PINE POINT
It was -30 C and the moon had disappeared. Deep in the throws of a winter chill, the cloudless sky was filled with northern lights as a lone vehicle made its way down a deserted stretch of road from Hay River to Pine Point Feb. 25, 1978.

Former residents of Pine Point held a 25-year reunion in August 2013. Signs were set up all along the highway to Pine Point, starting at Buffalo Junction, to guide travelers home. - NNSL file photo James McGaha, former United States Air Force pilot who now works as an astronomer and director of the Grasslands Observatory in Arizona. - photo courtesy of James McGaha

Thirty-four-year-old Judy Comerford was bringing her daughter Diana and her friend, Elizabeth Parker, home from a skating competition that night. It was 9:30 p.m.

Reaching the turn off to Pine Point from Highway 5, the car crossed a set of train tracks and the radio suddenly turned to static before fading out, leaving the three in silence.

Then an object appeared in Judy's peripheral, oval-shaped and bright. A peculiar disc seemed to be following alongside the car.

She would later tell the RCMP, "It was very bright, one of the brightest things I've ever seen."

Silently the object seemed to gather speed, cutting out in front of the 1975 Chevy Impala and slowing it to a crawl. Back and forth it zig-zagged across the highway, never hitting the car or going over top of it but instead hovering just out of reach. After a half an hour, the mysterious light disappeared - leaving the highway and flying away below the treeline.

The moon returned, visible on the horizon.

Today the long road from Pine Point is overgrown and the community is abandoned, shuttered after the Cominco mine closed in 1988. Its 1,200 residents had no reason to stay.

Now in her early 70s, News/North spoke with Judy from her current home in London, Ont. When asked to recount the events of that night nearly 40 years ago, she was at first caught off guard.

"I haven't thought about that in a long time," she said, musing. "In those days it was not something ever talked about ... But it's certainly something you never forget."

She says to this day she has never seen anything quite the same colour as the object they saw that night, describing it as shockingly bright but not emitting any light.

"It was a very bright colour, the whole big thing, but it didn't give off any light, it was just fluorescent," she said.

Judy could not say whether it appeared solid, remembering how she was terrified of getting too close.

"It was never very high off the ground ... and it didn't land but it was close enough that you wouldn't want to drive into it," she recalled.

"I don't even know if we could have driven under it."

Judy's daughter, Diana Pinkney, was 14 at the time and now works as a teacher in Burlington, Ont. She e-mailed News/North to recount the night, writing what they experienced was not like most reported UFO sightings.

"Most (sightings) are very quick and the person's perception can be questioned, as in, 'Did I really see that?'" she recalled. "The UFO followed us for 40 minutes and made us come to a complete stop. There was no question of what was in front of us."

Pinkney said throughout the whole ordeal she could not see the moon, which had previously been off in the distance, adding she remembers how scared her mother was as the object moved closer and she was unable to drive much more than 15 km/h.

"The reddish-orange ball began to go in the centre of the road and stopped there hovering approximately five feet above the road," Pinkney stated. "It covered the width of the road and over the ditch area and stayed there hovering."

According to the RCMP report obtained by News/North, the validity of the womens' accounts was called into question after Pinkney told officers the object "became the moon." Comerford said this was something she told the frightened girls to try and calm them down.

"What are you supposed to say to two scared kids in the car when you still have another 30 or 40 minutes to drive home?" she said.

The report states all airspace in the area was investigated for traffic that night. Aeradio detachments in Hay River and Fort Smith both said there were no reported flights during that time; similarly all armed forces aircraft were on the ground and accounted for by 9 p.m. An RCMP officer also patrolled the area where the sighting occurred and did not find anything out of the ordinary. Const. D.A. Mcleod, who put together the report in Pine Point two weeks after the sighting, concluded because of the object's position the women were most likely looking at a lunar phenomenon.

"These persons (likely) had seen a colour phase of the moon as it was rising," he wrote. "If in fact it was the moon, it would explain the object always being in front of them and to one side and the fact it would seem to be hovering in the trees at one time and up in the air at other times."

However, he concluded the report on an ominous note.

