July 22, 2025 • 54 mins
In the foggy, early evening of November 7th, 1990, two people at a Montreal hotel noticed something bizarre in the sky. Soon, multiple people in the hotel had gathered on a rooftop terrace to observe a genuine UFO -- and, soon after that, people across the city began reporting the object (if it was an object). In the almost three decades after this sighting, numerous witnesses, experts, fringe researchers and skeptics have attempted to explain exactly what was hovering over the sky for hours that evening. Join the guys as they delve into the case in tonight's Classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here's one for our Canadian friends, our dear neighbors up north,
who are still part of the Commonwealth of the United Kingdom,
but like us, hold an immense consistent interest in strange
stuff over the sky. Can we journey real quick to
(00:21):
seven November nineteen ninety?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh, are you talking about in the foggy early hours
of the evening of said to date in nineteen ninety?
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Wait? Are we talking about Hotel Bonaventure?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Wait? Believe what was that? What was that up there? Well?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
I think we're talking about not moons over my hammy,
like the sandwich. We're talking about UFOs over Montreal, which
should also be a sandwich, kind of like a coke monsieur.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Perhaps.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Well, I do love that this is a story about
a thing people still cannot explain multiple eye witnesses. It's
nineteen ninety, so they don't have the phones as smart
as some of us in the audience have today. But
I am immensely privileged to be hanging out with two
(01:09):
of the best forensic guys in the business. And in
twenty twenty we asked each other what we could make
of these reports.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah, anytime there's a mass sighting, right, that's what gets
us excited. It's just not one person's account, one person
remembering what they saw. We know that eyewitnesses are flawed
often in many things. Right, Just because we as soon
as we remember a thing that we saw or heard
(01:41):
or tasted or touched that sensation, we put a tiny
bit of our personal spin on it. We don't mean too,
We're not doing it intentionally. It's just the human nature.
Just you tweak it a little bit, especially when you're
recounting a story. Right, But in this case, it's a
whole bunch of people in a hotel that saw the
same thing or hours.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
The hotel, by the way, did not give us a discount.
I can't remember if we talked about that in this episode.
But let's roll the tape.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
From UFOs to Psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
A production of Iheartrading.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Nola.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul. Mission control decands, most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. Today's episode comes to
us from an email. It comes to us from Brian W. So, Brian,
I hope you're listening to every episode, but I hope
(03:00):
you were particularly tuned into this one. Here's what you said, Brian,
you said, Hey, guys, I've been binging on the show
all summer, and after listening to the Canada's Roswell episode,
I remember that my dad told me about a very
famous incident here in Montreal back in nineteen ninety that
he remembered seeing on the local news. So far, I
have not heard any of your episodes mention it. And Brian,
(03:24):
you are correct, my friend, fellow conspiracy realists, but that
is something we are going to correct for ourselves today.
In this episode Montreal nineteen ninety there was something weird
in the sky. It's true, and we'll get to the
crazy parts of this, but first let's start with the facts. Montreal,
(03:49):
what is it? You know it's in Canada, right, but
what else? It's a band I like, that's of Montreal.
That's right, that's.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Right, and they're actually on tour right now. Our farm
friend in my roommate and lifelong pal Frank recently went
to Montreal and said it was a delightful cornucopia of
delicious foods and arts, and very clean, and the metro
system was very clean and he had a wonderful time.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
He said. It is the second largest city right in Canada,
at least when you're talking about population, which is kind
of cool, right.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It takes up about three fourths of Montreal Island. It's
an older city, at least as far as this continent goes.
Colonial history dates back into the sixteenth century. It started
as a missionary settlement. Of course, like every other European
based American city, there were plenty of people living there beforehand,
but anyway Europeans come, it becomes a missionary settlement, and
(04:47):
you know, there was plenty of money to be made
in religion. But they also realized they could make another
ton of money if they got into the fur trade,
and so Montreal became a hub of the the fur trade.
Trappers would travel to and fro acquiring pelts, and then
they would return there to sell and ship them. As
(05:10):
for the character of Montreal, as in days of yore
and in the modern day, the best way to say
it is that if you were traveling to Montreal or
Quebec in general from the US, the first thing you'll
notice is that it is very, very very French.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Ah.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yes, and again goes back to its history. But also
right now, if we're talking about twenty twenty, the majority
of Montreal's population are French Canadian. They would identify as
French Canadian. And while you hear some people claim that
Montreal is the second largest French speaking city in the world,
of course, after Paris in France, that's a bit of
(05:51):
a dodgy statement, right there are some other places that
might actually meet that.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah, can Chassa, Algiers. They're both populous in their own right,
and they're also probably growing more quickly in terms of
birth rate.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
And maybe While once Montreal was known for exporting fine
pelts and furs, in the late nineties it kind of
got a reputation for exporting some fine musical bands such
as The Unicorns, the Arcade, fire Wolf Parade, Leonard Cohen
is from Montreal, a lot of great bands. Tim Hecker,
(06:28):
a more drony kind of thing, the Besnard Lakes, the Deers.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
I was huge into the.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Montreal music scene back in the late nineties and still
am today very much.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
But all it all. Montreal is a beautiful place. It's
full of history, it's full of culture. It's considered one
of the most cosmopolitan aka European cities on the entirety
of the North American continent. However, it's also known for
(06:57):
something else.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Oh yes, ben Like a lot of large metropolitan cities,
there are strange lights in the sky above Montreal. Strange
lights that may not come from any human origin or
maybe some kind of secret government experience, but in the end,
they're unidentified. They're flying, and they are objects.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
And that makes them UFOs objectively speaking. What are we
talking about. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. That's right, folks. Montreal is
(07:43):
not just famous for kabaquac culture and some bands from
the nineties. It's not just famous for proutine and amazing food.
It's famous for, you know, apparently, it's riddled with UFOs,
lousy with UFO sightings, the one of the most famous
of which occurred in nineteen ninety. So here's what went down.
(08:05):
Our story starts on November seventh.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
That's right, on November seventh, nineteen ninety, multiple witnesses reported
seeing a round metallic object beaming a series of bright lights,
brilliant lights even across the foggy Montreal sky. One witness,
the first known to have reported this sighting, said that
the object was seen from a rooftop pool on the
(08:30):
seventeenth floor of the Place Bonaventure hotel in downtown Montreal
a little after seven o'clock in the evening.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
And then the game of telephone begins. So this first
initial witness there were two people in the pool. The
first initial witness tells the lifeguard or sometimes described as
the pool supervisor, Lynn Saint Pierre, which sends off this
chain reaction. The lifeguard calls Albert Sterling. Albert Sterling works
for hotel security. Albert Sterling calls the police, the Royal
(09:02):
Canadian Mounted Police RCMP, the Horsey guys, and also a
journalist from a newspaper known as Laprosse, and as things
go on, the military in Canada gets calls NASA down
south the US way, They get calls and the story
spreads more and more and more people at primarily at
(09:25):
the hotel or around the area, gather on the seventeenth
floor terrace as the object appears to brighton at the
heights of the gathering. We're looking at around forty to
seventy people.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah, and it wasn't like it was just a light
that was there for a minute. When you're talking about
all of these people gathering and making their way down
to this hotel, it's time. There's a lot of time there,
and by the time people arrived, it was still in
the sky, still shining. And you're looking at about three
hours from beginning to end roughly, so from about seven
(09:58):
to twenty pm to around ten ten pm. And that's
one of the reasons this is such an interesting event.
Why we're so very glad that this was brought to
our attention, because you don't a lot of times have
this number of witnesses, and you know, how you would
characterize those witnesses depends really on each individual. But there
(10:21):
are enough reliable witnesses there to feel as though there's
something really happening here.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, journalists, pilots, police officers, Oh, a congressman is there
or a congress member. The journalist Marcel LaRouche arrives around
nine pm, so this thing has already been happening for
almost two hours, and he is our primary source for
(10:48):
photographs the most widely circulated photographs you'll see of the
phenomenon and the way he was able to photograph this
his camera directly toward the sky, manual pause for about
thirty seconds, and then he just held down the button,
so he got a bunch of different photographs. The light,
(11:11):
the brightness of the object had decreased. Now keep that
in mind because as it's slowly decreasing, that is that
is an indicator for us of one thing or another.
And another photo that was taken, Like if you, well man,
you're you're a visual expert, how would you how would
you guys describe this?
Speaker 3 (11:33):
The photographs that I've actually seen of this, I saw
some from the CBC archives, and I'm watching the video
on the CBC dot Ca website here, and we've also
got some screen grabs that you can find online in
a couple places. It looks to me like the way
I see the sun, like with rays of sunlight bursting
(11:57):
through cloud cover sometimes we can get that that real
distinct ray. It kind of looks like that a golden hue,
bit of a greenish color to it as well, and
it's just it's hard to describe. It does look as
though there was something kind of hanging out behind some cloud.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Cover right right, And we know that not all the
photos taken were of similar quality because of the way
the object appeared to be stationary, which is which is
hugely important. Other people were saying we saw six lights
or we saw three lights. You know, they were dim.
