fire and burning until the paper fuel is exhausted, which could explain why the objects over Prince George suddenly went dark.
But from where my wife and I saw them, they did not look at all like flaming objects. While the size of the light of one of the objects got smaller as we watched, the intensity of the light in either object did not vary at any time.
Camozzi also has a hard time believing it was a flame in the sky he was watching.
“They were super-bright, I think too bright to be candle lanterns, and they were close,” he said.
There were no UFO reports received by the Prince George Airport Authority for that particular night.
“Helicopters, you would hear them, and they wouldn’t be doing that kind of night flying, so I’ll go back and look at our logs just to be sure, but typically, particularly if the tower had noticed, something like that would be reviewed the next morning,” said PGAA president and CEO Gordon Duke.
Duke said there is a federal government website available to the public - Civil Aviation Occurrence Daily Reporting System (CADORS) - which catalogs daily incidents pertaining to Canadian-registered aircraft which occur at airports or in Canadian airspace. There was nothing reported to the website about Wednesday’s incident over Prince George.
“If another pilot had seen those (lights), they would have said, ‘Hey what’s this,’ and potentially entered it in CADORS” said Duke.
The mystery of UFOs has long baffled Canadians.
Two previous unexplained incidents in my life have me convinced we’re not alone. One happened about 20 years ago at 10 Mile Lake near Quesnel when my son and I watched as several bluish lights suddenly appeared traveling together in total silence over the lake before they suddenly took off and disappeared at unbelievable speed. The other, which was quite similar to the first, happened when I was kid in the early 1970s out with my siblings at Sylvan Lake, Alta.
In October 2019, the Royal Canadian Mint issued a rectangular-shaped coin to commemorate one of Canada’s most famous UFO sightings. The coin depicts three fishermen on a moonless Oct. 4, 1967 night in a boat in Shag Harbour, N.S., watching what appears to be a flying saucer crash right in front of them into the ocean.
According to the Canadian Press story about the commemorative coin, the Shag Harbour incident is widely regarded as one of the world's best-documented UFO cases. The fishermen described a glowing orange sphere about the size of a city bus which they saw disappear into the water without a sound, leaving behind an orange-coloured foam.
Four orange lights remained visible in the sky, as witnessed by several RCMP officers, dozens of fishermen and airline pilots flying 33,000 feet over the Gulf of Maine. Witnesses reported seeing a series of flashing lights moving rapidly before they hit the water about 300 metres from the shore. Several searches were conducted, including a three-day scan of the harbour floor, but no answers were found to explain the mystery.
