This is the time of year to witness a strange site in the sky, not an alien spacecraft, mind you, but a chubby guy in a flying sleigh.
But that's not what gets Michel Deschamps' heart racing. Greater Sudbury's resident UFO researcher and webmaster of NOUFORS.com reached out to Sudbury.com this month to share some of the best UFO sightings he received over the past year.
“It has been a while since my last submission to the Northern Life,” Michel M. Deschamps said in an email. “I have been busy adding new sections to my historical UFO-related website, NOUFORS.com, and correcting all the broken links I can find."
But that's not all Deschamps has been doing. For decades, he's been collecting local and area reports of strange objects in the sky and cataloguing them on his website, a somewhat thankless job to which Deschamps has dedicated himself since nearly the dawn of the internet.
NOUFORS.com might retain the look of a website circa the late 1990s, but it is an historical treasure trove of sightings. What it lacks in design esthetic, it makes up for in data.
Here are some of the best sightings reported to Deschamps in the past year, and catalogued on NOUFORS.com.
Date: Monday, Jan. 30
Location: Sudbury, Ont.
A Sudbury resident had a daytime sighting of a large object while riding the Lasalle-Madison bus on Notre-Dame. She watched as it came down out of the sky, somewhere between where she was and the Adanac Ski Hill, and proceeded to "pace" the bus from that distance. She said that it seemed to be submarine-shaped with a segmented top that reminded her of cauliflower. She submitted a sketch of the object and is willing to have her story recorded as an MP3 for my website.
Date: April 14
Location: Sudbury, Ont.
I received the following message from one of my Facebook contacts who said that her mother had seen something unusual in the sky: "My neighbour and I had a fire in the pit. We had been looking up at the sky and I said, 'There's the Little Dipper.' Shortly after that, she said: 'Lynn, what's that?' I looked up and saw something flying in a diagonal formation — four lines — heading from the northeast to the southwest, not white but slightly yellow tinge. The best way to describe it would be like stripes on (the sleeve of a soldier). She kept asking what it was, and I said it's either a UFO or the U.S. testing a new plane. She said, 'What if it comes back?' and I said, 'They're probably over Killarney by now.' But then it came back, this time in a different formation. It came from the southwest to the northeast in sort of a triangle formation, this time. There was the 'nose' and two to the side and then one following at the back. We watched and then they zoomed away and disappeared."
Date: Thursday, May 11
Location: Sudbury, Ont.
A cabby friend of mine sent me the following message at 1:57 a.m., Thursday, May 11:
"Just dropped off the crew from Westjet from the airport. They said they saw something when they were coming in to land. They were playing off that it was a drone. I said, 'I doubt it.' It was a bright light they said lit up the cabin. They had the landing gear down.' I asked him about what altitude were they at, and he said: 'I guess maybe 5,000 feet or so.' "
Date: Monday, Oct. 30
Location: Sudbury, Ont.
My girlfriend was headed to the hospital for an appointment, and as she walked towards Van Horne, she looked up at the sky as she usually does, and she spotted a white object moving among the clouds at a very high altitude. She described it as being oval in shape, completely white in color, and moving from the east and heading north. At arm's length, the object was about a quarter inch in size. It had no wings and no tail, so this was not a plane, which she would have been able to identify, even at the distance she was looking from. She submitted a sketch, which is on the 2017 Sightings Reports page of my website. http://noufors.com/2017_sighting_reports.html
Date: Wednesday, Nov. 22
Location: Blind River, Ont.
While at work and on my supper break, I received a short message via e-mail from my friend and contact, Joan Morningstar, which stated that there had been a sighting of seven strange lights traveling in a straight line. They were at a relatively low altitude because of the cloud cover.
UFO sightings are not rare, Deschamps said in his email to Sudbury.com, but things are made more complicated by having Chinese lanterns and personal remote-control drones flying around. But UFO behaviour is different, and once people know what to look for when trying to identify what they are seeing, it becomes easy to "separate the wheat from the chaff," as they say (or in this case, as Deschamps would say).
Deshcamps' next project is to try and collect as many reports from former police officers and make the interviews available as audio files on his website.
“I already have plenty of highly interesting audio files to listen to, and I'm hoping to add a few more,” he said.
You can check out the audio files that Deschamps has made available here.
Anyone willing to have their stories recorded for the NOUFORS.com audio archive is asked to contact Deschamps via his website, or by phone.
“I've seen how much relief people get when they finally get their stories off their chests,” he said. “They now have the peace of mind that they are not alone in seeing these objects, and that together, we can bring the UFO truth to the surface for all to see.
“But then again, the evidence is overwhelming that we are being visited, the hundreds of thousands of government documents that I have in my possession will attest to that fact.”
— Sudbury.com