(12:39):
Other attempts to photograph this object, other than those of
the journalists failed due to the low light. So we
think Marcel himself took about ten photos. The object gradually
melted into the increasingly dense cloud cover and it disappeared
completely around ten fifteen ps. So now we have to
(13:01):
ask ourselves, well, what did it look like? Matt I
think he did an excellent job describing it, but we
also have to acknowledge the some of the weird things
about eyewitness descriptions and the treacherous path of memory. So
we know that the accounts had slight variation and things
like number of lights, estimated size and so on, but
(13:23):
they largely agreed in our On a previous episode with
Mad Scientists podcast creator and host Christopher Cogswell, we had
a pretty good conversation about how people can misinterpret things
when they're viewing them on the ground, right, So that's
why it's important to note that we had we had
(13:45):
pilots both in the ground and spoiler alert in the
sky who were able to encounter this. Estimates currently from
a couple of different reports say the craft was about
five hundred and forty meters wide. Again, people who believe
it was a craft.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
And the other thing is kind of what you just said,
they're they're estimating how far away it is to give
you that general size.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
And just for everyone not on the metric system aka
like Namibia and the United States, O, Myanmar, five hundred
and forty meters is huge. It's like seventeen hundred almost
eighteen hundred feet, So whatever this was would have been
(14:29):
enormous if it were a physical craft.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Again, yeah, and if it you know, if they're getting
that distance, you know, the belief the believed distance correct
about how large that thing is because it sounds like
a dang mothership, you guys, right.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Right and are rush your mouth an arc traveling through space, right.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
And the other thing to point out here, ben or
the number of lights that were seen, because you know
it was a bit varied, but somewhere between eight and
ten distinguishable different lights were seen that were attached in
some way to this craft, at least as it was told.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And that could have depended on an angle,
because again we have to remember that of the multiple
witnesses who were sighted in most of the contemporary reports,
the majority of them were on this terrace, meaning that
for all for all practical purposes, they were looking at
(15:29):
it from the same angle. And when you have people
looking at something from the same angle, you lose valuable perspective.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
So I have to bring this up. Yeah, I've finally
got THISC video functioning again, huh. And some of the
images in there there they actually go to the journalist's
place of work who took those photos we've been speaking about.
And there's one pulled up here that is it's similar
to the one that you been in. The outline has
(15:58):
a screenshot of one of these, and you know, it's
a fairly low resolution video that we're looking at here,
But the way these light rays are going through that
cloud cover, I just I just have to say, like
trying to figure out how far away whatever it is is. Yes,
it's like the central difficulty, the central light.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
You know, it's just like two dots and then there
are these radiating points that Yeah, to your point, Matt,
it's really hard to gauge, like how close would it
have to be for those radiations to be that close.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
So the great thing that we have here is, as
you teased earlier, a witness who was actually in the air.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Right, Yeah, that's correct. So while this was going again,
it was there for almost three hours fromably like two
hours and fifty minutes. While it was going, there was
a private Cessna aircraft and these are Cessena or tiny
planes comparatively, And another very weird spoiler it turns out
they're hard to find. We'll follow up on that much later.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
So this I loved that.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
But this aircraft is passing near these light beams and
it doesn't run into anything. It flies through the sky uninterrupted,
thank goodness. Right, and this led police to say, well, okay,
whatever this thing is, this object is much higher in
(17:28):
elevation than we thought. And so the journalist says, okay,
the altitude of this plane might be round three hundred
and seventy meters. That's what I thought first. But then
there was a Near Canada pilot on the hotel roof
who said no, no.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
No, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
No way, man, you write the reports. I'll do the
I'll do the elevation estimates because I fly planes and
that thing is, I assure you, my friend, twenty five
hundred between twenty five hundred and three thousand meters.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
So that's almost ten thousand feet in the air.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
So that would have to like how huge would that
thing have to be to still look big from that distance?
Speaker 3 (18:06):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
So, of course, in interviews, which you can still find online,
there are multiple witnesses who are certain this was an
alien or extraterrestrial craft, including some members of the police force,
which was surprising to me. There was an interview with
one fifteen years later who said, Nope, never saw anything
like it, not of earthly origin. You can also you
(18:29):
can also find some reports that detail well, you can
find the entirety of the police report in French and
you can translate it. It includes the police force's own statements,
but then it includes drawings, little drawings like this from
the witnesses that just looked like circles with the lines
(18:53):
of light coming out.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Yeah, so where the light was in position, and then
where that light ray essentially was observed.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
The lights are all like what yellowish green?
Speaker 3 (19:01):
I guess, yeah, it's it's it's very yellow to my eye,
at least with that kind of green almost shading in there.
And I'm honestly not being there in nineteen ninety I
don't know what kind of light pollution is existing in
that area of Montreal to you know, color the clouds,
which occurs in any major metropolitan area. But it looks
(19:26):
oddly yellow green.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Right, that's correct, And well we'll figure out exactly what
that means as as we continue now, Matt, you alluded
to something earlier about what made this sighting different and
we have several features that distinguish it from the majority
of sightings.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Well, yeah, the first one I think is what we
already talked about, just the number of witnesses who were there,
who who you know, weren't just some This is off
to say, but it wasn't just some farmer or you know,
some a single person or a single family in a
rural area.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Two people in a truck.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Yeah, And that's not to cast aspersions on anyone who
would fit that description. It just means there are multiple
people there, multiple many of them are authority figures, someone
you would consider to be an authority figure when it
comes to let's say, any aircraft that's going to be
in the sky in a controlled airspace.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
And they were also you know, there's a funny story.
One of the witnesses sat at the hotel. I think
she was she was at a wedding, or she was
attending a wedding. She was having dinner. Basically, she's having
a fancy dinner and they heard about this, and so
she finished your soup and she goes as stairs at
the thief for a while. She goes back in, she's
the salad. She goes to check if it's still out there.
(20:53):
And like her account of the police is just her
taking breaks in between watching UFO to eat.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Yeah, And it wasn't just on this terrace. It wasn't
just in this building. It was over a huge city,
and there were people viewing this thing all over the place,
all across the city because it was just an unnerving
thing to observe.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah, And one thing they had in common is that
they all they all pointed out an unequal distribution of light.
It seemed to heavier own one side then another. Payon
there was where they were hanging out, and this was
a densely populated city. You know, there's something in the air,
(21:36):
and it's a real thing, then people see it. That is,
if it's a solid object and its line of sight.
But if it's a meteorological phenomenon, or if it's a
trick of the light, then people looking from the opposite
direction might not see anything at all. That's just how
that stuff works, right.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
It's true. But you got to take into account that
cloud cover in the distance from the clouds that we
were able to really discern.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Right, and there was no change in its movement, no
real change in its size. The fact that it was
visible for so long is interesting, not just because it
allowed more people to see it, but because it allowed
them to time to observe it in increasingly sophisticated and professional ways. Okay,
(22:23):
so one of the first things people would talk about
would be the idea that it's light, that it's just light.
We can dive into that later. But as oh, you know,
people back in the nineteen nineties were not any less
or nore more intelligent than people in twenty twenty. They
thought of that too. They actually turned off some nearby
(22:48):
floodlights or construction lights to see if that did anything,
and no, this mysterious Montreal UFO was still hung there.
And this leads researchers like Bernard Gugnete and ex NASA
scientist doctor Richard Haynes to argue that there definitely was
something up there, and meaning a solid object of some sort.
(23:10):
They said, we can't trace the source of it. I
can't tell you what it was, but we believe it
was something. Their report's pretty exhaustive. It's like twenty five
pages long, and the you know, the climactic moment of
their report is when they say, quote, the existence of
a highly unusual, hovering, silent, large object is indisputable.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
Yeah. Yeah, it really is big too, And you're right
on with the twenty five page report, and it's you know,
they don't well, maybe we won't spoil it now whether
or not they actually say exactly what it is.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Oh yeah, hey, you know what, Let's let's get to that.
Let's answer that question. Let's answer the ghostly yellow lit
elephant hovering above the room of the hotel here. What
on earth or off earth was this? We'll tell you
after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Okay, so what was it? I gotta know?
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Well, let me tell you, This thing, whatever it was,
was definitely unidentified.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
But yeah, unfortunate, Unfortunately for all the true believers out there,
there does not seem to be Again, we just have
to say it. There's not a there's not a water
tight case of extraterrestrial visitation. It does remain unidentified, this craft,
this object, this phenomenon, and while it seemed to be
(24:46):
a real physical object of some sort, there's no indication
that it did something like, you know, disobeyed the laws
of physics or generated any other abstract behavior. No non
human creatures out and warned us about the danger of
nuclear war or large scale pollution, so far as we know.
(25:08):
Maybe they missed that in the reporting, and this leads
those on the more skeptical end, of course, to relegate
this to the land of mundane weather phenomenon and then
subsequent exaggeration, which happens when people are panicking. So why
do they say this. It all really goes back to
the fog. Could this have been nothing more than spotlights
(25:30):
reflecting off the clouds?
Speaker 3 (25:32):
You know?
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Again, the Plas Bonaventure is close to pretty tall buildings.
It's in downtown Montreal. At least one of those had
active spotlights or construction. But those things were and those
things can be clipped off, right. You can make a
request to turn that stuff off, But you can't tell
everybody driving in a city to turn off their headlights
(25:53):
at night, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, I would say spotlights, even the ones that you'll
see you used and just shot up into the air,
you know, during a large event, maybe a movie theater
every once in a while, a gentleman's club you'll sells, well,
you'll see, yeah, exactly. They have a pretty specific shape
that can be you know, opened and closed. It's a lens,
(26:17):
but it expands at least slightly as it goes outward, right, correct,
So if we're talking about lights that are just beamed
up into the sky like that, or you know, reflections
of some pretty high powered spotlight of any kind, I
think it would look different than what we're seeing here.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, what we're seeing here is not something that I
can rightly, you know, attribute to any phenomenon that I've
personally seen before.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
But remember that doesn't take into account other kinds of lights,
other shapes of you know, lights.
Speaker 5 (26:57):
Ghost I just mean, I can't completely you know, I
can't completely say it wasn't a reflection like that of
some kind, because there's some other weird stuff going on here,
particularly with the angle of viewing the thing.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
But all of the evidence that I have been able
to look at, that you've been able to look at
and knowl's being able to look at is stuff that
was captured in nineteen ninety. Yeah, and that doesn't mean,
you know, we can't fully trust what we're looking at.
