SUBJECT: STRANGE LIGHTS IN THE NIGHT SKY FILE: UFO1165
DAILY NEWS, Nelson, B.C., Canada - May 2, 1989
THRUMS RESIDENTS REPORT UFO SIGHTINGS
by Barbara Tandory
A quiet woman working late nights at business books stepped off the sundeck
of her home in Thrums, and saw a UFO. Angae Paetkau was taking the family dog
for a midnight walk the Sunday before Easter when a "very bright red light"
flashed over Mount Sentinel near her house. "It swooped down, stopped in mid-air
and hovered, then made a little jaunt. It kept darting around and around the
sky."
Of it's lightning speed, she said, "They're quick, oh boy, are they quick."
Later, she saw red and yellow lights, flashing, revolving on a dark underside,
it's shape made visable in the city lights from nearby Castlegar. The display
continued for some minutes, long enough for Paetkau to run in the house for the
keys of a telescope enclosed in a domed planetarium in their backyard. To her
disappointment, she couldn't rouse her husband from sleep. The dog was whining.
Paetkau, mother of two grown children, has seen the elusive UFOs before.
But she kept quiet unitl her neighbors had also seen strange lights in the night
sky. Kathy Tarasoff, 31, was driving home from Robson - separated from Thrums
only by the huge block of Mount Sentinel - with her nine-year old daughter,
Stacy, when a dazzling white light streaked across the night sky, shot past the
mountain, then went down at a steep angle in the mountains near the Castlegar
airport.
One moment they were singing, "All night, all day/Angels watching over me,
my Lord," and the next Tarasoff cried out, "Look Stacy, a falling star," and
already the frightened child was crying, "Mommy, Mommy . . ." They thought they
saw a plane about to crash, Little Stacy cried all the way home.
The abrupt change of direction, with sudden acceleration, and the light's
trajectory - it seemingly flew past the mountain at its lowest level - suggested
to Taraoff that it was no falling star. Tarasoff reported the incident
privately to an employee at the airport weather office, certain that she saw a
landing light on a small aircraft.
The airport was shut down for the night, and no missing planes have been
reported in the area since January.
Tarasoff - who meets life's crises head on - found that experience more
unsettling than going into labor with one if her three children on the way to
the hospital. "It was an unexplainable light." She too kept quiet about it.
It was Melody Semenoff, a vivacious 35-year-old housewife and mother of
three, who brought it all together, first telling her story of three bright
lights at the kids' gymnastics, a week after her March 7 sighting.
Soon after dark that evening, Semenoff was standing in the kitchen of her
little house at the foot of Mount Sentinel, cooking dinner, when she felt that
"something was drawing" her to go outside. She turned down the stove and went
outside, but there was nothing more exciting there than the "blue star", to the
northeast, Vega in the Summer Triangle.
Semenoff went back outside a little later with her sister-in-law, Lil
Perepolkin, walking a long driveway to a neighbor's house. In the sky above
Mount Sentinel there appeared three starry lights of dazzling whiteness.
"We saw the most incredible light stars - bright and brilliant. They looked
like stars at first. Two of them were traveling together and they were moving,
but the third one didn't join them as they came close and back away again. It
stayed further out."
"The third light seemed to hover back and forth over the Whitewater Ski
hill towards Nelson, a half hour's drive from Thrums." This sighting was light-
hearted. "We're here, we're here," Perepolkin recalled joking when the
experience took on a Star Trek quality with the lights moving closer towards
them and darting back and forth.
Aliens and spaceship are far from Perepolkin's mind. "I saw them but I
don't believe in them." But she stands by Semenoff's account of white "giant
stars" that twinkled and radiated about 10 feet above the mountain, or so it
seemed. Like Kathy's white light, they too appeared to have come from a great
distance. Semenoff's neighbor at the foot of the mountain, Paetkau, believes
that the place is visited by alien spacecraft, that"they've been here for
years." She maintained a sense of humor, like her neighbors, in a recent
interview, but admitted the high seriousness that she could see "the metal, the
windows and the lights on the bottom of those things" in some of her past
sightings.
She had seen one of them recently, a light that moved - "this light on the
water" of the Kootenay River near the Brilliant Dam, across the highway from her
home. It happened on the night of Feb. 23, a day before Tarasoff's sighting.
That was another time that Paetkau got up from the books she keeps for a service
station that her husband operates in Castlegar, and took the dog Prince for a
walk. Paetkau said she wasn't surprised to see the revolving lights on the
water: "Here they go, taking our water." They are always by water, she said.