"No other reports of this nature were received; however, these witnesses whom we feel are quite reliable are sure they have seen an object that defies explanation," he wrote.

Five days later the investigation was passed onto the National Research Council in Ottawa but current archives officer Steven Leclair was unable to locate the documents.

After the incident Elizabeth Parker refused to acknowledge or discuss the events again and, according to Diana, was encouraged to keep her distance from the family.

A UFO can be defined as any object seen in the sky which its observer cannot identify.

Witnesses often report white or orange stationary lights hovering low on the horizon for hours - these typically are ruled out as planets or stars.

In 2014 there were 1,021 reported UFO sightings in Canada, most occurring between 9 and 11 p.m.

Seeking answers, News/North approached James McGaha a former United States Air Force pilot who, according to his bio with the organization Center for Inquiry, was involved with operations at the infamous Area 51 in Nevada. Now retired, McGaha works as an astronomer and director of the Grasslands Observatory in Arizona. After hearing an account of what the Comerfords witnessed outside Pine Point and examining the position of the moon that night, McGaha said nothing unusual stood out about their story. He said when the moon is very low on the horizon as it was that evening, innumerable optical illusions are possible.

"Any time you have an astronomical object near the horizon you have all kinds of strange things happen: defraction, refraction, illusions caused by thermal inversions, etc.," he said. "Things can look really, really strange. You can have a star look as big as the moon if the conditions are right."

This, coupled with a rare natural phenomenon called temperature inversion, could have made the moon look paranormal. Temperature inversion happens when cold air lies beneath warmer air, causing light rays to refract and bend toward the denser cold air. This has the potential to make objects - particularly lights - appear to be somewhere they're not.

"The object is actually magnified and inverted by the atmosphere, normally this happens with more distant mountain ranges and ships on the water but it does happen with the moon too," McGaha said.

Lights near the horizon can appear to come from the heavens instead of where they originated. If the moon is sitting below the horizon, a mirage may be visible. The refracted lights also have the tendency to move quickly across the sky or disappear suddenly as the angle or position of the object or viewer changes. In the Arctic this phenomenon commonly happens at night with the moon, stars and car headlights and will occur for longer periods of time than daytime mirages. McGaha says it is very common for the public to confuse this kind of phenomenon with UFOs.

"Most people when they look at the sky, don't have a clue what they're looking at," he said. "They see illusions, they see optical effects, they see astronomical objects - they see them and the first thing that pops into their head is an alien spacecraft."

Chris Rutkowski is the research director at the Centre of Ufology Research in Manitoba and said he is familiar with the Comerfords' case and agrees with McGaha's theory.

Nevertheless, he said he has heard a number of strange reports from the NWT over the years and says the crash of a Soviet satellite in the area just a month before had shaken up many residents.

"Only a month earlier than the Pine Point UFO, Cosmos 954 did in fact crash into the NWT near Great Slave Lake, so many people were understandably jittery about things in the sky."

Comerford and Pinkney maintain to this day it was not the moon they saw that night.

"I don't know whether I believe in aliens or not but I certainly believe it was something that was unidentified," said Comerford.

Other notable UFO sightings in the north

JAN. 24, 1978: A Soviet nuclear-powered satellite plummets into the Great Slave Lake area, scattering radioactivity over a 124,000 square kilometre area. Cosmos 954 was carrying 110 pounds of enriched uranium when it crashed. The clean-up effort, dubbed Operation Morning Light, was a joint effort between Canada and the United States and continued well into October of that year.

DEC. 11, 1996: Twenty-two witnesses from three communities along the Klondike Highway in the Yukon report a UFO sighting the same night. The object was described by witnesses as being smooth and solid - a huge row of lights moving across the lake, too slowly to be an aircraft.

AUGUST 2006: Residents of Fort Resolution videotape a series of red, white and blue lights flashing in the sky, hovering above the ground.

NOV. 2, 2007: A UFO is seen hovering over a ridge outside the community of Deline around 5 a.m. Witnesses described the phenomena as a triangle shape with a bright light in the centre. After an investigation no aircraft were found to be in the area at the time.

Source: NNSL archives

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