It just means the you know, it's the resolution is
(27:34):
going to be a little different unless it's film, right,
Unless it's actual film, right, which a couple of these
pictures were filmed, the video quality of anything that was
taken back then is going to be very low resolution.
I would just say the technology maybe was not as sophisticated.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, that's something I want to point out. Yeah, camera
equipment of thirty years ago. And yes, yes this should
shock and shock some people listening and weird some of
this out nineteen ninety was almost thirty years ago. It's
like a few November seventh, nineteen ninety is a few
months away from thirty years ago, and technology evolves at
(28:19):
such a breakneck pace. You're right, Matt, I would say
you totally cannot trust that stuff. It's fuzzy. You know,
if we just depended on those photographs and that video,
it's not surprising at all to rank anything inconclusive because
even an actual craft like say a high altitude blimp,
(28:43):
if those existed at the time, would be difficult to discern,
just given again that very low resolution. And then you
know one thing, it's tempting to say it's a weather
phenomenon because it appears to gently just sort of recede
into the clouds like that gift or jiff of Homer
Simpsons sinking back into the topiary. But blimps could just
(29:08):
rise and it would look the same to an observer,
you know what I mean, especially if the cloud cover
is increasing, because as cloud cover increases and moisture I
don't know why I was doing that voice, but moisture accumulates,
then it pushed the clouds seem to get lower right
and heavier. So I'm just saying we can't based on
(29:29):
the footage alone, we can't rule out either a solid
object or weather phenomenon. The problem is, again it goes
back to the vantage point, because people at the hotel,
upon a venture, to them, this looked like a solid object,
and some of them, including police, are still convinced to
(29:49):
this date. But people from other vantage points they still
saw something, but they thought it was a weird reflection,
you know, like how you see lights and pools at
night reflect weird weird ghost shadows from the water.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Yeah, and you know that could make sense to me.
I'm just trying to figure out. I'm trying to figure
out how I feel about this, you guys, I'm imagining,
you know, the holographic technology, the hologram technology that uses
mists as a medium, so you just shine light on
(30:27):
the mist and then you can have something three dimensional
or appear to be three dimensional, like the Peppers ghost effect.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
These in the Haunted Mansion at Disney sort of an
older effects, I believe, So, yeah, something these mirrors as
it's it's sort of an old school way of generating
a hologram.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
I believe they're updated versions those shut and a lot
of it goes into a yie old project bluebeam by
the way of projecting images onto cloud cover, which is really,
like you said, Ben, just moisture at certain densities, and
as it's more dense, you can get a more solid
looking object in the cloud cover, the fog as we're
(31:05):
calling it here, does appear to be very very thick
in that area. And I'm wondering if I just haven't
seen that kind of technology at play yet, and it
could be something like that that I just don't have
the reference point for totally.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, I mean, I can completely understand that. We also
have we have a couple of different experts who wait
in both in the Montreal area and then just people
study astronomy or ufologists or so on. Well, one I'd
like to bring to our attention is doctor Robert la Montaigne,
(31:44):
who's a professor of astronomy at the University of Montreal,
and he had I think he had the most even
handed initial response, because again we have to remember, like
November seventh, eighth through the ninth, people are say it
all kinds of just wild, out of pocket stuff about this.
(32:05):
So here's what the astronomy professor says. People saw something.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
They saw UFO.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Now the word UFO is unidentified flying objects. So they
saw something in the sky that they couldn't identify. They
saw phenomenon. Now it remains to find an explanation. We
haven't had time to find one yet. It takes a while.
We need to have observations, we need to collect a
whole series of information together. So far, most of the
investigations that are looking at the UFO phenomenon often take
(32:35):
several days to find an explanation. For decades that we
have been dealing with UFO phenomena, not only in Quebec
but almost everywhere in the world. Until now, none of
these UFO phenomena has found its source in the presence
of vessels from other planets. All UFO phenomena have their
explanation in natural phenomena of meteorological origin or or Borealis
(33:01):
type or artificial phenomenon that checks out.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
So in a very dry way, he's saying, I'm not
saying it can't be aliens, but it would be the
first friggin time ever. Well, it's also just the term
UFO is so loaded.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
People have so many associations with it from pop culture
and sci fi and everything, you know, But what it
really just means is a lack of an explanation. And
just because we're seeing something that doesn't have an explanation
doesn't mean you can make the leap to it is
this origins being somewhere you know, outside of the known.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Universe, Right, Yeah, I gotta say something really weird on
personal level about that several dates. Maybe it was last
week on Reddit. I was digging into something.
Speaker 6 (33:44):
And someone quoted me saying that on Reddit and it
was like the most I think it was the coolest
thing that happened to me that month.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Well, this month's this is a new month.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Every we just switched over bin.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
But yeah, we have to say that, right, every every
time we deal with UFOs, we do have to we
do have to emphasize that because you're right, Noel, it
has it has become a loaded term ever since the
nineteen what late forties?
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Maybe yeah, that old roswell, well, hey, let's I want it.
Can we go to the next person that stepped in
because this person just is so skeptical of anything else?
Like where that was maybe even handed that we just
heard from, sure from the professor there.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Yeah, but Mark has next to grind.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Oh man, Mark, what is a galinas? He's a meteorologist
with Environment Canada. That's an organization and secretary of the
Montreal Astronomical Society. This dude was not having any of this.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Oh yeah, you could just hear the the scoff.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, what did he say?
Speaker 1 (34:53):
He said, he looked at the photographs first, and he said,
it looks like a phenomenon observed on many occasions, especially
when we work with projectors sometimes used in meteorology.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Okay, no, okay, projectors used with meteorology.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I see the case you're building.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Okay, all right, keep going.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Okay, I'm picking up a foot down. I'm on board,
and so he goes. Light is reflected by ice crystals
or water droplets in the cloud. So depending on the
density of that cloud.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
I feel like we just talked about this.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah, the beam might be several hundred meters thick and
visible from a great distance. He further conjectured stuff like
the rays might come from an automobile because they have headlights.
The headlights might point at the sky, or they might
reflect toward the sky because buildings have windows and windows
(35:57):
are reflective.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Like, he's very much over this mark you're saying. Okay,
I'm first of all.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
He's saying everything, but I'm condescending, which means I talk
down to people.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
I'm just trying to imagine a car that is somehow
positioned with its headlights for three at that angle like
on a giant hill somewhere that's just kind of sitting
there shooting up.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Because the thing, the problem with the headlight argument is
that these headlights would not be static. They would be
moving right.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Well, well, they'd be moving, but also there are no
laser headlights. You know, they could shoot all the way
up into there and then reflect down in those rays
that we're observing. Maybe I'm wrong, Mark, maybe maybe you're right.
I just I don't see that, but uh, okay, we're
This is not aimed at you, Ben, but it's true.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
And then he's like, and then he points out the
spotlights stuff, and he points out that light beams come
from shopping centers. He's basically the whole time is going
you guys, lights, you have lights.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
They're everywhere.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Lights are everywhere. It's Montreal, we're almost in the twenty
first century.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
They are reflective surfaces everywhere, the clouds and the ice
crystals come on. Man.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
And it's interesting because you see other astronomy societies of
the time. There was one quote. I don't mean dig
through the notes, but there's there's one quote from someone
who seems a little bit offended by this, this claim
that it's an alien or extraterrestrial UFO and then says, oh,
(37:38):
it's a dominic l Rose. Dominic loros I believe is
the man who said, you know what, in my organization,
A lot of us came to it because we realized
that quote unquote alien UFOs don't exist. So it's weird
when you get into this kind of debate because science
(38:01):
has the lie and share of attention in these concepts
in these conversations, and it should, but there's also some
psychology and they're involved in there. There's some grudges being held,
like when we learn some of the weird behind the
behind the curtain business going on with Muffon, which was
frankly surprising and had nothing to do with aliens. Maybe
(38:24):
that's a conspiracy for another day, but let's look at
the other reports. So let's take psychology as far out
of it as we can. We know that, like any
other large city in the developed world, Montreal has a
ton of monitoring devices and systems in play. These things
are on every day of the year, twenty four hours
(38:46):
a day, seven days a week. They're supposed to ping
when they see something.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Yeah, and there are humans that for most of the time,
if not all of the time are checking those systems
and looking at them.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Yeah. Yeah, So so some experts check into power grids
and they say, what about electromagnetic disturbances. We know those
can do screwy things. Because keep in mind that Canada
is one of the one of the countries that experienced
the world's strongest, most recent coronal mass ejection, right, which
in the eighties threw the place back into the dark
(39:23):
age for a minute, but not for long, right, just
unexpectedly shorted out grids. So they found one power failure,
but it was like it was around eleven PM, so
it was after this thing would have been.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Around because we're talking seven twenties, always said.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Seven twenty to like ten ten or so. And then
they checked operating records of communication networks, radio stations, radio operators,
telephone circuits, excuse me, during the evening of November seventh,
nineteen ninety and they did not find any unusual amount
of malfunction whatever. This means that whatever it was was
(40:05):
not at the very least was not interfering with power grids,
nor electromagnetic systems or things that could be affected by that.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
Well that's I mean, okay, this is a good piece
of you know, knowledge to have. It's not it's probably
not the electrical grid. But another set of monitoring instruments
would be radar.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Which would pick up physical objects.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Yes, especially in the airspace. But that wasn't happening, right.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
There were no UFOs detected or reported to be detected
in any case by airport radar systems. The controller, a
controller that was interviewed, reported that for the twenty years
he's worked in the field at the same control tower,
no UFOs have ever been reported. According to him in
a report a few days later, the phenomenon reporter on
(40:50):
Wednesday was caused by a light ray.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Oh so we have another expert saying it's not physical.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
Yeah, it's just light, man, it's just a true of
the light.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
It's only the wind. It's not the ghost of your
dead lover. It's only the wind. All right.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Let's get almost down to the end here, because I
want to just talk about what I think it is.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Okay, all right, So if you want to see a
more modern version of this, and you're a fan of
less than stellar television, you can check out a show
that the television channel Canal D made in two thousand
and seven. A reconstruction of this phenomenon in a series
(41:34):
of theirs called Mystery Files. They interviewed a lot of
the witnesses. Surprise, mainly the witnesses who believe it was
extraterrestrial and different people. Will note that a lot of
the ufology websites that are convinced this was extraterrestrial origin
will mainly cite this report. You can watch it on YouTube.