"They're coming here for our water," she believes. When Tarasoff saw the light
as it flew past Mount Sentinel, "it looked like it was going to the (Brilliant)
dam."
Some UFO experts maintain that there is a connection between sightings and
various electrical effects - ranging from car engines dying down to power
blackouts of entire cities - and sometimes the phenomenon is so localized that
only part of the house, in the direct flight of a UFO, is affected.
In Thrums, the neighborhood experienced three power surges in a row in
February. All were around suppertime. Semenoff described it as an "energy
shooting out of the lightbulbs."
Some months ago, too, Semenoff and her husband, Charlie, were startled in
the middle of the night by a "flash, like somebody was taking a picture." This
happened four or five times, each time in their bedroom overlooking the Mount
Sentinel - which Melody calls the magic mountain and Charlie believes to be
special because of the quartz fields, coming thru a double-pane window which can
be reached only on a ladder.
In a similar incident, remembered by Paetkau and Gordon, her husband, a
blinding light lit up their bedroom. "There was a flash," recalled Gordon. "It
lit up everything. It was pretty phenomenal, just like sheet lighting - except
that there was no lightning." Besides, the flash was "very constant."
Yet Gordon, as an amateur astronomer, prefers to think that there are
rational explanations for this and other things happening in Thrums - rocket re-
entry with third-stage boosters going off, reflections or meteors. (UFO experts
agree that in about 97%, UFO sightings are due to misidentification, weather
conditions like air inversions, optical illusions, deliberate deception and even
hallucinations, but the remaining 3% defy all explanation.)
Gordon Paetkau reserves his judgement about UFOs as alien machines until
one lands in his backyard. But he remembers the light in his bedroom as rare and
unforgettable. "The light was like a nuclear explosion in the sky."
Some UFO research also indicates the objects seem to have a keen interest
in all kinds of power installations including nuclear plants, and in water. The
Thrums sightings occur in a setting where rivers, lakes and streams are constant
features of the local geography. In this quiet place of high mountains and deep
waters and hydroelectric installations, West Kootenay Power operates three of
its four power plants.
And something else did happen on the night Semenoff and Perepolkin saw the
lights. Outside Castlegar, four miles up the Columbia River, a transformer blew
up at Celgar in the small hours of March 8, causing a fire that shut down the
380-employee pulp mill, as company officials estimate, until mid-April. (Celgar
has just begun operating at 10 to 15% capacity). No one knows what happened and
an investigation into the cause is continuing.
"There was some sort of power outage , seconds earlier," according to Ron
Belton, Celgar's personnal manager. "We felt a power surge but we weren't sure."
At the local power company they also don't know what "tripped the line."
And, according to WKP public relations man Jack Fisher, there have been reports
of power disturbances, except for a 21-minute power blackout in most of
Castlegar when the transformer blew up at Celgar. Celgar is located near a
storage dam on the Columbia River operated by B.C. Hydro.
West Kootenay Power's Doug Ferguson in the Castlegar office explained that
momentary losses of power - such as the dimming of street lights, observed in
town around the time of the Celgar accident and Thrums sightings - are often
caused by nothing more than blown fuses and trees touching the power lines, and
go unreported since the problem can clear itself "when the reclosure comes back
after a 20-second delay." But, he admitted, "There are cases when we don't know
what happened."
One such problem occured on the night of March 7, a few hours before the
Celgar fire, when musicians playing in the Hi Arrow bar in Castlegar experienced
a power surge in the middle of a set. Bar manager Garry Clarkston described what
happened: "Pooof. Everything went down - the lights went out, the band
equipment went down, the till - then came right on. It was real quick."
The bar and the pulp mill, however, are powered by different substations.
In the case of Castlegar and Thrums, even the power plants are different because
Thrums, although located near the Brilliant dam, which supplies Castlegar, is
actually fed from the South Slocan plant.
The women in Thrums are also in the dark about their electrical problems
and their sightings.
Over the years there have been sighting of light objects, anecdotal and
unreported, coming form the Russian Doukhobor communities deep in the dark
Slocan Valley. The most recent sightings are just beyond the city limits and
centre on Mount Sentinel near the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia
rivers.
The mountain has a special place in the religious Doukhobor tradition - the
first Russian settlers early in the century names it Mount Sinai, after the holy
hill in Jerusalem, the home for God - and is the burial place for their leader
Peter the Lordly Verigin.
In that old, half-forgotten tradition there is a belief in other worlds and
visitors from them. Still, it came no easier to Semenoff, Perepolkin, and
Tarasoff to go public with their stories than it did to their non-Russian
neighbor Paetkau. But they agree with her when she says, "It's breathtaking."
=END=
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