Editor's note: To read Part 1, click here.
Despite the winks and nudges that would surely have come from his disclosure, Frank Stephens, of Barrie, bravely shared his experience with the Barrie Examiner in March 1978.
“Suddenly, I saw the weird object. It was completely round and had an orangish-red color. The object did not last for more than 10 seconds. It came directly across the highway, about one half-mile in front of me, at about 200 feet in the air. It looked to be the size of an average house.”
It is quite remarkable Stephens reported his UFO sighting on Highway 11 at all, as it is evident by his own words that he was having doubts about what he actually saw on that dark March evening.
“Stephens emphasized that the object was not a plane as it had no wings and no trail of smoke to it.”
He added, “At first, I thought it might be a mirage — but how could it have been if I saw it? The whole thing seems as though I am exaggerating, but I’m not.”
A little more than a year later, I had my own peculiar encounter with the unexplained.
I was 15 years old, a sober farm girl living on a dead-end road some 15 kilometres north of Bradford. It was a warm summer night and all of the house windows were open.
I had reached that age when catching frogs and playing with dolls no longer interested me, so on that night, I was looking at the distant lights of Bradford and thinking the people there were likely having more fun than I was at that moment.
Suddenly, from behind one of the two cold-storage barns in front of me, rose a metal object about the size of a minivan. It was the shape of an upside-down soup bowl and it was tilted on an angle. The object made no sound and had red and green flashing lights around its base.
As it hovered, I stood frozen on the spot. Then, in an instant, it was gone. It just zipped away, at high speed, into the night, without ever making a sound of any kind.
As I recall, I ran screaming into the family room and was mostly greeted with looks of this-must-be-teenage-drama-stuff. It took me a couple of days to gather the courage to take a look behind the vegetable barns, but I found no evidence of any strange goings-on there.
I have told my story to very few people over the years, for obvious reasons, but now you know.
These were the days of Mork and Mindy and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so there was a bit of an aliens-from-outer-space mania going on at the time.
In April 1978, a new television show debuted on NBC. Project UFO starred Jack Webb, former star of the popular Dragnet police series, and the program appeared in the Barrie Examiner TV listings on channels 2 and 9.
Webb was asked at the time about his own beliefs in UFOs, and he replied, “I have never seen anything except on a Saturday night when I was leaving a bar or two.”
There you have it. I suspect there are many great stories out there, close encounters of the Simcoe County kind, but the folks who could tell them are understandably hesitant to do so.
Each week, the Barrie Historical Archive provides BarrieToday readers with a glimpse of the city’s past. This unique column features photos and stories from years gone by and is sure to appeal to the historian in each of us.