(41:58):
I don't want to be a jerk about it, but
I wouldn't call it groundbreaking science. It's entertainment. So the
point of that is to entertain you with a recre creations,
as they're.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
Called, good old fashioned recree of some light rays.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
So in this case, it appears for now that the
most likely explanation for the nineteen ninety Montreal sighting was
either a mundane, if secret craft of some sort or
a strange type of light weather phenomenon caused by interaction
with this low foggy sky. Again, the big questions are
(42:39):
the number of witnesses let us know there was definitely
something visible there, and the fact that it stayed visible
for three hours is pretty fascinating too. There's a pretty
there was an argument for some kind of aberrant behavior
of the northern lights. But that doesn't hold up on
(43:01):
you once you dig into it. So all right, what
do you think, Okay, what do you think.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
A natural phenomena of sun rays somehow being bent around
at around seven pm, which you know that's November seven pm.
I don't know exactly when the sun was setting on
that day, but there is there are phenomena where sun
light can be bent around the planet if you know,
(43:32):
at certain times like after dusk or after the sun
has set, where you can get some weird light ray
action going on in distortions, right, and it's it almost
always has to do with moisture in the sky. These
ice crystals were talking about.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
That makes sense because they would refract it and could
split it off in different patterns and make it look
like it's moving abnormally.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Right, Yes, And Montreal isn't you know, right near the
equator or anything. It's getting up higher or north in latitude,
so you know that potential is there when you're talking
about where you can actually see some strange things in
the ionosphere above you, you know, Montreal is pretty dang
(44:15):
close up to those places where it's most strong. But again, oh,
you know, what when you when you see Aurora borealis
spin and noole, generally, what color do you see?
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Ah'm not the best person, desk.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
H green is one of the prominent colors that.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Is blue is supposed to be blue.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
It's greenish. Okay, I'm sorry, But the green hue or
the coloration and some of those images that you're seeing
high up above in that fog could be you know,
I I could see that being Aurora borealis kind of
of things. But then if you mix that in with
(45:03):
maybe a bit of sunlight being refracted and kind of
bent over like that, you could get those light rays
because it really does look like tiny suns like shooting
out rays through that cloud cover. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Huh wait, So did you just talk yourself out of
what you were originally going?
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I did, Okay, I did.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
I Like, I love watching these transformations in real time.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Well, I was gonna go with the Project Bluebeam test
because you know, I'm all about it, and I'm pretty
sure top of a building like that in Montreal would
be a great place to test it out.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
For years, you've you've been about this, and then maybe
maybe if we're if we're going further down the rabbit hole.
Maybe that explains why this was instead of a religious
figure or a messianic figure, this was a sun god.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
All right.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
This was just something that looked like an orb. So
here's my argument against it being a physical object some
or at least getting the size wrong. For it to
be almost most eighteen hundred feet and at an elevation
of twenty five let's keep it a meters five hundred
and forty meters elevation at twenty five hundred to three
thousand meters, that would mean just put it in American phrases,
(46:14):
because you know, we'll do We'll find a system of
measurement of ridiculous degrees in comparisons. We'll do anything we
can so long as it prevents us from having to
think in the metric system. That's why news is always like,
you know, what's blah blah blah kilograms. That's the size
of like four elephants and one Costco pack of oreos.
(46:38):
And it's like that's seven refrigerators. Anyway, this five hundred
and forty meters, think that's like five football fields that
would be if it were flying, that would be like,
by far right the largest craft. Ever.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
It's a dang mothership.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
You guys like, I don't have I don't know the
biggest airship right now, but I don't think it's five
football field.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Yeah, what is the aircraft carrier of the sky? I
keep thinking of the large military of the see one, no.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
See something right? C. Seventeen C five.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
I think that's right. I remember Marshall brain talking C.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Seventeen is correct, And that's one where the front opens, right,
the nose opens.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
Yes, it's huge.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, that okay, let's let's fig out that is fifty
three meters long, wingspan of fifty one point seventy five meters. Wow,
much bigger than that. I don't know. It's just tough
because it's like the Bigfoot question again. If there's something
that big and a ton of people are looking for it,
(47:40):
where the hell is it? Why haven't we found it?
Speaker 3 (47:42):
Well? If it is a space faring craft, Ben, that's right,
you're right, came into our atmosphere, hung out for a minute,
pretty high up, probably higher up than we thought, and
then just went back out.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
If it is. If it is, it's no set a mothership,
then maybe they just stopped by to see if there
was if there was room on this planet for them,
and maybe it was just like when you're walking into uh,
when you're walking around you're trying to find a public
restroom and you have to just like try the knobs
on the stalls or whatever. And so maybe maybe that's
what they Maybe that's what they did. Maybe they came
(48:16):
in and did the equivalent of like the bathroom stall
check and said, dang, there's already there's already a life here.
Speaker 3 (48:23):
There are way too many lights down there. Cap and
they're like, ah, maybe it's bioluminescence serves some other form,
And they're like, I don't know, I don't think it's
a trick of the light. I'm pretty sure those are
that's actual creatures.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
How cool would it be if they were on that
mother ship and they were debating what they saw? Yeah,
like what was that down there?
Speaker 3 (48:44):
That was weird, man.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
So I was like, no, it was just the it
was foggy.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
It was so fun.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Those were fog buildings, you fool. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (48:54):
Oh it is odd, man, it's really odd.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
If I just yeah, that's that's what I think is
interesting about this because there's not a satisfactory, universally accepted
explanation and every time you get to the point where
you say, well, was definitely this, there's always a well wait,
just like just like we encountered at the end of this,
my last one, my last ditch, the you know pitch
(49:19):
that I had my hail Mary, I'm pulling from my
back pocket. Uh if not my keyster is this? What
if it wasn't a physical craft but it was the
ghost of a craft? What if it's a ghost ship? No,
then it wouldn't be solid, it wouldn't be physical. Yep,
crickets Okay, Paul, can you put some crickets in?
Speaker 3 (49:43):
Man? Sorry? Well no, I you know, I just have
to say this has been a lot of fun to imagine,
talk about. And thank you to Brian for writing us
that email. I remember when you first sent that to us.
Of this maybe too much detail, but I was hanging
out at my house doing a thing that all of
us do that you know it involves a bathroom, and
(50:08):
I literally got your email and I went, oh, oh,
let me look at this. That sounds interesting. And then
I stayed way too long in the bathroom because I
was just I was watching that video I was telling
you about. It's not good for your calling now, well,
you know what I wasn't saying. I was actually using
the bathroom.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
I was just sitting there in that position, got stranded. Well,
we don't know.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
I got up and I was pacing. I was just
and forth, like what is this man in your bathroom? Yeah?
I have a really tiny bathroom. So it was just
kind of like a that's a couple of steps.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Well, that's that makes for a good pace. It's real intense.
We hope that you have enjoyed today's episode. We would
like to hear from you. What are some other what
what are some other cases of odd extraordinary sightings in
the sky, in the water, on land that you would
like us and your fellow listeners to explore. Let us know.
(51:01):
You can find us on Facebook, you can find us
on Instagram, you can find us on Twitter. We love
to recommend our Facebook community page. Here's where it gets crazy.
Some of the best mods in the business. All you
have to do get in is name one or all
four of us, or frankly, just like, make a joke,
say something funny. I'm a sucker for puns.
Speaker 3 (51:20):
It's so easy. Give us a call. Also, we are
one eight three three STDWYITK leave us a message, let
us know what you're thinking about this episode or any
other episode, and here we go our new tradition. I'm
going to play the latest message that has come in.
Are you guys ready, I'm ready. Here we go.
Speaker 7 (51:40):
Hey, Chromes TAGALOLNOI Hey, I heard your podcast on the coronavirus.
All I'm saying is I haven't heard any news about
Hong Kong in the last few months.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
Something ah as in the story of the coronavirus is
like in this episode, a fog that is being blanketed
over the region so that we don't think about what's
happening in Hong Kong right now.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
Yeah, yeah, I think we noted that in the episode
two you can find you can find news on Hong Kong.
But both the Hong Kong protest and the Weiger concentration camps,
it's my choice to call them that are still very
much in play. You know, it's still happening, it's just
not being reported.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
So follow Eric's footsteps. Leave us a message if you'd
like to.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Yeah, I do want to point out shout out to
everybody who there's a funny thread on. Here's where it
gets crazy, where people have started our fellow listeners have
started confessing that a lot of us repeat that phone
number to themselves along when you hear it. I'm telling you, guys,
ritualization works.
Speaker 3 (52:57):
Oh that is awesome. Well, thank you for doing that
with us, because it feels a little weird every time
we do it in here.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
Do it enough times, if enough people join us, you'll
summon some sort of demi gorgan.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
And that's the truth, some sort of demi gorgan.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
Now, you, guys, I want to say that Paul is
one human. And if you don't care for social media,
we get it. If you don't like phones, we get it.
If you have something that you need to tell us,
but you want a different way to tell us, well
we have one last option for you. You can always
contact us directly at our good old fashioned email.
Speaker 8 (53:33):
We are expiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (53:54):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of Iheartradios. How stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Here's one for our Canadian friends, our dear neighbors up north,
who are still part of the Commonwealth of the United Kingdom,
but like us, hold an immense consistent interest in strange
stuff over the sky. Can we journey real quick to
(00:21):
seven November nineteen ninety?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh, are you talking about in the foggy early hours
of the evening of said to date in nineteen ninety?
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Wait? Are we talking about Hotel Bonaventure?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Wait? Believe what was that? What was that up there? Well?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
I think we're talking about not moons over my hammy,
like the sandwich. We're talking about UFOs over Montreal, which
should also be a sandwich, kind of like a coke monsieur.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Perhaps.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Well, I do love that this is a story about
a thing people still cannot explain multiple eye witnesses. It's
nineteen ninety, so they don't have the phones as smart
as some of us in the audience have today. But
I am immensely privileged to be hanging out with two
(01:09):
of the best forensic guys in the business. And in
twenty twenty we asked each other what we could make
of these reports.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah, anytime there's a mass sighting, right, that's what gets
us excited. It's just not one person's account, one person
remembering what they saw. We know that eyewitnesses are flawed
often in many things. Right, Just because we as soon
as we remember a thing that we saw or heard
(01:41):
or tasted or touched that sensation, we put a tiny
bit of our personal spin on it. We don't mean too,
We're not doing it intentionally. It's just the human nature.
Just you tweak it a little bit, especially when you're
recounting a story. Right, But in this case, it's a
whole bunch of people in a hotel that saw the
same thing or hours.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
The hotel, by the way, did not give us a discount.
I can't remember if we talked about that in this episode.
But let's roll the tape.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
From UFOs to Psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
A production of Iheartrading.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Nola.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul. Mission control decands, most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. Today's episode comes to
us from an email. It comes to us from Brian W. So, Brian,
I hope you're listening to every episode, but I hope
(03:00):
you were particularly tuned into this one. Here's what you said, Brian,
you said, Hey, guys, I've been binging on the show
all summer, and after listening to the Canada's Roswell episode,
I remember that my dad told me about a very
famous incident here in Montreal back in nineteen ninety that
he remembered seeing on the local news. So far, I
have not heard any of your episodes mention it. And Brian,
(03:24):
you are correct, my friend, fellow conspiracy realists, but that
is something we are going to correct for ourselves today.
In this episode Montreal nineteen ninety there was something weird
in the sky. It's true, and we'll get to the
crazy parts of this, but first let's start with the facts. Montreal,
(03:49):
what is it? You know it's in Canada, right, but
what else? It's a band I like, that's of Montreal.
That's right, that's.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Right, and they're actually on tour right now. Our farm
friend in my roommate and lifelong pal Frank recently went
to Montreal and said it was a delightful cornucopia of
delicious foods and arts, and very clean, and the metro
system was very clean and he had a wonderful time.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
He said. It is the second largest city right in Canada,
at least when you're talking about population, which is kind
of cool, right.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It takes up about three fourths of Montreal Island. It's
an older city, at least as far as this continent goes.
Colonial history dates back into the sixteenth century. It started
as a missionary settlement. Of course, like every other European
based American city, there were plenty of people living there beforehand,
but anyway Europeans come, it becomes a missionary settlement, and
(04:47):
you know, there was plenty of money to be made
in religion. But they also realized they could make another
ton of money if they got into the fur trade,
and so Montreal became a hub of the the fur trade.
Trappers would travel to and fro acquiring pelts, and then
they would return there to sell and ship them. As
(05:10):
for the character of Montreal, as in days of yore
and in the modern day, the best way to say
it is that if you were traveling to Montreal or
Quebec in general from the US, the first thing you'll
notice is that it is very, very very French.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Ah.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yes, and again goes back to its history. But also
right now, if we're talking about twenty twenty, the majority
of Montreal's population are French Canadian. They would identify as
French Canadian. And while you hear some people claim that
Montreal is the second largest French speaking city in the world,
of course, after Paris in France, that's a bit of
(05:51):
a dodgy statement, right there are some other places that
might actually meet that.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah, can Chassa, Algiers. They're both populous in their own right,
and they're also probably growing more quickly in terms of
birth rate.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
And maybe While once Montreal was known for exporting fine
pelts and furs, in the late nineties it kind of
got a reputation for exporting some fine musical bands such
as The Unicorns, the Arcade, fire Wolf Parade, Leonard Cohen
is from Montreal, a lot of great bands. Tim Hecker,
(06:28):
a more drony kind of thing, the Besnard Lakes, the Deers.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
I was huge into the.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Montreal music scene back in the late nineties and still
am today very much.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
But all it all. Montreal is a beautiful place. It's
full of history, it's full of culture. It's considered one
of the most cosmopolitan aka European cities on the entirety
of the North American continent. However, it's also known for
(06:57):
something else.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Oh yes, ben Like a lot of large metropolitan cities,
there are strange lights in the sky above Montreal. Strange
lights that may not come from any human origin or
maybe some kind of secret government experience, but in the end,
they're unidentified. They're flying, and they are objects.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
And that makes them UFOs objectively speaking. What are we
talking about. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. That's right, folks. Montreal is
(07:43):
not just famous for kabaquac culture and some bands from
the nineties. It's not just famous for proutine and amazing food.
It's famous for, you know, apparently, it's riddled with UFOs,
lousy with UFO sightings, the one of the most famous
of which occurred in nineteen ninety. So here's what went down.
(08:05):
Our story starts on November seventh.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
That's right, on November seventh, nineteen ninety, multiple witnesses reported
seeing a round metallic object beaming a series of bright lights,
brilliant lights even across the foggy Montreal sky. One witness,
the first known to have reported this sighting, said that
the object was seen from a rooftop pool on the
(08:30):
seventeenth floor of the Place Bonaventure hotel in downtown Montreal
a little after seven o'clock in the evening.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
And then the game of telephone begins. So this first
initial witness there were two people in the pool. The
first initial witness tells the lifeguard or sometimes described as
the pool supervisor, Lynn Saint Pierre, which sends off this
chain reaction. The lifeguard calls Albert Sterling. Albert Sterling works
for hotel security. Albert Sterling calls the police, the Royal
(09:02):
Canadian Mounted Police RCMP, the Horsey guys, and also a
journalist from a newspaper known as Laprosse, and as things
go on, the military in Canada gets calls NASA down
south the US way, They get calls and the story
spreads more and more and more people at primarily at
(09:25):
the hotel or around the area, gather on the seventeenth
floor terrace as the object appears to brighton at the
heights of the gathering. We're looking at around forty to
seventy people.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah, and it wasn't like it was just a light
that was there for a minute. When you're talking about
all of these people gathering and making their way down
to this hotel, it's time. There's a lot of time there,
and by the time people arrived, it was still in
the sky, still shining. And you're looking at about three
hours from beginning to end roughly, so from about seven
(09:58):
to twenty pm to around ten ten pm. And that's
one of the reasons this is such an interesting event.
Why we're so very glad that this was brought to
our attention, because you don't a lot of times have
this number of witnesses, and you know, how you would
characterize those witnesses depends really on each individual. But there
(10:21):
are enough reliable witnesses there to feel as though there's
something really happening here.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, journalists, pilots, police officers, Oh, a congressman is there
or a congress member. The journalist Marcel LaRouche arrives around
nine pm, so this thing has already been happening for
almost two hours, and he is our primary source for
(10:48):
photographs the most widely circulated photographs you'll see of the
phenomenon and the way he was able to photograph this
his camera directly toward the sky, manual pause for about
thirty seconds, and then he just held down the button,
so he got a bunch of different photographs. The light,
(11:11):
the brightness of the object had decreased. Now keep that
in mind because as it's slowly decreasing, that is that
is an indicator for us of one thing or another.
And another photo that was taken, Like if you, well man,
you're you're a visual expert, how would you how would
you guys describe this?
Speaker 3 (11:33):
The photographs that I've actually seen of this, I saw
some from the CBC archives, and I'm watching the video
on the CBC dot Ca website here, and we've also
got some screen grabs that you can find online in
a couple places. It looks to me like the way
I see the sun, like with rays of sunlight bursting
(11:57):
through cloud cover sometimes we can get that that real
distinct ray. It kind of looks like that a golden hue,
bit of a greenish color to it as well, and
it's just it's hard to describe. It does look as
though there was something kind of hanging out behind some cloud.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Cover right right, And we know that not all the
photos taken were of similar quality because of the way
the object appeared to be stationary, which is which is
hugely important. Other people were saying we saw six lights
or we saw three lights. You know, they were dim.
(12:39):
Other attempts to photograph this object, other than those of
the journalists failed due to the low light. So we
think Marcel himself took about ten photos. The object gradually
melted into the increasingly dense cloud cover and it disappeared
completely around ten fifteen ps. So now we have to
(13:01):
ask ourselves, well, what did it look like? Matt I
think he did an excellent job describing it, but we
also have to acknowledge the some of the weird things
about eyewitness descriptions and the treacherous path of memory. So
we know that the accounts had slight variation and things
like number of lights, estimated size and so on, but
(13:23):
they largely agreed in our On a previous episode with
Mad Scientists podcast creator and host Christopher Cogswell, we had
a pretty good conversation about how people can misinterpret things
when they're viewing them on the ground, right, So that's
why it's important to note that we had we had
(13:45):
pilots both in the ground and spoiler alert in the
sky who were able to encounter this. Estimates currently from
a couple of different reports say the craft was about
five hundred and forty meters wide. Again, people who believe
it was a craft.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
And the other thing is kind of what you just said,
they're they're estimating how far away it is to give
you that general size.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
And just for everyone not on the metric system aka
like Namibia and the United States, O, Myanmar, five hundred
and forty meters is huge. It's like seventeen hundred almost
eighteen hundred feet, So whatever this was would have been
(14:29):
enormous if it were a physical craft.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Again, yeah, and if it you know, if they're getting
that distance, you know, the belief the believed distance correct
about how large that thing is because it sounds like
a dang mothership, you guys, right.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Right and are rush your mouth an arc traveling through space, right.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
And the other thing to point out here, ben or
the number of lights that were seen, because you know
it was a bit varied, but somewhere between eight and
ten distinguishable different lights were seen that were attached in
some way to this craft, at least as it was told.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And that could have depended on an angle,
because again we have to remember that of the multiple
witnesses who were sighted in most of the contemporary reports,
the majority of them were on this terrace, meaning that
for all for all practical purposes, they were looking at
(15:29):
it from the same angle. And when you have people
looking at something from the same angle, you lose valuable perspective.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
So I have to bring this up. Yeah, I've finally
got THISC video functioning again, huh. And some of the
images in there there they actually go to the journalist's
place of work who took those photos we've been speaking about.
And there's one pulled up here that is it's similar
to the one that you been in. The outline has
(15:58):
a screenshot of one of these, and you know, it's
a fairly low resolution video that we're looking at here,
But the way these light rays are going through that
cloud cover, I just I just have to say, like
trying to figure out how far away whatever it is is. Yes,
it's like the central difficulty, the central light.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
You know, it's just like two dots and then there
are these radiating points that Yeah, to your point, Matt,
it's really hard to gauge, like how close would it
have to be for those radiations to be that close.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
So the great thing that we have here is, as
you teased earlier, a witness who was actually in the air.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Right, Yeah, that's correct. So while this was going again,
it was there for almost three hours fromably like two
hours and fifty minutes. While it was going, there was
a private Cessna aircraft and these are Cessena or tiny
planes comparatively, And another very weird spoiler it turns out
they're hard to find. We'll follow up on that much later.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
So this I loved that.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
But this aircraft is passing near these light beams and
it doesn't run into anything. It flies through the sky uninterrupted,
thank goodness. Right, and this led police to say, well, okay,
whatever this thing is, this object is much higher in
(17:28):
elevation than we thought. And so the journalist says, okay,
the altitude of this plane might be round three hundred
and seventy meters. That's what I thought first. But then
there was a Near Canada pilot on the hotel roof
who said no, no.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
No, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
No way, man, you write the reports. I'll do the
I'll do the elevation estimates because I fly planes and
that thing is, I assure you, my friend, twenty five
hundred between twenty five hundred and three thousand meters.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
So that's almost ten thousand feet in the air.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
So that would have to like how huge would that
thing have to be to still look big from that distance?
Speaker 3 (18:06):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
So, of course, in interviews, which you can still find online,
there are multiple witnesses who are certain this was an
alien or extraterrestrial craft, including some members of the police force,
which was surprising to me. There was an interview with
one fifteen years later who said, Nope, never saw anything
like it, not of earthly origin. You can also you
(18:29):
can also find some reports that detail well, you can
find the entirety of the police report in French and
you can translate it. It includes the police force's own statements,
but then it includes drawings, little drawings like this from
the witnesses that just looked like circles with the lines
(18:53):
of light coming out.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Yeah, so where the light was in position, and then
where that light ray essentially was observed.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
The lights are all like what yellowish green?
Speaker 3 (19:01):
I guess, yeah, it's it's it's very yellow to my eye,
at least with that kind of green almost shading in there.
And I'm honestly not being there in nineteen ninety I
don't know what kind of light pollution is existing in
that area of Montreal to you know, color the clouds,
which occurs in any major metropolitan area. But it looks
(19:26):
oddly yellow green.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Right, that's correct, And well we'll figure out exactly what
that means as as we continue now, Matt, you alluded
to something earlier about what made this sighting different and
we have several features that distinguish it from the majority
of sightings.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Well, yeah, the first one I think is what we
already talked about, just the number of witnesses who were there,
who who you know, weren't just some This is off
to say, but it wasn't just some farmer or you know,
some a single person or a single family in a
rural area.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Two people in a truck.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Yeah, And that's not to cast aspersions on anyone who
would fit that description. It just means there are multiple
people there, multiple many of them are authority figures, someone
you would consider to be an authority figure when it
comes to let's say, any aircraft that's going to be
in the sky in a controlled airspace.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
And they were also you know, there's a funny story.
One of the witnesses sat at the hotel. I think
she was she was at a wedding, or she was
attending a wedding. She was having dinner. Basically, she's having
a fancy dinner and they heard about this, and so
she finished your soup and she goes as stairs at
the thief for a while. She goes back in, she's
the salad. She goes to check if it's still out there.
(20:53):
And like her account of the police is just her
taking breaks in between watching UFO to eat.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Yeah, And it wasn't just on this terrace. It wasn't
just in this building. It was over a huge city,
and there were people viewing this thing all over the place,
all across the city because it was just an unnerving
thing to observe.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah, And one thing they had in common is that
they all they all pointed out an unequal distribution of light.
It seemed to heavier own one side then another. Payon
there was where they were hanging out, and this was
a densely populated city. You know, there's something in the air,
(21:36):
and it's a real thing, then people see it. That is,
if it's a solid object and its line of sight.
But if it's a meteorological phenomenon, or if it's a
trick of the light, then people looking from the opposite
direction might not see anything at all. That's just how
that stuff works, right.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
It's true. But you got to take into account that
cloud cover in the distance from the clouds that we
were able to really discern.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Right, and there was no change in its movement, no
real change in its size. The fact that it was
visible for so long is interesting, not just because it
allowed more people to see it, but because it allowed
them to time to observe it in increasingly sophisticated and professional ways. Okay,
(22:23):
so one of the first things people would talk about
would be the idea that it's light, that it's just light.
We can dive into that later. But as oh, you know,
people back in the nineteen nineties were not any less
or nore more intelligent than people in twenty twenty. They
thought of that too. They actually turned off some nearby
(22:48):
floodlights or construction lights to see if that did anything,
and no, this mysterious Montreal UFO was still hung there.
And this leads researchers like Bernard Gugnete and ex NASA
scientist doctor Richard Haynes to argue that there definitely was
something up there, and meaning a solid object of some sort.
(23:10):
They said, we can't trace the source of it. I
can't tell you what it was, but we believe it
was something. Their report's pretty exhaustive. It's like twenty five
pages long, and the you know, the climactic moment of
their report is when they say, quote, the existence of
a highly unusual, hovering, silent, large object is indisputable.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
Yeah. Yeah, it really is big too, And you're right
on with the twenty five page report, and it's you know,
they don't well, maybe we won't spoil it now whether
or not they actually say exactly what it is.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Oh yeah, hey, you know what, Let's let's get to that.
Let's answer that question. Let's answer the ghostly yellow lit
elephant hovering above the room of the hotel here. What
on earth or off earth was this? We'll tell you
after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Okay, so what was it? I gotta know?
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Well, let me tell you, This thing, whatever it was,
was definitely unidentified.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
But yeah, unfortunate, Unfortunately for all the true believers out there,
there does not seem to be Again, we just have
to say it. There's not a there's not a water
tight case of extraterrestrial visitation. It does remain unidentified, this craft,
this object, this phenomenon, and while it seemed to be
(24:46):
a real physical object of some sort, there's no indication
that it did something like, you know, disobeyed the laws
of physics or generated any other abstract behavior. No non
human creatures out and warned us about the danger of
nuclear war or large scale pollution, so far as we know.
(25:08):
Maybe they missed that in the reporting, and this leads
those on the more skeptical end, of course, to relegate
this to the land of mundane weather phenomenon and then
subsequent exaggeration, which happens when people are panicking. So why
do they say this. It all really goes back to
the fog. Could this have been nothing more than spotlights
(25:30):
reflecting off the clouds?
Speaker 3 (25:32):
You know?
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Again, the Plas Bonaventure is close to pretty tall buildings.
It's in downtown Montreal. At least one of those had
active spotlights or construction. But those things were and those
things can be clipped off, right. You can make a
request to turn that stuff off, But you can't tell
everybody driving in a city to turn off their headlights
(25:53):
at night, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, I would say spotlights, even the ones that you'll
see you used and just shot up into the air,
you know, during a large event, maybe a movie theater
every once in a while, a gentleman's club you'll sells, well,
you'll see, yeah, exactly. They have a pretty specific shape
that can be you know, opened and closed. It's a lens,
(26:17):
but it expands at least slightly as it goes outward, right, correct,
So if we're talking about lights that are just beamed
up into the sky like that, or you know, reflections
of some pretty high powered spotlight of any kind, I
think it would look different than what we're seeing here.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, what we're seeing here is not something that I
can rightly, you know, attribute to any phenomenon that I've
personally seen before.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
But remember that doesn't take into account other kinds of lights,
other shapes of you know, lights.
Speaker 5 (26:57):
Ghost I just mean, I can't completely you know, I
can't completely say it wasn't a reflection like that of
some kind, because there's some other weird stuff going on here,
particularly with the angle of viewing the thing.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
But all of the evidence that I have been able
to look at, that you've been able to look at
and knowl's being able to look at is stuff that
was captured in nineteen ninety. Yeah, and that doesn't mean,
you know, we can't fully trust what we're looking at.
It just means the you know, it's the resolution is
(27:34):
going to be a little different unless it's film, right,
Unless it's actual film, right, which a couple of these
pictures were filmed, the video quality of anything that was
taken back then is going to be very low resolution.
I would just say the technology maybe was not as sophisticated.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, that's something I want to point out. Yeah, camera
equipment of thirty years ago. And yes, yes this should
shock and shock some people listening and weird some of
this out nineteen ninety was almost thirty years ago. It's
like a few November seventh, nineteen ninety is a few
months away from thirty years ago, and technology evolves at
(28:19):
such a breakneck pace. You're right, Matt, I would say
you totally cannot trust that stuff. It's fuzzy. You know,
if we just depended on those photographs and that video,
it's not surprising at all to rank anything inconclusive because
even an actual craft like say a high altitude blimp,
(28:43):
if those existed at the time, would be difficult to discern,
just given again that very low resolution. And then you
know one thing, it's tempting to say it's a weather
phenomenon because it appears to gently just sort of recede
into the clouds like that gift or jiff of Homer
Simpsons sinking back into the topiary. But blimps could just
(29:08):
rise and it would look the same to an observer,
you know what I mean, especially if the cloud cover
is increasing, because as cloud cover increases and moisture I
don't know why I was doing that voice, but moisture accumulates,
then it pushed the clouds seem to get lower right
and heavier. So I'm just saying we can't based on
(29:29):
the footage alone, we can't rule out either a solid
object or weather phenomenon. The problem is, again it goes
back to the vantage point, because people at the hotel,
upon a venture, to them, this looked like a solid object,
and some of them, including police, are still convinced to
(29:49):
this date. But people from other vantage points they still
saw something, but they thought it was a weird reflection,
you know, like how you see lights and pools at
night reflect weird weird ghost shadows from the water.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Yeah, and you know that could make sense to me.
I'm just trying to figure out. I'm trying to figure
out how I feel about this, you guys, I'm imagining,
you know, the holographic technology, the hologram technology that uses
mists as a medium, so you just shine light on
(30:27):
the mist and then you can have something three dimensional
or appear to be three dimensional, like the Peppers ghost effect.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
These in the Haunted Mansion at Disney sort of an
older effects, I believe, So, yeah, something these mirrors as
it's it's sort of an old school way of generating
a hologram.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
I believe they're updated versions those shut and a lot
of it goes into a yie old project bluebeam by
the way of projecting images onto cloud cover, which is really,
like you said, Ben, just moisture at certain densities, and
as it's more dense, you can get a more solid
looking object in the cloud cover, the fog as we're
(31:05):
calling it here, does appear to be very very thick
in that area. And I'm wondering if I just haven't
seen that kind of technology at play yet, and it
could be something like that that I just don't have
the reference point for totally.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, I mean, I can completely understand that. We also
have we have a couple of different experts who wait
in both in the Montreal area and then just people
study astronomy or ufologists or so on. Well, one I'd
like to bring to our attention is doctor Robert la Montaigne,
(31:44):
who's a professor of astronomy at the University of Montreal,
and he had I think he had the most even
handed initial response, because again we have to remember, like
November seventh, eighth through the ninth, people are say it
all kinds of just wild, out of pocket stuff about this.
(32:05):
So here's what the astronomy professor says. People saw something.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
They saw UFO.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Now the word UFO is unidentified flying objects. So they
saw something in the sky that they couldn't identify. They
saw phenomenon. Now it remains to find an explanation. We
haven't had time to find one yet. It takes a while.
We need to have observations, we need to collect a
whole series of information together. So far, most of the
investigations that are looking at the UFO phenomenon often take
(32:35):
several days to find an explanation. For decades that we
have been dealing with UFO phenomena, not only in Quebec
but almost everywhere in the world. Until now, none of
these UFO phenomena has found its source in the presence
of vessels from other planets. All UFO phenomena have their
explanation in natural phenomena of meteorological origin or or Borealis
(33:01):
type or artificial phenomenon that checks out.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
So in a very dry way, he's saying, I'm not
saying it can't be aliens, but it would be the
first friggin time ever. Well, it's also just the term
UFO is so loaded.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
People have so many associations with it from pop culture
and sci fi and everything, you know, But what it
really just means is a lack of an explanation. And
just because we're seeing something that doesn't have an explanation
doesn't mean you can make the leap to it is
this origins being somewhere you know, outside of the known.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Universe, Right, Yeah, I gotta say something really weird on
personal level about that several dates. Maybe it was last
week on Reddit. I was digging into something.
Speaker 6 (33:44):
And someone quoted me saying that on Reddit and it
was like the most I think it was the coolest
thing that happened to me that month.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Well, this month's this is a new month.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Every we just switched over bin.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
But yeah, we have to say that, right, every every
time we deal with UFOs, we do have to we
do have to emphasize that because you're right, Noel, it
has it has become a loaded term ever since the
nineteen what late forties?
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Maybe yeah, that old roswell, well, hey, let's I want it.
Can we go to the next person that stepped in
because this person just is so skeptical of anything else?
Like where that was maybe even handed that we just
heard from, sure from the professor there.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Yeah, but Mark has next to grind.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Oh man, Mark, what is a galinas? He's a meteorologist
with Environment Canada. That's an organization and secretary of the
Montreal Astronomical Society. This dude was not having any of this.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Oh yeah, you could just hear the the scoff.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, what did he say?
Speaker 1 (34:53):
He said, he looked at the photographs first, and he said,
it looks like a phenomenon observed on many occasions, especially
when we work with projectors sometimes used in meteorology.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Okay, no, okay, projectors used with meteorology.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I see the case you're building.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Okay, all right, keep going.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Okay, I'm picking up a foot down. I'm on board,
and so he goes. Light is reflected by ice crystals
or water droplets in the cloud. So depending on the
density of that cloud.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
I feel like we just talked about this.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah, the beam might be several hundred meters thick and
visible from a great distance. He further conjectured stuff like
the rays might come from an automobile because they have headlights.
The headlights might point at the sky, or they might
reflect toward the sky because buildings have windows and windows
(35:57):
are reflective.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Like, he's very much over this mark you're saying. Okay,
I'm first of all.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
He's saying everything, but I'm condescending, which means I talk
down to people.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
I'm just trying to imagine a car that is somehow
positioned with its headlights for three at that angle like
on a giant hill somewhere that's just kind of sitting
there shooting up.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Because the thing, the problem with the headlight argument is
that these headlights would not be static. They would be
moving right.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Well, well, they'd be moving, but also there are no
laser headlights. You know, they could shoot all the way
up into there and then reflect down in those rays
that we're observing. Maybe I'm wrong, Mark, maybe maybe you're right.
I just I don't see that, but uh, okay, we're
This is not aimed at you, Ben, but it's true.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
And then he's like, and then he points out the
spotlights stuff, and he points out that light beams come
from shopping centers. He's basically the whole time is going
you guys, lights, you have lights.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
They're everywhere.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Lights are everywhere. It's Montreal, we're almost in the twenty
first century.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
They are reflective surfaces everywhere, the clouds and the ice
crystals come on. Man.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
And it's interesting because you see other astronomy societies of
the time. There was one quote. I don't mean dig
through the notes, but there's there's one quote from someone
who seems a little bit offended by this, this claim
that it's an alien or extraterrestrial UFO and then says, oh,
(37:38):
it's a dominic l Rose. Dominic loros I believe is
the man who said, you know what, in my organization,
A lot of us came to it because we realized
that quote unquote alien UFOs don't exist. So it's weird
when you get into this kind of debate because science
(38:01):
has the lie and share of attention in these concepts
in these conversations, and it should, but there's also some
psychology and they're involved in there. There's some grudges being held,
like when we learn some of the weird behind the
behind the curtain business going on with Muffon, which was
frankly surprising and had nothing to do with aliens. Maybe
(38:24):
that's a conspiracy for another day, but let's look at
the other reports. So let's take psychology as far out
of it as we can. We know that, like any
other large city in the developed world, Montreal has a
ton of monitoring devices and systems in play. These things
are on every day of the year, twenty four hours
(38:46):
a day, seven days a week. They're supposed to ping
when they see something.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Yeah, and there are humans that for most of the time,
if not all of the time are checking those systems
and looking at them.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Yeah. Yeah, So so some experts check into power grids
and they say, what about electromagnetic disturbances. We know those
can do screwy things. Because keep in mind that Canada
is one of the one of the countries that experienced
the world's strongest, most recent coronal mass ejection, right, which
in the eighties threw the place back into the dark
(39:23):
age for a minute, but not for long, right, just
unexpectedly shorted out grids. So they found one power failure,
but it was like it was around eleven PM, so
it was after this thing would have been.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Around because we're talking seven twenties, always said.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Seven twenty to like ten ten or so. And then
they checked operating records of communication networks, radio stations, radio operators,
telephone circuits, excuse me, during the evening of November seventh,
nineteen ninety and they did not find any unusual amount
of malfunction whatever. This means that whatever it was was
(40:05):
not at the very least was not interfering with power grids,
nor electromagnetic systems or things that could be affected by that.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
Well that's I mean, okay, this is a good piece
of you know, knowledge to have. It's not it's probably
not the electrical grid. But another set of monitoring instruments
would be radar.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Which would pick up physical objects.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Yes, especially in the airspace. But that wasn't happening, right.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
There were no UFOs detected or reported to be detected
in any case by airport radar systems. The controller, a
controller that was interviewed, reported that for the twenty years
he's worked in the field at the same control tower,
no UFOs have ever been reported. According to him in
a report a few days later, the phenomenon reporter on
(40:50):
Wednesday was caused by a light ray.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Oh so we have another expert saying it's not physical.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
Yeah, it's just light, man, it's just a true of
the light.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
It's only the wind. It's not the ghost of your
dead lover. It's only the wind. All right.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Let's get almost down to the end here, because I
want to just talk about what I think it is.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Okay, all right, So if you want to see a
more modern version of this, and you're a fan of
less than stellar television, you can check out a show
that the television channel Canal D made in two thousand
and seven. A reconstruction of this phenomenon in a series
(41:34):
of theirs called Mystery Files. They interviewed a lot of
the witnesses. Surprise, mainly the witnesses who believe it was
extraterrestrial and different people. Will note that a lot of
the ufology websites that are convinced this was extraterrestrial origin
will mainly cite this report. You can watch it on YouTube.
(41:58):
I don't want to be a jerk about it, but
I wouldn't call it groundbreaking science. It's entertainment. So the
point of that is to entertain you with a recre creations,
as they're.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
Called, good old fashioned recree of some light rays.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
So in this case, it appears for now that the
most likely explanation for the nineteen ninety Montreal sighting was
either a mundane, if secret craft of some sort or
a strange type of light weather phenomenon caused by interaction
with this low foggy sky. Again, the big questions are
(42:39):
the number of witnesses let us know there was definitely
something visible there, and the fact that it stayed visible
for three hours is pretty fascinating too. There's a pretty
there was an argument for some kind of aberrant behavior
of the northern lights. But that doesn't hold up on
(43:01):
you once you dig into it. So all right, what
do you think, Okay, what do you think.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
A natural phenomena of sun rays somehow being bent around
at around seven pm, which you know that's November seven pm.
I don't know exactly when the sun was setting on
that day, but there is there are phenomena where sun
light can be bent around the planet if you know,
(43:32):
at certain times like after dusk or after the sun
has set, where you can get some weird light ray
action going on in distortions, right, and it's it almost
always has to do with moisture in the sky. These
ice crystals were talking about.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
That makes sense because they would refract it and could
split it off in different patterns and make it look
like it's moving abnormally.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Right, Yes, And Montreal isn't you know, right near the
equator or anything. It's getting up higher or north in latitude,
so you know that potential is there when you're talking
about where you can actually see some strange things in
the ionosphere above you, you know, Montreal is pretty dang
(44:15):
close up to those places where it's most strong. But again, oh,
you know, what when you when you see Aurora borealis
spin and noole, generally, what color do you see?
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Ah'm not the best person, desk.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
H green is one of the prominent colors that.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Is blue is supposed to be blue.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
It's greenish. Okay, I'm sorry, But the green hue or
the coloration and some of those images that you're seeing
high up above in that fog could be you know,
I I could see that being Aurora borealis kind of
of things. But then if you mix that in with
(45:03):
maybe a bit of sunlight being refracted and kind of
bent over like that, you could get those light rays
because it really does look like tiny suns like shooting
out rays through that cloud cover. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Huh wait, So did you just talk yourself out of
what you were originally going?
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I did, Okay, I did.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
I Like, I love watching these transformations in real time.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Well, I was gonna go with the Project Bluebeam test
because you know, I'm all about it, and I'm pretty
sure top of a building like that in Montreal would
be a great place to test it out.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
For years, you've you've been about this, and then maybe
maybe if we're if we're going further down the rabbit hole.
Maybe that explains why this was instead of a religious
figure or a messianic figure, this was a sun god.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
All right.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
This was just something that looked like an orb. So
here's my argument against it being a physical object some
or at least getting the size wrong. For it to
be almost most eighteen hundred feet and at an elevation
of twenty five let's keep it a meters five hundred
and forty meters elevation at twenty five hundred to three
thousand meters, that would mean just put it in American phrases,
(46:14):
because you know, we'll do We'll find a system of
measurement of ridiculous degrees in comparisons. We'll do anything we
can so long as it prevents us from having to
think in the metric system. That's why news is always like,
you know, what's blah blah blah kilograms. That's the size
of like four elephants and one Costco pack of oreos.
(46:38):
And it's like that's seven refrigerators. Anyway, this five hundred
and forty meters, think that's like five football fields that
would be if it were flying, that would be like,
by far right the largest craft. Ever.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
It's a dang mothership.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
You guys like, I don't have I don't know the
biggest airship right now, but I don't think it's five
football field.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Yeah, what is the aircraft carrier of the sky? I
keep thinking of the large military of the see one, no.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
See something right? C. Seventeen C five.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
I think that's right. I remember Marshall brain talking C.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Seventeen is correct, And that's one where the front opens, right,
the nose opens.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
Yes, it's huge.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, that okay, let's let's fig out that is fifty
three meters long, wingspan of fifty one point seventy five meters. Wow,
much bigger than that. I don't know. It's just tough
because it's like the Bigfoot question again. If there's something
that big and a ton of people are looking for it,
(47:40):
where the hell is it? Why haven't we found it?
Speaker 3 (47:42):
Well? If it is a space faring craft, Ben, that's right,
you're right, came into our atmosphere, hung out for a minute,
pretty high up, probably higher up than we thought, and
then just went back out.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
If it is. If it is, it's no set a mothership,
then maybe they just stopped by to see if there
was if there was room on this planet for them,
and maybe it was just like when you're walking into uh,
when you're walking around you're trying to find a public
restroom and you have to just like try the knobs
on the stalls or whatever. And so maybe maybe that's
what they Maybe that's what they did. Maybe they came
(48:16):
in and did the equivalent of like the bathroom stall
check and said, dang, there's already there's already a life here.
Speaker 3 (48:23):
There are way too many lights down there. Cap and
they're like, ah, maybe it's bioluminescence serves some other form,
And they're like, I don't know, I don't think it's
a trick of the light. I'm pretty sure those are
that's actual creatures.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
How cool would it be if they were on that
mother ship and they were debating what they saw? Yeah,
like what was that down there?
Speaker 3 (48:44):
That was weird, man.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
So I was like, no, it was just the it
was foggy.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
It was so fun.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Those were fog buildings, you fool. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (48:54):
Oh it is odd, man, it's really odd.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
If I just yeah, that's that's what I think is
interesting about this because there's not a satisfactory, universally accepted
explanation and every time you get to the point where
you say, well, was definitely this, there's always a well wait,
just like just like we encountered at the end of this,
my last one, my last ditch, the you know pitch
(49:19):
that I had my hail Mary, I'm pulling from my
back pocket. Uh if not my keyster is this? What
if it wasn't a physical craft but it was the
ghost of a craft? What if it's a ghost ship? No,
then it wouldn't be solid, it wouldn't be physical. Yep,
crickets Okay, Paul, can you put some crickets in?
Speaker 3 (49:43):
Man? Sorry? Well no, I you know, I just have
to say this has been a lot of fun to imagine,
talk about. And thank you to Brian for writing us
that email. I remember when you first sent that to us.
Of this maybe too much detail, but I was hanging
out at my house doing a thing that all of
us do that you know it involves a bathroom, and
(50:08):
I literally got your email and I went, oh, oh,
let me look at this. That sounds interesting. And then
I stayed way too long in the bathroom because I
was just I was watching that video I was telling
you about. It's not good for your calling now, well,
you know what I wasn't saying. I was actually using
the bathroom.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
I was just sitting there in that position, got stranded. Well,
we don't know.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
I got up and I was pacing. I was just
and forth, like what is this man in your bathroom? Yeah?
I have a really tiny bathroom. So it was just
kind of like a that's a couple of steps.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Well, that's that makes for a good pace. It's real intense.
We hope that you have enjoyed today's episode. We would
like to hear from you. What are some other what
what are some other cases of odd extraordinary sightings in
the sky, in the water, on land that you would
like us and your fellow listeners to explore. Let us know.
(51:01):
You can find us on Facebook, you can find us
on Instagram, you can find us on Twitter. We love
to recommend our Facebook community page. Here's where it gets crazy.
Some of the best mods in the business. All you
have to do get in is name one or all
four of us, or frankly, just like, make a joke,
say something funny. I'm a sucker for puns.
Speaker 3 (51:20):
It's so easy. Give us a call. Also, we are
one eight three three STDWYITK leave us a message, let
us know what you're thinking about this episode or any
other episode, and here we go our new tradition. I'm
going to play the latest message that has come in.
Are you guys ready, I'm ready. Here we go.
Speaker 7 (51:40):
Hey, Chromes TAGALOLNOI Hey, I heard your podcast on the coronavirus.
All I'm saying is I haven't heard any news about
Hong Kong in the last few months.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
Something ah as in the story of the coronavirus is
like in this episode, a fog that is being blanketed
over the region so that we don't think about what's
happening in Hong Kong right now.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
Yeah, yeah, I think we noted that in the episode
two you can find you can find news on Hong Kong.
But both the Hong Kong protest and the Weiger concentration camps,
it's my choice to call them that are still very
much in play. You know, it's still happening, it's just
not being reported.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
So follow Eric's footsteps. Leave us a message if you'd
like to.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Yeah, I do want to point out shout out to
everybody who there's a funny thread on. Here's where it
gets crazy, where people have started our fellow listeners have
started confessing that a lot of us repeat that phone
number to themselves along when you hear it. I'm telling you, guys,
ritualization works.
Speaker 3 (52:57):
Oh that is awesome. Well, thank you for doing that
with us, because it feels a little weird every time
we do it in here.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
Do it enough times, if enough people join us, you'll
summon some sort of demi gorgan.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
And that's the truth, some sort of demi gorgan.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
Now, you, guys, I want to say that Paul is
one human. And if you don't care for social media,
we get it. If you don't like phones, we get it.
If you have something that you need to tell us,
but you want a different way to tell us, well
we have one last option for you. You can always
contact us directly at our good old fashioned email.
Speaker 8 (53:33):
We are expiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (53:54):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of Iheartradios. How stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
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